Now before you get your pitchforks out hear me out. I’m just going to go over the many issues with the cosmetics in the game and why it shows that 343 put a lack of care into them despite the majority of cosmetics now being monetized. I’m not dunking on the initial designers either who have honestly done great work with the armours and probably had little control over how they were implemented in game.
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Why don’t coatings apply to all pieces of a spartan? Why does every chest piece (that can cover a substantial amount of a spartan) have to be grey even if the coating you have conflicts with it? Why are the cat ears compatible with coatings but no other helmet attachment? There’s just a lot of baffling and lazy decisions being made here that not only hurts the customization as a whole but also makes coatings look even worse in the eyes of players. Like seriously colours were applied to chest pieces back in REACH IN 2010 with no issue why is it different here? I may sound a bit harsh here but it is genuinely one of those baffling things where you have no idea what 343 was thinking other than cutting the amount of work they had to do.
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One of the biggest arguments against cross core is clipping issues but if 343 can’t even avoid stuff like that with how cores currently are it honestly throws that argument out the window. Now I realise some clipping issues are inevitable but recently we have seen an increasing amount of cosmetics that are misaligned / have clipping issues / have broken textures. It also doesn’t help that 343’s response time to these issues have been lacklustre with a vague promise of them being addressed in S2 and then sweeping it under the rug. If you are selling us cosmetics you need to make sure that the product is of quality and doesn’t have these obvious issues.
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Cosmetics sold on the store need to feel more special and not just be basic looking things you’d expect to get for free. What I mean by this is that we really shouldn’t be seeing coatings of basic colours like red and blue sold on the store when there is so much potential for them to be doing more with the coating system. Same goes for shoulder pads with many of the ones that stand out not appearing in the store yet and us getting extremely basic and forgettable ones.
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Ok now to address the elephant in the room… WHY IS THERE NO CROSS CORE. One of the most baffling decisions made on 343’s part and it frustrates me to no end. This topic has been beaten to death so Ill keep it brief.
I understand making everything cross core going forward can get difficult especially as more cores are added BUT that doesn’t excuse the fact that 343 could have just made the basic spartan cores like MK 5(b) and MK 7 cross core leaving the drastically different cores out. This would mean we would still get cross core to an extent and 343 wouldn’t have to worry about as many clipping issues. I feel like this would be a suitable compromise for everyone and I’m still baffled 343 wasn’t even thinking about something like that come launch.
I could go into a bunch of other reasons for cross core but I’d just be beating a dead horse at this point it’s obvious this isn’t something people are just going to give up on and it is important that 343 makes this change sooner rather than later so they aren’t giving themselves even more work to do in the future.
You’d think with cosmetics being the main things monetized they would at least make sure the cosmetics and customization system was done well but I guess not.