Unless playing Dress-Up was and is more important to you than gameplay and gameplay-related features like maps and modes.
Read: I do not believe the current shop prices are okay, nor do I believe the current Battlepass is that great. I believe Shop items all need around a 30-40$ price decrease, and some need a 50% decrease. The Battlepass needs less Swaps/Boosts and more free items. BUT THAT DOES NOT MAKE THE OLD SYSTEM BETTER THAN THE NEW ONE. Flawed as the new one may be.
I’ve been doing this gaming thing for a long, long time. I’m getting long in the tooth here. I may not like change, but I recognize when it provides me benefits over the costs it requires. And, to me at least, sacrificing easy and cheap Dress-Up for my character in order to ensure a better post-launch gameplay situation is well-worth the trade-off. Because I’ve been here for all those “Expansions” and Post-Launch DLCs and Map Packs. For many, many games. And I will tell you, 100%, they were more of a waste of money than spending $10 for an armor set in the Infinite store. You know why?
Because you’ll actually get to see and use that armor set for more than two weeks after you get it. I’ve spent so much money on Map Packs and Expansions only to see even the great ones get dropped almost immediately or be reduced to one server that is always full as people are desperately trying to get use out of the $12-$20 they spent on it.
Anchor 9 was a great map in Reach; you got to play it maybe a few times before never seeing it again. I think I count the number of times I played Assembly in MM before MCC on one hand. The entire Final Stand Expansion for BF4 was amazing…too bad until EA gave it away for free it was barely present after the first month. Gears 1-3 had quite a few great DLC maps…but most of us probably can’t even remember them because they never got played.
Even CoD suffered from this, despite it’s insane popularity. Or how the great maps in the DLC for Rainbow Six Vegas or Ghost Recon never got played. Or any number of other games.
Dev saw this too, and to them it must - no did - feel like big content and expansions felt like a waste of time and effort because outside of customs their work wouldn’t get played or used that much. Nor would they make a ton of money. Worse still, it would hurt the community overall because of how each new DLC would split the community further and further.
So we came and made a trade - we would get all the gameplay content, for free. For everyone. No divided community, new playable content on a semi-regular basis. And it would cost us the ability to play Dress-Up like we used to. And that is the question you need to ask yourself;
What is more important? The ability to play Dress-Up, but be stuck basically with just the launch content forever? Or get new gameplay content, but have to pay to play Dress-Up?
I feel like most rational people, when you stop and think about it, are going to say the gameplay content is what matters. We can negotiate on the price of playing Dress-Up, and we should, but in the end we all benefit from this trade.
To answer two big questions I can foresee coming up;
But we used to get 12-16 maps in a year! Now we get 4!
What is more valuable - 12 items you MIGHT see for a little while, or 4 items you WILL see for the rest of the game’s life?
But we don’t even get that much content now!
I will submit to the fact we didn’t get a ton of modes in Infinite, but maps?
Halo 3 Launch Maps
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Guardian (4v4)
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Last Resort (6v6/8v8)
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High Ground (4v4)
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Narrows (4v4)
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The Pit (4v4)
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Construct (4v4)
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Epitaph (4v4)
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Snowbound (4v4)
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Isolation (4v4)
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Sandtrap (8v8)
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Valhalla (8v8)
Halo Infinite Launch Maps
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Aquaris (4v4)
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Bazaar (4v4)
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Streets (4v4)
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Launch Site (4v4)
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Behemoth (4v4)
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Live Fire (4v4)
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Recharge (4v4)
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Fragmentation (12v12)
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High Power (12v12)
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Deadlock (12v12)
Halo 3 - 11 Maps (3 BTB, 8 4v4) vs. Halo Infinite - 10 Maps (3 BTB, 7 4v4)