: Inventing new things that feel like they belong in the Halo universe does get
: my respect but completely reinventing older established items and changing
: them because they need to give their new artists room to express
: themselves tells me only that they hired the wrong artists. If they'd have
: hired Levi for example, the Dawn could still look like it did in Halo 3
: and you could still have Halo-looking new things like the Infinity and the
: Mantle's Approach.

: Respect for the artists that established this stuff would ave garnered more
: respect from me. The radical changing of the Dawn's look seems like the
: new artist is flipping the bird to the Bungie artists that came up with
: the look and kept that look for 2 consoles, and in Halo 2, 3, ODST and
: Reach. Do you think Bungie didn't know by that time what a UNSC frigate
: would look like at any graphical resolution? A 343 Artist said this about
: it in the Halo 4 artbook: "The initial ship in Halo 3 felt like an
: aggregation of boxes, and we wanted to make it look more like a single
: object."

: Sparth goes on, "Even if it was different, we wanted it to be identified
: as the Forward Unto Dawn while still making it a different vessel."
: In my opinion, that is the WRONG attitude to have about art design for a
: game franchise you inherited.

Amen to that. Although I don't feel like it's telling the original artists to fuck off, I do think that it is really unnecessary and time-wasting. Saying that the artists wanted to express themselves by changing established visuals seems like kind of a weak excuse for doing it. To me, that's like saying, "yeah, I can't really draw Master Chief too well, so I just drew him in my style".

Plus, there was plenty of new things in Halo 4 for the artists to express themselves with. Changing the Dawn was unnecessary- the game didn't have to have a level take place on the ship.