: Expecting 343i to keep all of Bungie's designs the same is as
: ridiculous as people looking at Legends being all pissy that none of that
: looked the same as what we saw in game. If artistic interpretation bothers
: folks that much, I'd suggest those folks need to reevaluate how much they
: invest in Halo, as 343i has made it pretty clear that those changes are
: going to continue.

: I guess I just don't understand why it bothers people so much. I mean, I
: guess I can understand people liking things to have continuity, but
: changing the design of things because "we think this looks
: cooler" is perfectly acceptable to me.

I guess I just prioritize consistent visuals because I feel lack of consistency with the look of something can have almost as big of an impact as the consistency of the narrative itself. Many of these redesigns are "visual plot holes," so to speak. A few weeks before Halo 4 came out I had this to say about the issue:

Aesthetics are important for the storytelling aspect. Lack of visual consistency helps to break immersion. Making sure things stay looking the same helps ground the universe and tie it together instead of letting it look like a mishmash of loosely-connected but otherwise separate continuities. Changes to the design of something — a character, species, ship, weapon — need a damn good explanation. Star Wars and Star Trek do a much better job of maintaining visual consistency than Halo has typically done.

For Star Wars, compare Boba Fett's armor with Jango Fett's; when Jango was introduced in Episode II, it was obvious that it was the same armor as Boba's, just newer and not all beat up and with a different paint job (IIRC, it's the same suit of armor, and Boba just modified it after inheriting it from his father). Or compare their ship the Slave I as it appears in Empire with how it appears in AotC: exact same design aside from a new paint job (Boba repainted the blue parts red-brown). RotS-era Clone Trooper armor looks the same in both said movie and in the Clone Wars CGI cartoon, as do their gunships. Your basic Storm Trooper, the Millennium Falcon, X-wings, Y-wings, A-wings, B-wings, TIE fighters, TIE interceptors, Imperial-class Star Destroyers, AT-ATs, AT-STs, and other iconic vehicles and armors look the same in most of their non-film appearances as they do in the movies.

I go on to make some Star Trek comparisons, pointing out that when the USS Defiant from the TOS episode "The Tholian Web" showed up on ENT, the ship's exterior and interior looked identical to the Constitution-class ship and set designs the studio made back in the 60s, despite having to rebuilt the sets from scratch and having to recreate the original ship props using CGI. When they remastered the original series, the CGI ships looked identical in design to the designs used in the 60s. When the Enterprise was redesigned for The Motion Picture, it had an explicable reason: Starfleet was refitting a now 20-year-old vessel, and even then it still looked very much like the Enterprise (the warp nacelles were the biggest change). Granted, many of those older sci-fi properties were limited to physical models before they could use CGI, but even in modern times, regardless of whether its TV or movies or video games, things stay looking about the same, and visual changes tend to make a lot more sense.

When I watch Star Wars or pre-reboot Star Trek, I feel like I'm always experiencing the same universe. With Halo... not so much. I've even half-joked that 343i-era Halo is actually not canon and is actually a dream that Chief is having in cryo.