: I hate to use this comparison but it's the most apt I can think of right now.
: Bungie and 343 Industries art design, respectively, reminds me of the old
: Transformers cartoons versus the newer live-action CGI films. The latter
: is so over-complicated, canonically over-engineered, and aesthetically
: serves no real purpose. While the former does not have the visual clarity,
: or capability, that these films do, they are nonetheless the epitome of
: who these characters and these things are.

: Building lore is great but it's kinda unnerving seeing so many wildly
: unmilitaristic designs with no clear utility or necessary function provide
: the atmosphere that this is all real within the Halo universe. This latest
: release shows me that we were indeed quite spoiled with Bungie's
: stewardship of Halo's visuals.

: Fireteam Osiris had some wonderful designs and I'm never going to forget
: who's who. Buck and Tanaka more or less fit perfectly into a straight-up
: military design language favoring utility over aesthetics. While I do love
: Locke's and Vale's designs they could do with a little simplification. Not
: just for design's sake but for the believability that these are armors
: designed for general consumption and not exclusively for one single
: Spartan.

: I feel like most of these designs have come a few hundred years too soon,
: from a UNSC whose Spartans are increasingly individualistic and thus can
: afford to spend money on wildly unique, intricate armor sets. Can't
: imagine they just have all these immensely specialized single-role armors
: just laying around.

This criticism has been valid since at least Reach, if not Halo 3, though. It made no sense that there were all these versions of MJOLNIR that were apparently being used by single Spartans; while Reach could at least handwave some of it with attachments and modular designs, you still had stuff like Jorge talking about making his own modifications to armor that was worth the price of entire ships.

In many ways Halo 5's setup is the *most* plausible we ever got, because the flavor text reveals that there are numerous companies contracting armor designs, or in some cases even backfilling technology to create their own GEN2-akin armor for their own purposes. With the War Games setup you can argue a lot of the bespoke armor is stuff for testing or prototyping, rather than standardized gear (the sheer number of variants starts muddying this again, but such is life.)

Basically it was going to be an issue no matter who was helming the franchise, and you only need to take one look at Bungie and Destiny to see that it's easy to look back on the early days of Halo with rose-tinted glasses and realized it was less the developer and more the climate these games were made. A Halo game without a player investment system these days would be unthinkable.