When I bring up how impractical mechs are, or when Gravemind and Uberfoop explain why the "Different species" excuse doesn't adequately explain the differences between Halo 4 Jackals and anything else in the history of Halo that's been called a Jackal, it's because we're upset by the changes. We don't think they're cool. But just saying "That's not cool" or "That's cool" doesn't start a conversation. People agree, or they disagree. There's no conversation to be had about that.

What we're doing is exploring why we're dissatisfied with the new direction. Nobody enjoys fiction in a vacuum. Their reception to fiction is colored by their knowledge and experience. Try being a gun enthusiast and watch the typical Hollywood gunfight, for example. Many people will think it's a cool sequence, you'll be bored or irritated or maybe even embarrassed by the poor gun handling. And the tragedy is that 99% of the stuff that bugs you isn't in there because it's cool, it's in there because of ignorance or apathy on the part of the actors and director. Correcting that stuff wouldn't make the fight scene any less cooler for the mainstream audience.

That was a bit of a tangent, wasn't it? Sorry. By the way, my two most favorite "Realistic" gunfights are from Dead Heat and Open Range.

Ok, so we're not just Halo fans that notice the difference. We're Halo fans that notice the difference and know just how stupid it is. I assure you, the majority of people who played Halo 3 didn't finish the game and think "Gosh, that game would have been a lot more fun if only the Covenant looked like Locusts". Sadly, there were probably a few that looked at the multiplayer armor and felt sad that they couldn't wear a Guyver suit, but I guess I got to get used to sharing the fandom with them.

We notice the differences and we complain about what we don't like. If, somehow, the Initiation and Escalation comics gave Palmer the character revamp she so desperately needs and made her a better, more interesting character, we wouldn't be complaining that the writer derailed her. It's an improvement. Or hey, remember when the Brutes changed between Halo 2 and Halo 3? They were reworked from lightly armored bullet sponges to armored, shielded, and significantly less hirsute pack hunters. The complainers were in the minority even before we had a canon reason for the difference.

Heh. I remember when I was on the Official Halo Wars Forums, when I was even more of an asshole and even more of a stickler for canon. But did I complain about the change? No. People speculated what the canonical reason for the change might be, and I posted "The last Prophet is allergic to dog hair, so he made them all shave. Took care of the flea problem too."

I didn't care. The new Brutes looked to be more fun to fight and a better enemy overall.

At this late hour, I can't think of any positive changes to the art direction and gameplay that 343i has made. Hold on, I know you're going to gush about the stuff in Halo 5. I'm strictly talking about Halo 4 here. All this stuff is different for the sake of being different and, I suspect, to draw players from other games like Gears of War and Battlefield. All the armor sets were afflicted with Crysis skin and greeble cancer because that's the art direction that 343i's art director wanted, or maybe because it scored well in a focus test.

Well, you know what? Crystal Pepsi and New Coke passed the taste tests, somehow. Allow me to quote Wikipedia:

New Coke was only on the market in the United States for a short period, but it remains influential as a cautionary tale against tampering too extensively with a well-established and successful brand.

Changing yourself to be new, hip, and cool is a fool's errand when you were pretty damn cool to begin with. And the Chief's armor has the same problem as the Jackals and Grunts; it's a needless change with a horrible in-story explanation that falls apart the moment you think about it. If the Master Chief had stepped out of the cryotube with his old armor and upgraded to the new one when the Infinity arrived, you'd see less complaining about 343i retconning the armor. The hecklers would stick to "This new art direction sucks."

But 343i went ahead, retconned the Chief's armor, and then chalked the difference up to "Nanotechnology" and "We've got better rendering technology than Bungie ever did. They don't seem to care about a connection between the old Bungie stuff and their shiny new stuff. I've said it before, the 343i-era is a reboot in all but name. And 343i continues to insist that the shiny new stuff is 100% backwards compatible with the old stuff. They would insist that we care about canon and consistency.

Let's say that they declared Halo 4 to be a reboot. Bungie's Halo is a broad interpretation of the actual events, and the visuals are sorta close to what Halo is supposed to look like. Then all we can do is compare Bungie's Halo with 343i's Halo, and chose our favorite. Either 343i is the company Halo has always needed, or Bungie's Halo is a golden age and it is a tragedy that a good successor could not be assembled. Granted, you may like both. Whatever floats your boat.

From my perspective, being the guy who determines what is cool for me and what is not, 343i's art direction isn't cool. Particularly the armor and enemy design. They've made great progress for Halo 5, it seems, but the Mantis is still an ugly bird that fell out of the ugly tree and hit every ugly branch on the way down. Then it bounced. You know what? Visuals aren't the only thing that can be cool about a vehicle. The Warthog (Halo 1-Reach) looks awesome, and plays awesome as well. There's not a single variant that I didn't have a blast driving around. So, if the Mantis was retconned into some sort of wheeled vehicle, but still had the same movement and controls, it would still be a bore. It's not simulated enough, you know? You can careen and power slide with a Warthog all day, run over infantry, crash into rocks, it's all governed by a wonky, outlandish, cool set of physics. The Mantis doesn't have that. Nothing short of reducing its hitpoints to zero will remove it from the upright position. Stomping the ground just creates a magical AOE that kills anyone within range. The final nail in the coffin is that you can't carry passengers. That's what makes UNSC vehicles so damn fun.

In fact, the weapons in the Halo 4 sandbox were kind of the same way. You have the mainstays like the AR, BR, DMR, shotgun, whatever. Fun in their own right, but there was nothing beyond that, you know? Reach had a bunch of fun, cool weapons like the Plasma Launcher and the Focus Rifle and the Needle Rifle and Grenade Launcher. The Needle Rifle is the big one. I've introduced three people to Halo via Reach, and the Needle Rifle was a crowd pleaser up there with the Grunt Birthday Party Skull. That supercombine never failed to bring a smile to a newbie's face. How do pink crystal shards home in on enemies and only enemies and then supercombine? I don't know. Rule of Cool, and it's scarily effective besides.

But how does the omission of those nifty weapons make the game cooler? Does it make the game appeal to the Battlefield crowd?

And why are Promethean weapons virtually identical to Human weapons? Are we still trying to appeal to the Battlefield crowd? How is a weapon from a 10,000,000 year old race that functions comparably to a gun made by a primitive race of hominids cool? How is a faction sandbox that offers nothing substantially new over the two existing sandboxes cool? Wouldn't it be cooler if Promethean weapons could do something that Covenant and UNSC weapons can't? Like, say, you pull the trigger and the enemy's weapon overheats and vents for ten precious seconds. Or a device that projects shields around allies and traps enemies in hardlight restraints? Something new.

I guess the answer is that the Prometheans had to have something to shoot at you, but that presupposes that the Prometheans are an infantry mix identical to what the Covenant field. They had the potential to be something better, the likes of which we've never fought in a Halo game.

But that is a post for another time, when I've gotten some sleep.