You’re probably asking yourself, what the living heck am I doing in this post? Why is this guy called HaruspexOfHell? Who even is this man and why should I care about his opinions about the art, which I so very much adore deeply?

The answer is, no, you should not care about my opinions, I only wish to enlighten the unenlightened, though, my name is Joseph, I’m a guy living in Venezuela interacting with the Halo Community with the best of my abilities every single day with undying passion; I am also a writer myself – Albeit only a fanfictioner? Is that even a word? – Anyways, I digress, and I shall set upon the topic that has brought some of you here tonight, or this morning, or afternoon. . . Whenever, you see fit to read this piece, ha-ha.

And that topic, as it says in the post, at the start, and right here, right now is none other than the art direction.

And which art style you ask? Well, whatever there is and whatever there’s ever been in the Halo Universe, taking into consideration all of the changes and which ones I do believe that they fit, perfectly. And to do this, we must start with a little experiment, what experiment, however? Just follow me on this one alright? Let’s go back to Halo 4, the awakening to our long journey from Installation 04, The Battle of Earth, New Mombasa, Old Mombasa, Voi, all of these events.

Now, close your eyes, try to imagine the cold breeze of the cryo stasis caressing your skin gently, lost in space as you laid dormant in the middle of the FFG-201 UNSC Forward Unto Dawn, a Charon-class light frigate, drifting in space as it ventured into an unknown location of space, where a sleep danger would await, but you don’t know this yet, unbeknownst to you, you drift silently into the sky, with your loyal companion; Cortana, who remained ever vigilant for any new encounters, or rendezvous with the UNSC, that would never happen, as you’re missing in the dark corners of the Milky Way, without concrete knowledge of where you’re located at the moment. . .

Now wake, John-117, wake up from your long night of solace, as you are awakened by Cortana, uttering the last thing you told her to do when she needed you ‘I need you!’ she screams and you wake up from Cryosleep as the tube is drained from the cryogenic that kept you asleep for just as long as eight years after you last went to sleep.

You look around, however, and everything you see is familiar, your armour the same you wore to battle many years ago, the technology exactly as you left it, the halls dark and lightly dim by the emergency lights operating in low power, alarms blaring, and the ship shaking carefully as something from the outside rocks it enough to cause distress in the ship, you exit the cryo-tube, and you step directly towards Cortana, ‘Seems like old times’, she says as you step in front of her and say ‘Ready to get back to work?’, to which, she replied with ‘I thought you’d never ask. . .’

And ready she was, barely, as you stepped out of the cryo chambers, however making your way around the ship, everything was old, some monitors were frozen as they were subjected to the harmful aspects of the vacuum of space, a lot of the ship was damaged from previous encounters as well, from throughout the Ark Installation Campaign, however, you find this strange looking Sangheili, you yourself had never seen before, but, John has, however, he makes no mention of it. But once you reach the control centre, blast shields down and a Sangheili of a very familiar design stands there trying to open the blast doors of this ship, you sneak up behind him and assassinate him, clearing out the room shortly after only to discover that you stumbled upon a fleet of the Covenant.

However, you fight you way through this, utilising old equipment such as the M392, BR55HB, MA5C’s, etcetera, etcetera. As well as you donning the old Mark VI GEN1 gear, unscathed and unchanged from when you left it, battle-scarred and worn.

You successfully launch the missile into the cruiser that was getting into position to attack the FuD, and when this happens, an ancient awakens below in the shield world that we drifted upon, fight or flight instincts kick in, you need to get out of the ship, so you get running back inside, going through the airlock as you quickly head towards the life pods, only for it to have been a failed measure as the hull of the ship rips off and you fall into space as you’re sucked out into the vacuum and get caught by the gravitational pull of the planet we’d come to call. . . Requiem.

We land on the planet below, and while terrifying, we bask in its beauty, all of it goes noticed every second, every location of Requiem goes through noticed by our eyes as well as us being able to utilise the gear that we know and love, though, it all changes in a moment, abruptly as we start obtaining garbled distress calls from an unknown recipient and our objectives change as we try to figure out who is behind that distress call, the more we realise, the more our objective changes until we find that it comes from a UNSC vessel, the UNSC Infinity.

First of her class, the Infinity-class had caught the distress call from the Forward Unto Dawn and set forth to pursue it, however, our objective changes as we try to keep the Infinity off the grasp of Requiem, and all this, only ends badly as we find the Cryptum lying in rest as it was locked away a thousand millennia ago, holding an ancient terror that we had never seen before; a living forerunner? And yes it was, and his awakening would be directly our fault, as the Infinity is pulled into the planet losing control of the ship as she fell into the surface, finally crashing against the soil of Requiem.

So, we decide to go help out, after we escaped in the ghost, everything crumbling in our path as we jump through a portal that Cortana had managed to get up, and barely escape not without almost falling off a cliff first, and we proceeded to see the Infinity fall from the sky as it soared above us in its behemoth size, this, is what the UNSC had been up to these last eight years, this is what our sacrifices propped up at the end.

We weren’t mice anymore and the size of this behemoth almost but screamed this fact, as it crumbled down from the sky and crashed far beyond us, and as was said, we decided to help out setting forth towards the crash location of this behemoth, where we would acquaint ourselves with the new equipment, the new men and women who served the UNSC, not for war, but for exploration and growth.

And this is where I want to conclude this little experiment, bringing forth, something that I doubt has been tried before in the Community, do these things really not look Halo? For the lack of an explanation, I’d like to set out and try to explain what many have been saying about the art of 343 Industries, amongst many words the most common is ‘It doesn’t look Halo’ when in fact they do, some of these design look just as good – if not better – than those of Bungie. However, to explain this, we have to set forward and look at a few designs, which I shall couple together, and post below; first I shall make an example of the DMR, both M392 & M395 series.

Look at these rifles? Not too different are they? Look at them good and hard. They’re one and the same, the Halo 4/5 rifle is the recipient of a lot of controversy in the community, however, many saying it doesn’t look good, or that it doesn’t resemble the original rifle, when in fact; it does. These don’t need changing, in fact, I would love to see these two together in a game, some day, though. . . Someday.

Now, let’s take a look at these different rifles, which I shall post below, here.

Let’s take a look at the SRS99 rifles, or as we call them Sniper Rifles, let’s take a look at them, at first glance yes, each are very different but the base design in the same, I’ve seen plenty of people, complaining about the design of 343i, which being honest I have concluded that the hate for this design is entirely subjective, and most of the hate, however, is regarding the blue scope and the palette colour of the rifle, nothing more.

This is what I’d regard as blind hate, saying you hate the design, entirely based on something that does not pertain on the design but more how you look at it, and quite frankly their designs suffer a lot from this, too often. Here’s however, an edit made by a good friend; LateNightGaming, regarding the scope.

And here’s a comparison.

There’s not much to pick at when you look at it like this, and even then the design is still pretty good, a landmark of the new Halo’s in my honest opinion; however, I would rather see at least one other variant of the SRS99 in future games, just like everybody else.

Anyways, I digress, before I continue rambling about the designs, I am gonna tackle on one more design before I conclude the post, which quite frankly, if I continue it, it shall be only aimless rambles, and none of us want that, right? Okay, let’s move on with the Promethean Knight.

LOOK AT THIS UGLY MOTHERF– I mean, beautiful guy, honestly I can’t say much about him aside from the fact that, quite frankly he does look Halo, however, he represents something that we’ve not seen before, ever. In the history of Halo, the Prometheans fit only for the Forerunners put them elsewhere and they’re definitely the odd man out, however, I can obviously sit here saying how we could improve the design, how the nodes and the hunch back should be in more of a square space, how you could maybe actually attach the legs to the overall body, etcetera, etcetera. While he. . . Or she is ugly like a rotten tomato with bugs, that does not make them not Halo, just because we don’t like their overall appearance most of the time, they can be much better, for one look at this design, they could recover this and redo the Knights in inspiration to this, would it not be better if you felt both terrified and intrigued to fight them? Awaiting what they would do next, etcetera, make them more interesting to us, the players.

Yes? Look at that, how much better would that be? I certainly think it would one hundred percent better, imagine that you’re in close quarters when you rip the armour off of it and you release what’s inside only for it to grab at you and plead for you to let it free from its pain, the composer’s abyss which stores thousands of souls in pure agony as they bask in their own pain and hopelessness waiting for someone to come to save them, only that, this is a false hope as they will never be saved from their slumber, at least not with any method we know of or have ever encountered yet. . . Anyways, I shan’t continue my ramblings about any of this, as we near the closing of this post – albeit my first post – hopefully, you all enjoyed listening – More like reading – to my ramblings about art, I shall not keep you any longer as I have nothing more to add.

Be safe, live your life as you wish it, and you know, don’t let this guy catch you. I hear he molests teddy bears and does coffee?

Anyhow, I hear there’s a birthday party coming up soon, must get ready, cheers!