In Halo Infinite, armor effects can provide some additional visual flair to your Spartan, encompassing everything from flaming helmets to flourescent bunny ears. There’s only one issue: For a lot of players, these effects are simply too ugly to be worth using.
A thread posted on Reddit this weekend asked why armor effects as a whole appear to be seeing a drop in popularity, and players didn’t hold back when airing their grievances with the current state of the cosmetic type. At a time when the cost of Halo Infinite’s microtransactions is also under intense scrutiny, the accusation of effects being “visual noise” that aren’t worth the price gets wrapped up in a wider conversation on Infinite’s free-to-play model.
“The armor FX were a novelty when it was difficult to get, and there was only a small number of them that could be used,” one player wrote. “Now though, there are so many that they’ve lost their novelty.”
The challenging acquisition being referenced was from the days of Halo 3 and Halo: Reach, where armor effects were first introduced to Halo’s customization. In Reach, armor effects required both a high rank and a lot of credits to get. Even if it wasn’t a look you were particularly fond of, it came with an amount of status that is lacking in Infinite’s paid effects.
“It’s a hot take, but I didn’t like the Reach effects either,” another comment read. “Effects like that have always looked cheesy.” This was backed up by another player who similarly said “effects have been ugly since Reach” and agreed they look even worse in Infinite.
But why do the effects look worse in a game released a decade later? One of the simplest reasons is that the armor effects appear to be animated at a lower frame-rate than the rest of the game. This was the fundamental technical issue brought up by one of the most popular comments, which claimed it’s a two-headed problem of most effects being “kind of ugly,” as well as the fact “they only run at 30 FPS.”
Other players further criticized armor effects that feature fire for being “low texture” and “2D“—an issue that their counterparts in previous Halo titles did not suffer from in the same way. While the facets that lead players to disliking the armor effects are diverse, one user summed up the overall sentiment best by simply saying “they look horrible.”
It isn’t all doom and gloom for the cosmetic type, though. In the same thread, players praised more “subtle” armor effects such as Trapmaster’s Map and Inevitability of War that affect areas of the Spartan like the wrists or legs. A sentiment that appeared often was that these restrained designs have a more “lore friendly” aesthetic that doesn’t clash with Infinite’s grounded science fiction art style.
As a player who owns a majority of the currently available armor effects, it’s something I recognize in the ones I choose to use as well. Whether it’s the Victory Laurels or Packmaster’s Glare, there’s only a handful of effects out of the 40 in Infinite that I equip on a regular basis. Fixing the technical issues with some of the pre-existing effects might make them appealing to players, but it seems clear that the demand instead lies in the creation of new effects that clash less with the armor underneath them.
