Evolution of Master Chief (1999-2019) Halo Armor Through The Years

back in the late 90s and early 2000s when Microsoft was first planning to launch the Xbox they knew that they were coming into an already highly competitive market Nintendo had a huge list of intellectual properties that were very familiar to consumers and Sony had already stacked up their game titles with characters and worlds that were extremely unique and during this initial preparation phase of launching the first ever Xbox Microsoft funded a ton of different little projects to see what could be the most popular in having a mascot for their own system and while interviews suggest that they were kind of putting their bets on blinkx to be the most popular and mainstream character on the Xbox there's no denying that Halo and the Master Chief definitely defined the console and paved the way for a ton of other awesome games and franchises to make their way onto Microsoft's system but the Master Chief has come a long way over the years graphics have gotten better design philosophies have evolved and different Studios even have taken their own takes on how the Master Chief should look in the main games so today we're taking a look back at the evolution of the Master Chief in gaming for this video we're only going to be really looking at the main entries of the Master Chief and we're not going to include any of the side live-action or animated series but that being said let's get into it first up we're gonna go all the way back to at 1999 before Halo was even attached to Microsoft Bungie had been developing a game for Apple computers there at least a really short tech demo of the game which had the game in a really early stage and it looked like the game was gonna emphasize more just regular soldier movement and be more of a tactical strategy game rather than a first-person shooter but this actually marks our first appearance of the Master Chief ever and for the most part he's mostly reminiscent to what he is in the very first Halo game with a few minor differences from this short tech demo we do see that the Master Chief's visor is slightly darker in shade than what we actually see in the final release of the game and she has an coming out of his head which was removed later on we also noticed that his back Armour piece kinda shows a lot more in the front and almost looks like he has a large thing on his shoulder however a different side angle later shows that it's just part of his back and while this isn't actually a part of his appearance he does wield an energy sword which isn't really something he's able to do until halo 2 but whatever finally we do notice that his visor protector has a black underneath section as opposed to the just general green part that he has in halo combat Evolved fast forward to 2001 we have the classic Master Chief set which we're mostly familiar with from the way he looked based off of the original Halo game of course in this game he actually is wearing the mark 5 Master Chief helmet or Spartan helmet rather than the mark 6 helmet that he wears in Halo 2 forward but for what the Xbox was capable with graphic wise or just based on the development cycle of when does game started all the way back in the late 90s this Armour definitely defined a generation and showcased a brand new type of game that people had never seen before with Halo 2 Bungie now having the experience of working on the Xbox had a lot of time to really refine their engine to work better with the Xbox and the graphics really improved between halo 1 and halo 2 and with that they decided to give Master Chief a cosmetic overhaul actually going as far as changing his helmet in the lore to better represent their new art direction with the game in Halo 2 the Master Chief now sports the mark 6 helmet which for the most part is very similar to the mark 5 except the visor is different and the way the textures show on the visor is completely different with more of that richer gold color that we kind of are familiar with Master Chief just generally looking like and while halo 1 kind of just had general green reflective gradients on his armor in halo 2 they fully went through and textured his entire armor while also changing his character model to kind of represent more of a super soldier and less of like a blocky robot it's a little difficult to explain but just in general the proportions look a lot better in Halo 2 than Halo one fast forward to Halo 3 for the most part Master Chief's appearance stays relatively the same especially since halo 3 picks up immediately where halo 2 left off with the only major changes coming from the fact that during the development cycle between halo 2 and halo 3 Bungie really worked on dynamic lighting and just doing a lot of things with the textures which really reflect well on the Master Chief overall he looks mostly the same but you might notice a few minor cosmetic differences such as his visor is a lot more reflective this time around which makes it look a little bit brighter in color coming back up to that goldish color were mostly familiar with in the Master Chief rather than the slightly darker color we saw in 1802 also the textures in Halo 3 are much more detailed kind of showing just general deterioration of the Master Chief's armor kind of over the length of the battle which is kind of a nice extra touch after halo 3 and Master Chief finally finishes the fight we don't see too much of the Master Chief for a while until the full release of Halo 4 but there are still a few minor Master Chief appearances in the games at the very end of Halo Reach on the pillar of autumn during the final cutscene if players hold the analog stick right they can actually see Master Chief from Halo one in his cryo sleep chamber you can't see too much of him but if you have a modded xbox and you know clip you can actually see that it is Master Chief of course but his armor is slightly different it's probably just because reach had a slightly different design philosophy as a whole as much of the coloration was much more gritty than we'd seen in previous Halo games his chest plate is slightly different him having a couple of random buttons on it and if this could either be the lighting or the visor color that they chose to put on his armor in this specific cutscene it definitely looks like either the silver visor or the black visor not so much the gold visor that we are used to seeing the Master Chief with mind you the helmet though is back to being in the mark-5 which is a cool homage to how the Master Chief looked in halo 1 combat of all and it makes sense because coming from Halo Reach as it leads right into the events of halo combat Evolved Master Chief technically would still have that older Harmar and that older helmet so it was a good attention to detail on bungees part when they hid this in the game after helo reaches release bungee no longer was in charge of making the Halo games and Microsoft put together a new team in three four three studios and the first project three four three studios was tasked at making was halo combat Evolved Anniversary which was a ten year special remaster of the original Halo game that would run on top of the original game engine and you could switch between the graphics pretty instantly now the initial trailer for this game actually looked pretty awful they did this hole that was then and this is now thing and honestly Master Chief's helmet just seemed a little bit too stretched out in the visor like they hadn't really nailed the graphics yet unfortunately before the game actually released they did fix the way that the helmet looked in the remaster version and they actually did a really good job with just the way the Master Chief looked in this remaster obviously they wanted to stay true to the mark 5 helmet and just his general appearance that he looked like in the first game because canonically that's how he is supposed to look and that's how that game is supposed to feel so they did a really good job at both kind of taking that original concept and upgrading him from there rather than trying to make some hybrid form of the way the Master Chief looked overall they kind of kept his general shiny appearance with that green standard gradient on his armor but they added a lot of like dirt textures to kind of make it feel more worn rather than just this not very appealing texture even his visor has some sort of reflective shadows on it that look really good when 2012 rolled around 343 Industries was prepared to release their first ever Halo game in Halo 4 no boy the Master Chief had a really really huge graphical overhaul I'm gonna try my best to keep my extremely strong opinion and dislike for the halo 4 armor out of this but they completely changed the way that the Master Chief's armor looked in Halo 4 they didn't really give any explanation whatsoever between Halo 3 and Halo 4 but if you look you can notice to his chest piece is completely different it's kind of added this lower part above his waist his visor protector is a little bit extended on his helmet making the way that his helmet overall looks a little bit different his arm pieces and leg pieces kind of take on a little bit of a different shape to be more in line with the general art style found in Halo 4 across the board they changed it up his under suit quite a bit making it not just the general black color that we're used to but it has more of a shinier reflective grayish vector style to it and overall they changed the lighting dynamics in Halo 4 which made the Master Chief Armour look a little bit more drastic than anything we've ever seen from Halo his visor has a lot more texture in it also kind of taking on that vector like appearance and once again his visor color is a little bit darker than what we've seen in other Halo games making it look almost orange sometimes sometimes it looks a little more like what we're used to but other times it looks more orange it's pretty inconsistent across Halo 4 two years later Xbox and Microsoft announced the Master Chief collection would be coming out which would be like the perfect dream for any Halo fan who's been a fan for any amount of time and even though the game didn't work and launched and didn't work for a really really long time thank goodness they're finally fixing it the game did release halo 2 anniversary which was a special 10-year anniversary of Halo 2 that had remastered all the graphics in the game along with the cutscenes now being pre-rendered they brought in a studio known as blur to make full rendered animations of the cutscenes from Halo 2 and while these aren't game engine cutscenes these are possibly some of the best visuals we've seen from Halo ever blur did an amazing job at taking the art style found in Halo 2 and just bringing it to life in some of the most realistic graphics we have ever seen from Halo while they easily could have taken some creative liberties from Halo 4 as that was the most new version of the Master Chief we have seen they stay pretty true to just sticking to the source material and made Master Chief look as close to his halo 2 and halo 3 appearance and manage these graphics just look absolutely amazing especially with just the way that the Master Chief's armor looks as a whole his green color looks great and his visor once again is more the type of visor that we feel should represent the way that Master Chief looks it's the Master Chief that most people recognize him as and once again the black under suits were back which was a pretty big deal overall fans were really excited to see Halo 2 anniversary's graphics and they were hyped about Halo 5s release and you would think 343 industries would take a note with how well-received Master Chief's appearance was right well it didn't really do much to change the Master Chief between halo 4 and halo 5 they kind of just skipped over the progress that they made in doing the halo 2 anniversary graphics and mostly kept Master Chief's appearance the same in halo 5 guardians honestly doesn't even matter because he's barely even in the game all things considered honestly it was a pretty big deal when halo 5 guardians came out because they marketed the game as Master Chief on the run from Spartan lock and it was going to be this huge confrontation and only one would walk out alive and it was really cool marketing except throughout the entire game you mostly play a Spartan Locke you only have a very very small handful of levels where you actually play as the Master Chief and there's not even really that big of a confrontation it's kind of just cyrus team following in the tracks of the Master Chief to see what he's up to and then they kind of fight one time and that's about it and while they kept the general appearance of the Master Chief from Halo 4 they did do a couple of things with the visor to kind of make it look a little bit more like what fans had liked from Halo 2 and threes visor but they still kept it along the general art style from Halo 4 you can really see the vector shapes in the visor in Halo 5 but they did brighten the color so it didn't look as orangie all of the time and even though Spartan Locke is only a Spartan 4 which aren't supposed to be as powerful as Spartan two's that was kind of the whole purpose of the interrogation at the beginning of Halo 4 somehow he breaks the Master Chief's visor in a fistfight so Master Chief now has a broken visor as of halo 5 guardians and after the release of halo 5 Guardians or hasn't been too much Halo since 2015 the Master Chief didn't make any appearance in Halo Wars 2 but we did get a reveal trailer of the Master Chief in Halo Infinite last year at e3 and we expect to see more footage from this new low game sometime this year and just based off of the very small footage that we did see it looks like they are going back to that standard Master Chief appearance that people kind of know and love they built a brand new engine from the ground up which looks a little bit more on par with some of the amazing visuals that were found in Halo 2 and halo 3 and even some new kind of graphical enhancements that we've never seen before some of this stuff actually looks pretty promising and the way Master Chief's helmet look shows that they're definitely taking note based off of fan and community feedback finally they removed the vector textures out of the helmet visor just giving us this really nice crisp gold reflective visor the way the Master Chief's supposed to look we can also tell that the green looks a little bit more on brand foe how Master Chief should look and finally the basic black under suit is back none of that weird shiny reflective vector shaped under suit that they had in a low four and five so steps in the right direction 343 industries we appreciate that much but generally that's where we are with the Master Chief now he's come a long way he's had some really high highs and some pretty low lows but hopefully now 343 Industries and Microsoft understands the way that Master Chief generally should look I probably wouldn't have had as big of an issue with Halo 4 and Halo 5 had they done what they did between halo 1 and halo 2 and just kind of explained why there's an armor change in the cannon and maybe when Master Chief woke up from Halo 4 or after he met back up with the humans they could have upgraded his armor that would have made a lot more sense but at least whatever they're doing now they've maybe gotten over that feeling of having to try to redo the Halo franchise and the aesthetic look from the Halo franchise because fans have a pretty strong opinion this game had a really great precedent set when Bungie was there and we just want that same level of quality across the board but let us know what you think what is the best looking Master Chief in your opinion personally I think the halo 2 anniversary cutscenes look amazing I just really like that halo 2 halo 3 appearance of the Master Chief I'm optimistic about halo infinite let us know what you think in the comment section below maybe you love halo fours Armour I don't know let us know either way and if you're new and you like all this talk about Xbox Microsoft halo things like that be sure to subscribe and turn notifications on alright guys we'll see you all next time with a brand new video [Music]

Channel: Rocket Sloth

Views: 315,304

Rating: 4.8201842 out of 5

Keywords: rocket sloth, halo armor, master chief, master chief armor, halo, master chief armor evolution, master chief armor halo 5, master chief armor halo reach, master chief armor halo 4, master chief armor build, master chief armor changes, halo infinite armor, halo infinite master chief armor, halo anniversary armor, master chief helmet, master chief appearance, evolution of master chief, evolution of master chief armor, evolution of halo, halo evolution, master chief armor change

Id: 5vq3aiad3NA

Length: 15min 41sec (941 seconds)

Published: Sun Mar 17 2019