Character customization has always been a huge part of multiplayer games even before MTX became a thing, particularly for Halo titles.
Disregarding that as "you only want to play dress-up" is not only unbelievably reductive, it's also a very lazy way to just hand-wave away a very real issue.
The same way you could disregard the vast majority of features from any game except core-gameplay features; "You want to color your car in your racing game? How silly, you only want to play dress up!"
I guess it's just naïve of me want to play things in games?
Maybe if you started with Halo 2. Halo 1 lan parties and Xbox connect you had a choice of maybe 10 colors. It was about the shooty-shooty. And maybe that's why I like infinite, I get pretty darn good shooty-shooty.
I agree to an extent that the customization system is a little broken though. Team games should force red or blue coloring, half the time I can't tell who is or isn't on my team. "Outlines" aren't enough. All so people feel that their $50 armor purchase isn't hidden.
I "started" with Quake, but that's besides the point.
> Halo 1 lan parties and Xbox connect you had a choice of maybe 10 colors.
At PC lan parties people had a choice between a myriad of custom skins particularly with GoldScr mods, all for free.
> It was about the shooty-shooty.
It was also about the community, particularly at a lan party, and part of a community is also being able to individualize your avatar.
This used to be very well understood for the longest time, and now it's suddenly considered "playing dress up" because billions dollar heavy AAA publishers, and developers can't be arsed anymore to put in any meaningful player customization that isn't monetized and FOMO'ed to hell.
> All so people feel that their $50 armor purchase isn't hidden.
Would you disagree that previous Halo games, short of going back over a decade, offered more, and particularly more meaningful, multiplayer customization options out of the box?
> Team games should force red or blue coloring, half the time I can't tell who is or isn't on my team. "Outlines" aren't enough.
They are enforced to such a degree that picking any blue color skin already gives you a slight advantage as enemies will always be colored red and allies always be colored blue.
Which is btw a very separate issue from armor types customization, people having different armor types makes it much more likely for you to recognize enemies from friends as 90% of people wouldn't sport the exactly same armor style that's completely indistinguishable.
It gives the whole affair a real "clone wars" vibe where you ain't fighting individuals, but yet another of the same model, something that wouldn't have been acceptable in single-player FPS games or multiplayer mods, like CS, decades ago.
I didn't write a single thing about my enjoyment of the game?
But it's fascinating how your difficulties of differentiating players and teams trace directly back to the lack of non-monetized character customization, and that just passes right by you like a non-issue.
Maybe you enjoy fighting in the clone wars, I think it's greedy design and not conductive to good gameplay.
20 years ago non-commercialized mods got this right, I really don't see why wanting it to get right in massive AAA titles, with a pretty rich and established history in exactly that, is suddenly such a controversial opinion, on HN out of all places.
On one hand I get called out for wanting more than only the purest "core-functionality" ("You can shoot people, what more do you want?"), on the other hand people disagree with the notion of how these "low-content" version are very much "f2p" versions, as a lot of content that used to come out of the box is now relegated and hand-waved away as "playing dress up".
So to answer him, yes, you want to play dress up. Everything you’re complaining about is entirely cosmetic.