Ya turd.
To say that Halo 5: Guardians launched with a lack of content would be an appropriate statement to make. It was missing key features like Forge, a functional Theater mode, and an unstructured PvE mode. It would also be an appropriate statement to say that Halo 5: Guardians has added a substantial amount of content since it launched. Forge has delivered the most robust maps in the Halo series to date, and 343 Industries brought their own (albeit flawed) spin to Firefight. Aside from just features, 343 Industries launched Halo 5: Guardians with a specific tool that allowed them to constantly update and improve player identity. That tool is the requisition system. Ive made posts and statements before about how key player identity is in forming a players experience over the lifetime of the game and series, but the two points I want to address are how and why players select their identity in-game. To do that Ill cover a brief history of player identity first.
Halo CEs player identity was simply color. Halo 2s player identity was simple. Each player had an emblem that would appear on their character and by their name in the menu UI. Additionally, they could choose whether their player model was an Elite or a Spartan. Halo 3s evolution allowed for armor customization and a player tag about friendly waypoints. Reach expanded on these and offered a wider array of choices on armor, but players were forced to be a Spartan or an Elite depending on the game mode. Halo 4 did something that Halo games had never done before and that was tying player emblems to the progression system. The most basic form of identity was relegated to how long a player had been playing Halo 4. Lastly, Halo 5 tied all forms of player identity to its progression system of requisitions.
This is a two-edged sword. On one hand, the player cannot create an identity when they first pick up the game. Some players are turned off by this because theres nothing to distinguish them from the crowd if they are an average player. Other players see a goal in unlocking a certain piece of armor or a helmet and they chase that piece of identity. Now why do they latch on to a piece of identity? This will require getting a bit more nitty gritty with Halo: Reachs system of unlocking cosmetic items. Halo: Reach required players to earn credits, which could then purchase the different cosmetic armor sets. There were definitely a few trends in players on picking a Reach armor. The main trends in Reachs players were 1) how much the item cost, 2) how much the player resonated with the armor, 3) how much it looked like an in-game character. In the first case, a lot of players would have the most expensive item whether it was expensive in terms of time invested or credits, players would don these items. The Skull Pilot of Inheritors was commonplace in the waning days of Reach. In the second case, it usually dealt with the armor that they used in Halo 3. EOD was a popular helmet in Halo 3 and its return in Reach was a reason to use it. A quick side note here: the CQB helmet in Reach was locked behind an Xbox Live Gold paywall of Halo Waypoint on the 360, so its popularity might be much lower than what it was in Halo 3. As for the last point, many players would dress up in order to look like a character that was easily recognizable. Players would run around in the multiplayer trying to make themselves look like the Noble team characters. One character that they could somewhat accurately represent was the Master Chief himself.
Master Chief has gone through three iterations on his armor design throughout the series, but arguably his most popular is the original look, the Mark V set. Halo 5 used the requisition system to release a Mark V variant in one of the content updates, but it wasnt quite the look he had in the original game. Going back to a previous point, players would sometimes choose an armor set because they resonated with it in previous games. Mark V has been in every mainline title except Halo 2, so players can feel a continuity aspect to it. Giving players the choice to their identity from the start is important also, and theres no reason why an iconic armor set should be withheld from the next mainline Halo title.
I hate that ending. But after credit scene is awesome.