In case you missed the news among The Game Awards hype and Cyberpunk 2077 finally releasing, 343 Industries has shown off another batch of Halo Infinite armor variants that should tickle your fancy. In this month’s Inside Infinite blog post, together with announcing the game’s latest release window of Fall 2021, Lead Progression designer Chris Blohm provides some insight regarding the game’s armor customization options.

Looking back at Halo: Reach‘s “breadth and depth”, he and his team knew that they had to not only return to that level of customization but add more stuff into the game. While they haven’t detailed exactly how many customizable armor pieces are there, Reach‘s influence on the designs is pretty apparent. As you can see below, one of Halo Infinite armor variations even pays tribute to Bungie’s last Halo title using the Noble Defender coating:

One of the armor and coating showed here will be available as an exclusive bonus to Halo 5 players who have reached SR 152 — or have grinded around 10,000 matches back in the day. This is because 343 Industries believe they didn’t properly reward loyal Halo 5 players and now have learned a lot to better structure player progressions and rewards for their next game. Chris added that he knows he’s still being vague with Halo Infinite armor options, but he wants to “save some surprises” for later while still have some more stuff to show off “soon” as well.

On the other hand, the inclusion of the coating system that replaces previous games’ color options is still a hot topic among fans. Defending their decision again, Chris said that “flat colors” is not good enough for Halo Infinite armor customization. And the coating system lets them create more color variations for armor, weapon, and vehicles faster than “they could create weapon skins in Halo 5“.

With this month’s update, to date 343 Industries has shown six different armor coatings:

  • Monarch: Purple
  • Red Shift: Red and white
  • Scorpion Punch: Dark gray and red
  • Noble Defender: Greenish brown and gray
  • Splinter Desert: Camo green
  • Watchdog: White and dark gray