Okay by now you may have seen a preview of Master Chief’s new armor for Halo 4 but incase you haven’t here is a comparison shot of the armor from Halo 3 and Halo 4:

Now why am I showing this?

Because I thought of a rather interesting theory as to why it looks so different. Obviously 343i wants to make the armor look awesome, however they also want to make it their own and no longer Bungie’s. So that precipitated the need to redesign the armor. That’s the factual side of things.

Fans have hypothesized that the armor was upgraded during cryosleep by nanobots in the armor. However, nanobots to the best of my recollection were not introduced into the armor until Mk VII Mjolnir. So MC wouldn’t have that tech in his older Mk VI armor.

So that brings me to my theory for the in-game reason:

If we take into consideration the canon events from Halo Reach to H3, that all takes place in less than a year’s time.

At the end of H3, we see MC and Cortana rushing towards a space object horizon we thought was a planet. If that same object is this supposed shield world we saw in the teaser trailer, then practically no time elapsed and MC would have only been in cryo a VERY short time. Hours if not minutes.

So that would mean MC changed armor 3 times in less than a year? Really? Okay, but man the budget the UNSC/ONI have for this armor must be huge.

Now if we are to believe that MC and Cortana are adrift for much longer, then at least that explains the new armor. Possibly. Maybe it was in storage aboard the frigate they are on, but that isn’t believable to me.

However, I’m not wholly convinced the new armor is UNSC issued, well not entirely.

I’m going to go out on a limb and say that once landing on the shield world MC comes upon some engineers (the very same kind as we saw the Covenant use, though these ones have never been tainted by another race) who upgrade his armor. It would explain a lot of why it looks different and not entirely human. Look at the abdominal section. Those don’t look like human abs to me. In fact, that could be more reminiscent of Forerunner armor.

So the new suit is partially his old suit reconfigured and retrofitted with Forerunner tech. It wouldn’t even be Mk VII at all but something entirely different.

So why would Engineers remake MC’s armor? That is a very simple question to answer. They know of the flood contamination from their early years with the Forerunners. This Reclaimer has come to their location in armor that is battered. MC shows no sign of contamination, however to better protect him, the engineers upgrade his armor.

So this new armor still has some UNSC stuff in it, but is now remade with a lot of Forerunner tech. How that will be represented in the game, who knows. I’m sure it will mean an updated HUD. However, it could also mean new weapons, new armor shield tech, health powerups/boosts (like sprinting or super jumping).

I’ve mentioned this on forums before that I think the D-pad needs to be used in Halo. Since we have new armor with supposed new abilities, that would translate to the use of the D-pad quite nicely.

Here is an example of the D-pad layout:
Up=Jetpack or super jump
Right=Sprint
Left=Invisibility
Down=Armor lock or going prone (which I hope it would be the latter…)

If you have a theory, I’d like to hear it. Please register and comment below.

Thanks for reading as always.