We need to get back to the original formula, make sure it is at least as good and polished as it was in Halo 3, have the same amount of content and features as Halo 3 did, and then expand upon those things. Make them bigger, expand the sandbox,and add new and exciting ways that vehicles,players,weapons, and the maps all interact with each other. Not staying exactly the same,and not changing the formula completely and having less features and content,like Halo 5, but expanding upon what was already perfect and making it even bigger.Think about what Nintendo has done with the Super smash bros. Series. They’ve expanded the core gameplay,features, and overall content, without taking away from the original formula. It’s only gotten bigger,and more polished. It feels like after Halo 3 the series was hit by a truck, got amnesia,adopted a new identity and is now slowly recovering. There are things I like about Halo 5 (I would play it over any modern FPS game) but Halo went backwards after 2007. There’s less content, smaller vehicle/weapon variety, and a lack of understanding of what it means to evolve a Game franchise. We are slowly building to a point where some more things are starting to look a little more like Halo. But the changes they are making aren’t enough when it’s trying so hard to be something else . something less Than We know it is capable of being. Halo’s gone backwards, taken away features, adopted someone else’s formula, and lost most of it’s identity along the way. It needs to get back up to where it once was with Halo 3,then expand on what it has done without completely throwing away what it is,and should be.
If you look at the way that the original trilogy had evolved from 1-3, it’s easy to imagine what the next game in the series would look like. 343i Has completely abandoned Halo’s Gameplay,pacing,narrative flow, art direction and sandbox, Just so they can blend in with the rest of the crowd. They threw away the idea of making a great sequel to Halo 3, just so they could play it safe. They add little by little, just enough to get you to buy the next game, in hopes that it will be the one that brings Halo back to it’s former glory. They want to dangle that carrot in front of your nose for the next 30+ years, in hopes that you’ll buy multiple average games for years to come, instead of that one Amazing game. They want Halo to last as a service and an infinite franchise. They don’t care about a single game they care about all of it, and making sure they don’t give you exactly what you want all in one game. They are okay with releasing something completely mediocre as long as people still buy it.( Kind of like another popular FPS franchise we all know.)
And nothing is going to change if we don’t let our voices be heard. We shouldn’t be okay with with a bad microtransactions centered reward system.(Just because it’s okay and doesn’t completely break the game, doesn’t mean it’s good) We shouldn’t be okay with a 4 hour cliffhanger campaign, with a forced on squad element, and about a thousand plot holes. We shouldn’t be okay with them selling us an unfinished, half developed game, and updating it for the next 6 months, and labelling it as “free DLC” as a selling point. We should never settle for something that is “close enough to Halo, or " not as bad as it could be” We should never settle for something that is less than what Bungie gave us back in 2007 with Halo 3.