I can now safely say it sucks. The combination of shotguns, radar, AND the new flag capture mechanics make it so once you or an enemy grab the flag, you just move back a bit and the camping teammates will take care of the rest for you.
Not only that, but the maps themselves have become a wide-open disaster with almost no cover to them whatsoever, other than the walls that provide the main pathways (which are almost guaranteed to be littered with shotguns.). The few items of cover they do have in the maps are surrounded by waist-high nonsense that only serve to get you stuck when you’re trying to back up or sidestep to cover.
Shotguns do nothing but make the hallways a sudden-death circus. They promote no means of skillful play, as the only strategy to them is “Wait for enemy to get close, pull trigger.”. With an SMG, you can use it to suppress and descope an enemy at range without having to aim with the Magnum; the penalty for doing so being a lack of capability to actually damage the enemy, only limit their aim.
A CQB battle with SMGs is concluded when the player who gets the most consistent shots lands more bullets, or move in close and executes a well-timed melee attack. Now? You pull the trigger once, and they’re dead. Hell, it’s even become all too common for both parties to die in a shotgun battle, which only leads to frustration. A trade-off in a Magnum or BR battle indicates that you and your opponent are equally-skilled. A trade-off in a shotgun battle just means you both pulled the trigger at roughly the same time. It’s not fun, and it’s not competetive.
Starting with weapons that cause instant death isn’t even a fair battle when dealing with corners. When you walk into a room, you generall have two corners that enemies could be hiding behind. You’re taking a risk simply by entering the room. With SMGs, if you walk into a room and you checked the wrong corner, they begin firing at you, giving you a split-second to react; will you boost out of the room? Or turn and fight? Anymore, if you check the wrong corner, you just get blasted with no time to react.
Radar means there is no need for comunication whatsoever. This could also be argued in other Arena modes, however, the size of Breakout maps is VERY small compared to Arena maps, meaning your radar covers most of the locations your enemies could be. Besides, Breakout is supposed to be the ultra-competitive mode of Halo 5, where you either work with your team or die. Without radar, you must rely on your eyes or your team. No information is just given away. Except that, of course, now it is. You can see exactly where the enemy is from almost across the map.
You can approach a room and know for sure there is an enemy in there. You know he’s waiting for you to enter, eyes glued to radar, finger ready to pull his shotgun’s trigger. You expect him to be camping. You wanna get the drop on him by not appearing on his radarn so you crouch…and move remarkably slower. By the time you’re done crouching the whole way to the enemy from outside his radar, the rest of their team has already moved up and grabbed the flag. You gotta make it quick, so you work to kill the camper and move on. Uh oh, too late, they walked the flag back to their base because they don’t even need to walk the flag through hostile territory. They can grab the flag, and walk back through where their team is, which is more universally known as “the area where they’re perfectly safe.”. The entire game now boils down to running through the only three hallways (lest you get caught in the open), rushing the flag with shotguns (where the winner is chosen via dice roll, more or less), and simply stolling the flag back to base. You can’t make a counter-push, because that involves moving quickly across to THEIR side of the map. By implementing radar, moving quickly is inherently punished as opposed to waiting or moving slowly.
The change of making the flag scorable at your base puts a huge emphasis on moving with speed; the inclusion of radar penalizes speed. You can see how that doesn’t add up.