The Halo 5 Multiplayer NEEDS to go back to it’s roots. There are way too many load-out based shooters out there, many of which just do it better. Halo was an arena shooter, and I think the only reason Halo: Reach introduced loadouts was so Bungie could test Destiny concepts on an audience without ruining a new franchise.
By going back to a place where everyone starts with the same guns, and weapons drop on map (preferably without HUD markers), you had to learn the 3 pillars of Halo multiplayer:
- Map Control- Weapon Control- Vehicle Control
Good luck winning a team game without dominating at least two of these aspects. You can have your team scattered all across the map, but without the guns or vehicles to back you up, you’d be slaughtered by bigger and badder enemies. You could control the Rockets, Sniper and Sword, but if you were huddled in your base surrounded by tanks, it didn’t do much good. Multiplayer in Halo 2/3 was rock-paper-scizzors: rockets beat tank, tank beat sniper, sniper beat rockets (from a distance).
But when you have weapons being dropped in, or custom loadouts, weapon control is gone. It’s substantially easier to defeat foes in vehicles.
I recall that the Warthog in Halo 2/3 was actually a useful weapon in your arsenal. A good gunner and driver could wreck a team that wasn’t expecting it, even if it was the good old machine gun warthog and not the powerful gauss 'hog.
The fact that you can literally shoot a Warthog and make it explode combined with loadouts and weapon drops nullfies Warthog effectiveness, and turns the Warthog into a transport vehicle from point A to B, which was the niche role of the Mongoose.
With Halo 4, weapon niches were essentially gone, because too many weapons and vehicles fit the same role, and loadouts caused many niches to no longer be useful. When everybody spawns with a Battle Rifle, few choose the route of the Assault Rifle, despite the AR being a relatively effective starting weapon.
Halo multiplayer was special in that it had progression within the actual gameplay. You started weak, and you worked your way up. Pistol > AR > BR > Rockets, and while it isn’t much, it’s more of a progression than BR > Rockets.
Halo was competitive because it had an actual metagame! Yes, the metagame is not nearly as big as it would be for a Moba, but anyone who played Halo 3’s the Pit competitively can tell you there was a goddamned strategy to it. Hell, the Pit almost has “lanes”, with Rocket hall, Overshield alley, and Camo hall. The rush at the beginning was important to control, but good teams could easily still win even if they didn’t grab Rockets at the beginning.
Armor abilities continued this alienation of the fanbase. Don’t get me started on Armor Lock, and many of them were simply poorly implemented. What Bungie/343 should’ve done with Armor Abilities is make them similar to weapons, dropped on map and up for grabs by anyone.
This would add a new level of metagame - do I keep sprint or do I grab bubble shield? Is it better to have a team of fast movers with sprint/thruster pack, or should we go defensive and employ Reflective Shields and Bubble Shields?
Multiplayer in Reach and 4 wasn’t Halo. Sure, some people found it fun, and that’s okay. But to them I bring up a line from the movie The Departed, delivered by Martin Sheen to Leonardo diCaprio:
“Do you want to be a cop, or do you want to appear to be a cop? It’s an honest question. A lot of guys just want to appear to be cops. Gun, badge, pretend they’re on TV.”
Does 343 want to make a game that appears to be Halo, or do you want to be Halo? You can make a game with energy shields, aliens, and battle rifles, but it doesn’t make it Halo.