As some one who likes CQC in shooters I tend to have quite a bit of fun with shotguns in fps games. Nothing feels better than either flanking the position or dodging the shots of your enemy to flick onto them for a clean shotgun kill. So when I started playing the available pc halo games leading up to and through the launch of MCC on PC I felt quite let down by how the shotgun is balanced in all of the Halo games in multiplayer.
In campaign they’re fine, playing peak-a-boo with tougher enemies you don’t want to waste ammo on whittling down from afar, or swapping to it to deal with a lunging/charging enemy or swarm of infection forms is fun and useful.
In Multiplayer though, it’s balance of one shot, but only near point blank range, and a real slow fire rate tends to encourage some of the less fun playstyles. Since it’s strong when it can one shot but is so slow it can’t follow up with a second shot on anything not a one shot before you die it leads to it being beaten in close range by the lunging energy sword or even a hip spammed sniper once outside of point blank range. This forces people who want to be effective with the shotgun to either go full camper and hide at a door/lift exit for easy point blanks (or point blank to melee if you are a slightly too off or back) or to randomly pull it out towards the end of a duel to clean off the last bit of damage since your starting weapon’s mag ran out or you didn’t feel like lining up a headshot.
All this leads me to be excited for using what appears to be a shotgun that trades less one shot potential for a faster firerate (I know this is somewhat speculation as things could change or I misinterpreted it’s time in the demo, but seems like what they’re going for). This could lead to the shotgun being able to be more useful in close range playstyles that aren’t just camping a corner without it becoming a cheesy instakilling machine like shotguns in some other recent shooters have been.
It is sad though the classic style of shotgun (and magnum 
) appear to be gone for now, but hey if this one plays differently enough and they weren’t lying about sicking with this game for a while we could see in the future the old shotty returning and filling it’s old niche role without taking the away role of the new shotty completely.