First thing’s first, I’m loving Halo 5 so far. It’s intense, fast paced, and smooth. Every weapon is extremely useful and has its place. The movement feels great. Kills feel very rewarding.
Thus far, I don’t see any guns that need a heavy nerf. People complain about the assault rifle quite a bit, but I think you all should go play some Halo 2 on lockout without BR starts. In that game, the BR is basically a power weapon if you get it as the SMGs have no mid range capability at all. The mid range capability of the assault rifles in Halo 5 really isn’t great compared to the BR and DMR.
There are a lot of little things I love about this game, such as the meter that tells you when your shield will come back and the callouts from my teammates.
Possible issues:
Grenade bounces seem off to me, maybe they’ve changed for the better and I’m just not used to it, but they seem to not bounce as far as they did in previous games. Grenades are very prominent as well, but they are a staple of Halo gameplay. I would test the game with some slightly less powerful frags. And while I’m on the topic of grenades, I find myself never using plasmas now when I used them a lot more in previous Halos. I only throw them if I’m out of frags in Halo 5.
The ranking system might need a little work too. I just had 23 kills and 6 deaths and lost 50-49. This gave me a performance decrease of -19… That’s a bit outrageous considering I only get between +5 and +9 for winning normally.
A long term issue I see is the lack of weapon variety compared to past Halo games. Is it called The Prophet’s Bane now because that’s the UNSC name for it and all weapons are now UNSC? I can’t say I’ve missed the covenant weapons that much at this point, but I’m curious to see what they look and feel like after seeing how great the UNSC weapons are.
This long term issue is sad, but true. CoD gets its long life from having a huge unlock system. What can Halo do to one up that? Unlocking armor is not going to keep people around that long and neither is unlocking emblems. The ranking system is their best bet, but I still think there needs to be more if they hope to sustain a decent population for months after release.