After thinking this over for the past week, I’ve figured out why I am so distressed whenever I play Halo 5. To explain myself, I will use an analogy. Halo has traditionally had awkward bones. The mechanics the games are built on have odd quirks, these allowed butterfly jumping and rocket deflection; however Halo games have always had a lot of meat. This is content, and as you all know, when a game has a large amount of meat, the bones become less prominent. This is why people generally ignored the projectile system in Halo 3, and focused on the epic capabilities of Forge. People love content. As long as a game has plenty of content, the majority of people will forgive minor shortcomings. This is why Halo Reach did so well, despite the lack of the BR and the addition of armor abilities. Firefight and the expanded Forge offered so many hours of enjoyment that we would have forgiven almost anything.
The problem Halo 5 is facing, is one of content. In my analogy, Halo 5 would be an anorexic child with beautiful bone structure. That is the problem. While large amounts of content will distract the players from minor flaws, a lack of content highlights even the most trivial errors. After all, once a player runs out of content, what is left to do except complain? This is the lesson 343 should take from this. Content is more important than mechanics. All the mechanics need to do is work, they don’t even need to work well, they just need to work. After all, you can repair a skeleton with ease, but players will not wait for meat they expected at launch.