Beta’s over, time for feedback…
Disclaimer: some of the things I say here have most likely been brought up already.
The primary reason that modern Halo games aren’t as fun as the first or second is because they are so slow. Nobody thought it was fun in Halo 2 to put 5-6 shots into the flag carrier’s back when he had no shields only for him to get away and still score the flag. Nobody thought it was fun in Halo 3 when you would always lose a 2v1 due to the long period of time players had to react to being shot at. You could be much better than two opponents but would still always die because of how long it took the Halo 3 BR to kill people and how ineffective the gun operated over distance.
It would seem that 343 recognizes this and wants to speed up the pace of the game in Halo 5. They do this by making the kill times faster and giving players movement options such as sprint and thruster pack to get around quicker. The problem with this is that since you are unable to shoot your gun while executing these movement options, they can not be used offensively. When you remove the offensiveness from these movement options, all that is left is defensiveness. Thus, the movement options that everyone spawns with in Halo 5 are really defensive options, and when players have defensive options gun fights are prolonged. In other words, these movement options make the game slower.
While the kill times are faster in Halo 5 relative to Halo 4 and Reach, they are not fast enough to offset the impact that the defensive movement options have on gameplay. If we wanted to do that, kill times would need to be COD-style instant where 1-2 shots from an automatic gun would be enough to take out an opponent.
The most obvious solution to Halo 5’s slow gameplay problem is to remove the defensive movement options from the game. Because sprint’s inclusion in the game requires that non-sprinting speed be slow, I suggest making the base movement speed to be equal to sprinting speed since this would be speed everyone would be traveling at. There would be no need to make any modifications to map sizes this way since they have been tailored to suit sprinting speed.
Removing Halo 5’s defensive movement options may be a problem since they are what the developers had planned on innovating the Halo series with. I would argue that a console FPS in which everyone travels at a classic arena FPS’s player speed (sprinting speed in this case) is an innovation for Halo alone since that has never been done in the franchise before. However, perhaps replacing Halo 5’s current movement options with arena shooter mechanics such as wall jumping or dodge jumping would suffice for a gameplay innovation since these have never been done in Halo before. As long as players are able to shoot their guns while performing movement options, they have offensive potential and will not be strictly defensive options.
Honestly though, while there is a need to innovate Halo, there is no reason why these innovations need to involve gameplay changes. For example, forge and theater were fantastic innovations to Halo, yet neither of these tampered with gameplay. Perhaps there could be an innovation with forge in which players could build maps on PC and then export them to their Xbox’s. Perhaps Halo could be innovated with a custom game search lobby instead of traditional matchmaking. Perhaps there could be a system in which players randomly unlock helmets and other armor pieces, similar to the system in Advanced Warfare, but have to option to trade their more rare unlocks with other players or cash them in for credits which can be used to buy more random armor unlocks. The sky is the limit regarding innovating Halo without tampering with the gameplay.
If the defensive movement options in Halo 5 MUST stay, the best way to balance them is to only allow players to use them if they have 100% shields. Let’s say I’m sprinting and get shot at; I should be forced to stop sprinting and not allowed to sprint again until my shields are fully recharged. The current balancing mechanic does not go far enough. Again though, removing the defensive movement options entirely is the best way to fix Halo 5’s slow gameplay issues.
Halo 5 has potential, but serious changes first need to occur. Without them, Halo 5 will suffer the same fate as the last three Halo games of being nothing more than mediocre.