Am I the only one who thinks that this is an utterly abhorrent idea? I’ve just played a game of Warzone, and watched in disgust as a guy with a Ravening Sliver actually closed the gap at medium range and killed two players, before turning and lunging a -Yoinking!- stupid distance to take out two more players. In five seconds, the sword went from being a good 25 metres from the teammates to them all being dead. It was absurd. Who’s bright idea was it to make melee weapons viable at low-medium range? And before people start with the “well they should have landed their shots better” argument, that doesn’t stand when you bring a melee weapon (melee meaning literally making contact with your opponent) to the same range as a pistol or basic BR, because you’ve then gone from the standard rock/paper/scissors balancing of weapons, to every weapon being overpowered, which does not equate to a good balance. The sword has an advantage at close range over a precision weapon like the BR, that’s fine. But what’s not fine is the Sword’s ability to negate its medium-range disadvantage by being able to close that medium-range gap between the user and the enemy almost immediately.
There are some things that Halo 5’s sandbox does beautifully, but this is not one of those things.