This is going to be a long opinion on my feelings on halos gameplay, its going to be kind of a rant so ill TLDR it for you.
basically I believe halo needs to focus in on what it had and make better and more complex versions of what came before (vehicles, weapons, MAPS!!!) aswell as add new mechanics that complement halos already established style and flow. it needs to combine what we learned from halo 2,3,5 and infinite aswell as take inspiration on what games like doom eternal are doing. it needs to get CREATIVE.
I’ve seen alot of debate (babyfights really) over the years about how halos combat should move going forward, with halo 5 fanboys and halo 3 fanboys going back and forth between classic style and advanced mobility. personally i find both to be unrelenting and wrong. One wants halo to move in a direction i dont think suits it and one wants it to just stay the same. personally i think halos future should be taking what has been in halo for years and expanding and evolving upon it.
dash: ill get this out of the way fast, no, i dont like the dash. atleast, how halo 5 did it. the thing i hate about dashing is that it gives you such a huge boost, you can basically avoid grenades entirely. the point of grenades is to punish people for poor placement, so giving them such an easy out ruins one of the pillars of halos gameplay. however i do like how dashing adds some complexity to strafing. i think a good middle ground would be a side step, it could give you enough breathing room in a tight gunfight, but not enough to dodge grenades.
Sprint: i dont mind sprint in halo infinite but i feel that just increasing base movement speed more is the better option.
Movement: yes i believe halo needs new movement mechanics, halos classic movement has a lot of limitations and makes gameplay kinda stiff. however i think the focus should be on adding movement mechanics you can do while shooting. after playing 100s of hours of the classic trilogy, the neat thing about all the movement and jumps is that you can do almost all of them while shooting, this is vital. the reason why guns up in halo is important is not because thats just the way it was, it was because it allowed for very vertical intense fights where you are actively using the terrain around you WHILE SHOOTING. having mechanics like clamber be a a requirement forces players to turn and lower their gun to make jumps, which feels slow and clunky. its a fine mechanic as an optional thing to keep you from failing jumps but forcing players to do it just seems counter intuitive. i think instead that the new mechanics should be built off what came before. one idea i had was a wall jump, basically you jump into a wall and jump off of it
additionally i believe the new mechanics should be more tied to the map itself. for my wall jump example, you cannot wall jump if their is no wall, but wall jumping will allow you to reach new heights and do things you could never do in the old games, rather than just making the same things that you could have done in the old games more needlessly complicated , which is how i feel halo 5/infinites movement mechanics act when it comes to map traversal.
maps: this is the thing that needs to get better more than anything else. halos maps were kinda what made the game. dont get me wrong, i like halo 5 and halo infinites maps, but they often a far simpler than even classic halo maps. after playing games like counter strike, halo really needs more diverse and complex maps that up the antie. also more map interaction, maybe different weapon types can have certain affects on the map itself or vise versa
weapons and vehicles: its amazing to me that vehicles have stayed almost the exact same since halo 2 but nobody ever talks about it. there have been maybe 2 new mechanics that have been added since, seat swapping and doomsday, the latter of which is kind of redundant as players will abandon damaged vehicles regardless.
why not add an ejector seat? or allow drivers to shoot smaller weapons while driving? or let you kick smaller vehicles toward enemy players? allow banshees to rotate in the air like jets. or maybe at the very least just improve the handling on vehicles so we arent flip flopping in warthogs constantly
for weapons, i think infinite has a good start but more tactical abilities for weapons would be cool, like how in doom eternal you can have special abilities for weapons.
The stuff that just stayed the same: there is SO MUCH in halo that has just stayed the exact same for so long, halo players have gotten so used to these things that they dont even think about. just because they work fine doesnt mean they cant be better.
lets talk about how chainguns have stayed the same since halo 3, with that 3rd person view and having to drop the weapon. why not make it an actual weapon you can carry on your back? its not like their so OP that they cant make that work with the right balancing. they can still slow you down a bit, but im sure these weapons would be used far more often if they operated like regular weapons.
lets talk about how melees have been the same since halo 2 with that weird magnetic lunge. in halo 1 the melee had no magnetism, but because it was such an old game it was quite hard to land melees, but were in 2022 now with smoother frame rates and better hitboxes, why not get rid of the auto targeting lunge, it would make melee fights a much more engaging affair, if its little too difficult maybe just add a longer melee range but make it non targeting so you melee where you are looking.
you see, there is so much potential for halo in the modern era. but no one ever wants to talk about how we can move halo forward, just how it was so much better back in the older titles whether it is halo 3 or halo 5 their talking about. idk its annoying that this stuff never gets brought up, i wanted to say my piece on this topic.