I’ve played through Halo 5’s campaign once on heroic. I had a really good time, I liked the new abilities and enemy types, thought the encounters were designed in really interesting ways. Throughout this, I found myself noticing how the ability to get revived when I died changed my playstyle. In old halo games often I did something crazy and fun to take out a tough enemy, but ended up dying and needing to restart. That made me eventually end up playing very conservatively on heroic, inching around corners and never using any weapons except long-distance ones.
In Halo 5, It feels like they want you to have more fun with the gameplay and do more daring things, and as long as it actually works and you kill most of the enemies before they take you down, your team can mop them up and help you out. It’s a really cool feeling.
The problem is that in some cases it feels weird: when enemies take you down and you’re far from your team but they don’t try to finish you off, and plenty of other scenarios where it just kind of feels like your time is being wasted rather than getting an instant restart like in other halos.
I feel like perhaps reviving should be less powerful and less of a focus, and instead the same kind of spirit for encouraging aggressive and skillful play should come from your team fighting more effectively when you play better and do cooler things: making it so you have less chance of being downed at all simply because you’re playing well. Because if you’re playing well, they stick closer to you and take down the enemies you miss, and if you’re playing poorly they kind of scatter a bit. Perhaps to make people aware of this something like “team cohesiveness” or “morale” should be a HUD element (which is something that actually makes sense for the leader of a team of spartans to have, since they can monitor vitals through the suit and whatnot) and as you get headshots and boss takedowns and multikills and such, the morale meter would rise.
Perhaps that’s a bad idea for presenting it and it should be subtler, but my point is that the best way to improve the revive system is taking some of the pressure off of it: allowing there to be other ways to avoid death that are explicitly based around skill.