So it seems like Halo 5 was about improving the general feel of movement and thus allowing the action to be bigger in scale. (spartan abilities, giant warzone maps, multiple paths through campaign levels)
Going back to previous games feels very different: they are all so much less intuitive. it really is completely just about knowing how to play each map and basic shooting skill, which is fine, but halo 5 gives you more tools to think about and play around with which can make it more fun to learn.
But as soon as you get in a vehicle, it feels pretty much like it did in previous games. The vehicles control better and some of them have interesting twists (nadegoose godlike) but the way you drive vehicles in halo is the same, and the way you have to use them is very strictly defined and hard to learn, just like player movement in old Halo games.
As far as Melee goes, it’s never been an especially deep thing. Ninjas are about the most interesting thing they bring to the table, but those fall more under the category of player movement: nothing about the actual hit is really interesting. Assassination animations are cool but I feel like they mainly serve to cover up the lack of compelling feedback you get from a normal backsmack. At its most basic, squaring off against another person at close range, melee is the least interesting part of the often quoted dynamic of gun + grenade + movement + melee. It can still be PART of exciting moments, it’s just never really the cause of them. People hate getting double melee’d not because it’s cheap, really, but because it’s boring.
Vehicles don’t need to be completely different. They should work based on the same principles, but the idea of spartan abilities should be applied to them in ways that can further those principles. And that can be done in ways that both ground these vehicles in their in-fiction mechanics as well as new things the fiction makes up solely to excuse better gameplay (Warthogs that can strafe, Ghosts that can climb steep inclines) or just general changes to the controls or tuning that give players more input and confidence.
For Melee a less forgiving approach may be required. We all have seen cool CQC fight scenes in movies and game cutscenes. We’ve even seen first person games get CQC done right. But with Halo, you don’t want it to turn into this hideously complicated thing that turns people off from even engaging with it. You don’t want every close quarters fight to turn into chief and locke fighting. Cause while that was a cool fight, they abandoned every other aspect of halo gameplay during it: no grenades, limited movement, no guns. But I think if you can get melee to a point where it is at least entertaining and skillful to fight with melee only, then that’s proof that melee will be a more interesting part of varied fights that use all of the mechanics in the game. It should look cool and feel cool. Two people punching themselves in the face to death is not cool. CQC is about defense and offense, dramatic comebacks and finishers. Currently the game treats it like a short-range gunshot: impersonal and detatched from a sense of physical tangibility and reality. It just needs a little something. I’m not sure I know exactly what, but it needs it. (Note that I consider the Spartan Charge and ground pound to be movement-centric, as they are basically just new ways of delivering a fairly standard melee attack)
And I guess combining these two things: the mechanics of boarding and meleeing people in vehicles. I can’t honestly think of what could be done to make this better, but the way it works right now is, to put it lightly, “fiddly”. Obviously all of the boarding maneuvers are incredibly complicated acrobatic feats and it seems like a huge task to make them more player-driven, but I’d like to think that they could be a bit more controlled and involved than “hold input while in proximity of part of vehicle”.
So in conclusion I’m not saying that player movement or normal weapons aren’t important, and those should definitely be adjusted and added to in future games. I just think that they don’t need a very radical shift from what Halo 5 has left them as, and mostly can get by on tuning, tweaks, and aesthetic changes. Vehicles and Melee are parts of Halo 5 that feel very tradtional, and they aren’t “bad” because of that. They just don’t fit in as well as they could with a game that has moved forward in a lot of ways.
