Why are Halo games shorter than they used to be?

Games Halo 5: Guardians
1

I mean I was playing Combat Evolved and the actual number of enemies didn’t feel all that different. It was simply that:

  1. Weapons feel a lot more powerful. Simply
    gong through a few grunts and elites took a fair bit of killing with grenades, cover and lots of assault rifle fire. Now you can easily down the same number of enemies in a single round of BR fire.

  2. In a lot of Halo missions you are quite simply walking or driving in an empty space with no action. In some missions like Control Room or Halo this is actually quite a substantial amount of time. Halo 4 and 5 actively avoid this with combats rolling one after the other. Maps are often well designed but small and easy to cross.

  3. Overuse of weak enemy types is also a major issue. Making the bulk of your opponents one shot and slow moving crawlers and grunts makes combat very easy. Halo 5 gets a lot harder when they start adding turrets, snipers, hunters and the warden but these are too infrequent. The game doesn’t create challenging combats like in previous Halo.

4 Theres also a lot less “hold this ground against waves of enemies” or backtracking to extend the length of the mission without adding more sections.

5 The revive system makes the game wayyy easier. You probably would have added do a lot of time to my playthrough with that disabled. Dying should send you back to a checkpoint and punish you for failing so you lose your work. This could be punishing in previous Halo titles.

2

I was disappointed that there isn’t any missions such as the Covenant from Halo 3, that mission had the right mixture of length and action. But for Halo 5 it seems that 343 wanted the Campaign to be more fast-paced - which resulted in smaller missions with more action in one place rather then a long mission with the action spread out.

3

Your points are pretty valid but Halo 5 really isn’t that much shorter than previous Halo games. I beat it in 8:30 hours which makes it roughtly 1 hour shorter than my playthrough of Reach but also around 2 hours longer than my Halo 3 playthrough. But then again play time can be pretty different between people.

4

It took me 5 an a half hours to do it on normal and I partly put that down to fatigue since I played it at midnight.

Wish I had a comparison for my first playthroughs. Although I played Halo and Halo 2 ten years ago so…