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It has come to my notice that, especially following the release of the newest iteration of the game which shall not be named, it has become, I might say, the vogue to roundly condemn Halo 5 as an inferior Halo game, and to decry 343i as ‘ruining their favorite game series’. This is an unfair generalization. Certainly, the Reclaimer Trilogy story has been nothing short of a dumpster fire, but for every mistake they have made in the area of story, they have made an improvement in the gameplay department.
Armor Abilities: I didn’t particularly love or hate them in Halo Reach and 4, but the universal abilities in Halo 5 are quite nice. The foremost among these, of course, is sprinting. I don’t care what the purists say, it was no fun spawning on Sandtrap with all the vehicles gone and the fight all the way across the map. At least now we can traverse ground significantly more easily. The thruster pack is pretty much a modified jetpack, bringing with it most of the pros and cons of the jetpack. Clambering has added a pleasing element of verticality to the gameplay, and 343 have enthusiastically embraced this in their map design. Shoulder charge and ground pound seem somewhat gimmicky, and I honestly couldn’t care less about them. One possible explanation is that 343 saw what shoulder charge became in Destiny and so was wary of letting it become that in Halo. To be clear, this is an area where it is decidedly better to be safe than sorry. I also quite like their act of reinstating the powerup system and limiting it to the truly useful ones, namely overshield and active camo.
Weapons: I don’t think 343 has really done anything wrong with the weapons, and they’ve certainly done a lot right. Reinstatement of the BR in Halo 4 was met with universal jubilation, although it was mitigated somewhat when people found that it outclassed the DMR in almost every way. However, in Halo 5 they have differentiated between the two, while still making both seem like powerful weapons. It was certainly nice to see the Magnum granted some of its former glory, although that was somewhat more of the doing of Bungie in Reach. Still, 343 carried it on, and then built their entire sandbox around it. In Halo 5 they included almost every weapon from the previous games which, although it is really only noticeable in Warzone, is still a nice touch.
Microtransactions: 343 has taken a lot of flak for adding microtransactions to Halo 5, and not without reason. Certainly I do not approve of their addition of this monetization, but I consider that they’ve been quite nice about it. REQs are mostly quarantined to Warzone, meaning that microtransactions don’t cause a multiplayer imbalance. Furthermore, you can earn them. It takes time, but it can be done. And Halo is a game that never gets old.
PCs: While they’ve not given as much attention as we’d like to the PC community (of which I’m a member), they’ve done more for it than Bungie. After Halo 1 and 2, which were released in an age where consoles were in their infancy, Bungie seems to have forgotten about its supporters among the Glorious PC Gaming Master Race. Halo 5:Forge is certainly not a replacement for a full game, but it was nice of them to offer us a stop-gap while they work on Halo 6, which has been all but confirmed to be coming to PC, as well as a possible classic production in the vein of the game which must not be named.
If people are going to criticize Halo 5, they should criticize the parts worthy of criticizm (Why did they have to go and put in Spartan IVs? It devalues both the Marines and the Spartans), rather than blanketing the whole game in and abuse, hurling diatribes indiscriminately at the good and the bad. In conclusion, I’d certainly rather have 343 in charge of Halo than Bungo. At least 343 seems to want to learn from their mistakes.