As a lurker, I feel fine, great in fact. Exploring Requiem brought back a lot more memories of exploring the original Halo than, say, exploring Reach or New Mombasa (as cool as those might have been). Halo 3 barely featured a Halo anyway. To be quite frank, there is nothing necessarily more interesting about a Halo ring than say, a Shield World or the Ark. Halo 3: ODST and Halo Reach are great games, and so is Halo 4. Further, if anything Requiem evokes the scale of the original Halo more than any mega-structure since the Ark.

The question is: does the Halo title in question have mega-structures and/or cool sky boxes with a variety of sand box environments ? If the answer is "yes" then you have a crucial ingredient for a good Halo game, the mere existence or non-existence of a Halo ring has nothing to do with that. Also, galactic genocide rings end up losing their punch when they show up all the time. Gotta have variety.