Are we now the minority, guys? Is our little HBO clique just too curmudgeonly to embrace change? Maybe what's best for Halo really is to arbitrarily shove in a bunch of stuff that has no reason being there for fear of stagnation. I guess we just like stagnation.

Halo 4 was like the kid in school who thinks he has something to prove, so he tries really, really hard to be as cool as possible while everyone thinks he's being kind of annoying. Halo 5 looks like that kid grown up, and thinking his attempts to be the coolest guy in school were successful.

Maybe this is purely nostalgia talking but, when I think of Halo, I think of simplicity, clarity, no obfuscation or bullshit or trying to be too cool. That's what made Halo CE, Halo 2, and Halo 3 so cool. They weren't trying to be cool. They were just cool. Cool? Cool.

I feel like 343 thinks I'm a tiny baby and is dangling keys in front of my face to try to get me interested. Halo has never needed that. I'm interested because it's an extremely simple sandbox from which complex, interesting scenarios arise. Frills don't add to the complexity. In a weird way, they restrict it. The complexity of a Halo 2 match is interesting because of how organic it is. The complexity of a Halo 4 match is not interesting because it feels engineered. It comes off as the developer trying to trick me into thinking what I'm playing is fun or interesting by just adding a bunch of crap to it.

When it comes to Halo, less is so, so, so much more.