: Not happening. I understand why it's frustrating—I'm definitely in the same
: boat as you—but at some point it was inevitable. Having vehicle-based
: controls made sense for when the Monitor essentially *was* a vehicle to
: spawn in objects, but now that Forge has dived whole-hog into being a map
: editor first and foremost controls more conducive to that needed to
: happen.

I don't see it as inevitable. I see it as forced. Three iterations of Forge and no changes to the basic controls, and them *BAM!"

: Some things like swapping the D-pad controls were less necessary and irksome,
: but them's the breaks. Even though the controls still don't feel
: "natural" to me and won't for some time, I can already tell that
: it's a *better* way of controlling things—especially when it comes to
: quick and easy rotation.

"Better" is subjective, and "thems the breaks" is unacceptable. Imagine if you were used to regular look controls (up is up, down is down) and suddenly inverted look controls became standard and there was no way to undo it. Better yet, imagine if Halo only had one control scheme from Halo 3 on through Reach and Halo 4, and it was basically the Halo 3 default: B is melee, RB is reload/action, A is jump, LT throws grenades, clicking RS zooms, etc. Then Halo 5 comes along and the only control scheme is the Halo 5 default. Action/reload getting moved back to X might not hurt if you still played default on Halo 1 & 2, and switching weapons is still on Y and firing your weapon is still on RT, but pretty much everything else has shifted to be more similar to COD (and it's not a straight copy of default COD controls, either, so thinking it'll play like most other non-Halo shooters won't help you, either). You go to toss a grenade and instead you zoom in. You go to melee and instead you engage your thruster pack. You go to crouch and you start sprinting. You go to zoom and you crouch instead. You go to reload and instead execute a melee attack. You go to toggle grenades and you throw a grenade instead.

Now imagine if you're like me and muscle memory is a huge issue with you. Even with simple tasks it takes you weeks to adapt. Now you're having to basically throw out 8 years of habit that has etched itself so deeply into your brain that your body continues to act even when your consciousness tries to tell it to do things the new way. Switching to Halo 3's default was bad enough for you, but at least it only switched action/reload from X to RB. Everything else was left the same. But now hardly anything was untouched, and tens if not thousands of Halo fans are struggling to adapt. Some adapt quickly, while others simply fail to adapt because they quite literally can't adapt, at least not in a reasonable amount of time (recall the guy who took a year to learn how to ride a bike with reversed controls, i.e., right is left and left is right). Do you just say "Tough luck," "Thems the breaks," or "Deal with it" to that latter group, because after all "It's just a game, right?"

Well, no. It's a consumer product, one that I already invested money in. If it doesn't function how I've come to expect it to function, and the maker decides "Well, the new way is better. Just adapt to it" and not even telling about these changes until after the fact (we had very little Forge information prior to Halo 5's launch, and nobody said anything about the controls being overhauled), well, I have the right to stop being a customer. And 343i has repeatedly made a bunch of decisions (and sometimes outright blunders) that make me question whether they deserve any future business from me, and they've uniquely made me feel regret for buying a game from them, something no other developer or publisher has succeeding in doing. Halo's been a big part of my hobby for the past 14+ years, but it's moving in a direction I don't care for.

343i deciding to continue the practice of there being only one control layout for Forge, but then deciding to change the entire layout (because somebody though it was "better") without regard to what anybody else might think or what difficulties certain players might have is the latest thing they've done to draw my ire. Had I known about all of this in advance, I probably would have just rented or borrowed Halo 5 to play the campaign. I don't even feel any compulsion to hop online and play matchmaking anymore, whereas with Halo 2, 3, and Reach I got online almost daily. At this point, the only thing that's keeping my from just selling off my XBO to recoup some money is the MCC, which despite some remaining aggravations is appealing enough in its own right to keep playing; it just took several month before it got to the point where it didn't make me feel like I regretted my purchase. In fact, if I could go back in time to November of 2014, I would tell my past self to save his money and not even bother buying an Xbox One in the first place. At the very least, I am absolutely not going to be buying Halo 6, at least not at launch. 343i has managed to kill the last remaining interest I have in the future of the franchise.