OK. Let me get this off my chest.

I don't have an XBox One. I stated earlier that the console doesn't have enough games that capture my interest, and Halo 5 isn't a console-seller. I watched the campaign on Youtube. Hunted down a LPer who had the good sense to keep his yap shut during the important story bits. Watched all the cutscenes. Watched them again. You'll notice that my criticisms of Halo 5's gameplay, be it weapons, levels, and enemies, have been few and far between. When I do talk about the Prometheans and their weapons, it's on the conceptual level. When I talk about the Battle Rifle's firing mode, I am drawing on my experience with precision weapons in Halo 4 and Halo: Reach.

When I first got interested in Halo, I didn't have an Xbox. For five years, from 2005 to 2010 when I bought Reach and a console, all I had was a bootleg copy of Halo PC and the books I'd bought or borrowed from the local library. I didn't even have Youtube because I was on 56k dialup. Heck, just to confirm a minor detail in a fanfic I was writing, I had to read Halo Nation's Halo 3 article beginning to end, and then sift through a bunch of campaign pages. That wasn't enough, so I had to message a friend and ask for details. I could get that same detail today by dinking around on Youtube for two minutes.

Back then, what little access I had to the Halo franchise was enough to make me fall in love with it. Watching Halo 5 on Youtube is enough to tell me that 343i fucked up.