: 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.

I cannot agree with this enough.