The movement is decidedly more along the lines of Advanced Warfare and even Titanfall and Destiny to some extent. The Spartans now seem so zippy, light, and floaty. It just doesn't seem like Halo-style movement. Sure, players could start with jetpacks in Halo: Reach as well as thruster packs in Halo 4, but those weren't built in and could even be disabled. But this doesn't just have a built-in thruster pack. It also has ground pounding, manteling, and sliding to boot. It's like 343i decided to remove all the COD-style features found in Halo 4 (custom loadouts and the Skinner box unlock system), only to add other mechanics straight out of COD and other shooters. While Halo 5's movement most closely resembles Advanced Warfare and its exo suit, ledge grabbing in FPSs has been done as far back as Crysis 2 (Mirror's Edge had it as well, but it wasn't a conventional FPS), sliding apparently started appearing in shooters in Vanquish (though Mirror's Edge had it too) and has since spread to Crysis, Killzone, COD (since Ghosts), and Destiny, among others, and both COD:AW and Destiny have ground-pound attacks. Halo 5 seems like it's just trying to ape all the other "innovations" in play movement over the past four years of the FPS genre. But merely copying what everyone else is doing isn't innovation. It's merely making things more same-y.

Next, there's the chatty dudebro Spartans. So maybe having in-game voiceovers conveying important information may have practical value to those without headsets, but generally the chatter is just noise, hand-holding, and back-patting. Surely visual indicators would be sufficient, would they not. Also, the overall attitude of the Spartans makes them seem more like swaggering athletes rather than professional soldiers. They seem less like Spartans and more like overly macho "behold my alpha-as-fuck badassitude" types. It's bad enough that e-sports is informing much of the game's design, but does it also have to have the stereotypical jock-ish frat boy attitude? I'm half expecting Red Team to walk out and do their little pose while wearing a backwards baseball cap, a too-tight shirt with a popped collar, and a seashell necklace. Well, maybe they're not that bad, but still.

The pseudo-ADS fortunately is no different mechanically from how aiming has always been in Halo (no movement penalty, no accuracy penalty for hip fire), but it still looks out of place in Halo, plus it's being applied to all weapons, including the AR, which was never intended to be a mid-range weapon and thus never needed a scope.

As most of you probably know by now, I'm not big on change for change's sake. Halo 5 really isn't innovative at all, but rather imitative, but still, there's some pretty fundamental changes here to the core gameplay, not to mention to the very essence, atmosphere, and attitude of Halo. If 343i was fearful of the series stagnating and wanted to chance things to keep it fresh, they're going about it the wrong way. I've made my thoughts on this matter clear before, but to reiterate, if you're going to try have combat evolve again, why not focus on things like level design in Campaign, AI and encounter design, and pushing the boundaries of what Forge is capable of as a map editor? Halo 5 just seems like it's trying to be more like everyone else, but that's not keeping things fresh. That's just exacerbating the trend of greater homogenization within game genres. It seems like there's less diversity than ever in FPSs, or at least those with a heavy focus on multiplayer.

I really hope my fears are unfounded, but given 343i's track record so far I feel I have to worry. I mean, first the ill-conceived TU for Reach, then all the visual retcons, custom loadouts, and Skinner box crap in Halo 4, then the MCC being broken, and now Halo 5 is looking to be the biggest departure from classic Halo to date. I'm already losing my patience with the MCC, which is really killing my interest in Halo in general. I really hope Halo 5 doesn't kill it off for good.