Whenever a thread like this pops up, people focus on the obvious. Remove advanced movement and "fix" the TTK (into whatever direction) and voilà, Halo is great again.
I don´t believe that the obvious things are even remotely as important as they seem to be at first glance, and i am saying that as someone who is not a fan of sprinting personally.
Halo needs more of the bold parts:
Can we have a functioning harpoon on the warthog or some use of the tether for some cool hijinks. I think the warthog needs improved with another function with cool sandbox possibilities. I mean come on, wire to a tree, incoming elites on ghosts. Can I tether to a rock then reverse off the cliff for a better scenic view then rock the physics to swing the warthog across the cliff to reach that hidden skull then wind up back up the cliff only for a glitch to bounce me a mile in the sky seeing that glorious Halo landscape way below.
1. Get rid of the useless armor/weapon/design clutter
2. Revisit what made Halo campaigns feel epic, yet charming and funny at the same time
3. Bigger and more dynamic physics sandbox
4. Innovation (smarter AI, open and large battles, player freedom, ambience)
Those are the four main things I feel the franchise needs.
- Return of fun to 4v4. I love halo 5's drive to make something for the competitive crowd (even if they didn't quite get there). I definitely believe that there doesnt have to be a competitive vs casual design conflict; a game built to be competitively viable should absolutely be something that casual players can play and have fun with. buuuut, halo 5's 4v4 mp left out a lot of the fun that halo fans look for. i want infinite to have really great competitive maps and modes. sweaty as fuck ranked playlists that reflect what the pros are playing. but i also want unranked that in addition to the ranked list also has "less competitive" maps, weapon/vehicle sets, and gamemodes. i want to play on larger, open, 4v4 1-flag ctf (or 1 bomb) maps with warthogs and/or ghosts. i want to play ricochet. i want to shoot down a banshee and have its flaming wreckage smash into me.
- With my #1, we need (and i 100% expect at some point) a match composer. while i want to play 4v4 maps with vehicles and i love many objective game modes, not everyone else would. we should have the ability to fine tune from the wealth of what halo is to us and play only that. i NEVER want to play griffball again.
- Return of the silly and creative physics. give me less realistic but infinitely more fun and interesting physics of old. i want to be able to flip warthogs with well placed grenades. i want to splatter fools with parking cones. let me get killed by the guardians. i also want to again spend hours flipping warthogs 100s of feet into the air "just for fun" or to reach new places (perhaps the warthog could be indestructible again?).
- A return of the sense of wonder and exploration to single player. i want the world to once again be featured in the game to where its almost a character unto itself. Let it be mysterious and new. have it make the player generate their own questions and mysteries and DONT GIVE THOSE ANSWERS AWAY (at least early on or easily). i want large open environments as well as believable interior spaces that may (or may not!) feel more cramped. the old bungie halos, especially ce and 3, really nailed this and its been lost along the way. i love halo 5's multiple path design, and its level design in general, but it still felt like a linear path only with options - a far cry from how it feels to play CE. Along the same lines (but not its own number since this is already 4!) the sp vehicle sections too need to feel more natural and less game designy. let me feel like a vehicle is an option again. let me have opportunities to creatively steal them or discover them to radically change level strategies. dont plop me down in front of a tank and ask me to drive through large corridors ever again.
Thats a lot of really important "returns" to what made halo halo to me.
While the moment to moment gameplay sure is very important, i don´t think that Halo 5 was lacking that. The whole package was flawed, from the campaign structure to the multiplayers focus on e-sports. I especially agree with the quoted posters regarding physics. Make this shit fun to use, the harpoon/tether idea sounds really great.
The Halo of 2001 has been gone for nearly 20 years now. Its a fantastic game still, but Halo back in it´s day was not popular because it played like Wolfenstein 3d but rather because it did new and interesting things for it´s time. I believe that Halo Infinite needs more than one interesting and "spicy" element to make it popular, and not sprint/no sprint. Shooters are gigantic on consoles now, and the competition has long surpassed Halo in popularity.
Halo needs to be put back on the map AGAIN (because it´s simply not important anymore when it comes to player numbers), and that can only be achieved by doing unexpected and new things, not by heating up old ideas while resisting to change them.