Ascension was played along the outskirts and from tower to tower. Due to the lack of movement, your best option was on the rim of the map. And the rim had short sight lines to accommodate the movement. Snowbound was fought mainly underground due to the same reasons. I could go on.
Ascension gave you the option to move slowly around the edges of the map in cover or cross faster across the dish at the risk of being exposed. This is the so often lauded "risk vs. reward" system used to defend sprint, and it was achieved purely by map design, without butchering the core mechanics.
Snowbound had the overshield and camo spawn outside the maps, encouraging/forcing the player to go outside or lose an advantage. Weapons spawned usually where they weren't useful, such as the beam rifle spawning
inside the base but the plasma pistol or needler spawning
on top. So you had to go outside either to get the weapons that were effective inside, or stay outside to make the most use of the weapons you
got inside.
I can also go on, if you want to go on.
The skill gap is huge. It's the highest skill gap a Halo has had.
No. No, it's really,
really not. The difference between an intermediate player and a high-rank player is
very small due to all the tools that are set in place by the game for you to suck less. Sprint, clamber, Autoaim, Bullet Magnetism, etc. I'm not saying the gap is the
smallest it has been in the franchise, but it's
definitely in the lower half. Maybe only undermined by Halo 4, because of the killstreaks and the resulting snowball effect during matches. The
highest skill gap, however, is still in Halo CE, arguably Halo 2 if you include all the button combos.
The skill floor of any Halo is understanding the basics.
Correct.
H5G has
more basics than previous games, with the addition of new mechanics (and I'm not just talking movement, but also Ground Pound, ADS, etc.) so there is more to learn, so there is a higher skill floor.
The original Halo games were "easy to learn, hard to master". H5G, however, is "hard to learn, slightly harder to master".
And no, I'm not just talking from me sucking at the game. There is a
huge amount of users complaining online, including right here in these forums, about the game being "too sweaty".
Really, you think the movement or skill jumps in Halo 5 are not challenging. That's fine, were they ever a challenge in old games. We had crouch jumping being the main one and then what. Knowing which ledges we can magically stand on to get to places. That is not difficult either. The movement at a base level in Halo 5 is not challenging but the skill jumps are, some are really hard and others are decent.
The jumps
themselves were not challenging in the original trilogy. The challenge came from learning to do them, say, backwards, while still fighting the enemy. That is also a difference between skill floor and skill ceiling. H5G hardly has any jumps that can be done without clamber, so there is no skill to be learned here, because A) clamber is an inherently forgiving mechanic and B) you're forced to face the wall to do them, disrupting combat and thus even
removing a skill that was present in previous games.
Just because you don't have your gun up does not make it a separate mode.
Fine, call it "movement phase" and "combat phase" if you want to. It doesn't change the fact that the gameplay is now fractured into two distinct pieces that originally accompanied one another.
It works as a Halo game
No, it doesn't. Halo games are built around Run'n'Gun. Recent titles don't
have Run'n'Gun. That has nothing to do with me liking it or not.
I also don't like sprint in other games, such as CoD, but it fits into those game because everything is balanced in such a way to supplement everything else. Case in point, TTK is so low that sprinting in the wrong situation leaves you
dead. The last few "Halo" games, however, were still balanced similarly to the series roots but now have (a) mechanic(s) that completely undermine(s) the concept. You may not like the videos posted, which - admittedly - were making fun of the mechanic, but they are still factually correct: It is
ridiculously easy to run away in "modern Halo", even
after desprint was added, thanks to stuff such as thrusters, clamber and let's not forget sprint now being literally
infinite.
Vice versa, I
do like SWAT (preferrably without sprint). But I would never argue for it to be the basis of Halo games, because removing the shields across the board would completely alter the gameplay, as it does, well, in SWAT. It's fine for one or two modes but it has no buisness being in, say, BTB or even campaign.
