Is Halo an Arena FPS?

There has been a lot of debate on this, and I know you guys are more so PC guys, but I'm sure you've played some Halo back in the day.

So what do you think? Is halo and arena fps? (Excluding Halo 4, including Halo 5) I believe it is to a point anyway.

I'd say yes, but it's definitely the one I like the least.

Halo has always felt really bland to me, both in single and multiplayer.

You're an arena FPS.

Also yes.

Halo CE was the closest to the classic Arena model, expect it reversed two main mechanics. Arena shooters typically spawn you with a weak weapon, but gives you fast movement speed that allows you to travel the map and acquire armor, health, and power weapons.

Halo CE reversed this by spawning you with essentially the best overall weapon in the game, but made it difficult to use and balanced the sandbox so although the pistol is the greatest, it's always beat by another weapon in various ranges. It also gave you a very slow movement speed, but allowed you to acquire weapons very very quickly just like quake by allowing weapons to be grenaded to you from multiple points on each map.

The rest of the series is a bit clouded, but I consider 2 and 3 to be a form of an arena shooter, but not great ones. I had tons of fun playing them but they have plenty of bad mechanics for competitive play.

If you're looking for an incredibly deep game, look into Halo CE 2v2's. it's the hardest and most competitive form of Halo still to this date.

May I ask why you believe so? Personally Ive always loved it, it's singleplayer (excluding probably 3 and Reach) has fun gameplay and a good story, in fact Halo 4 had the best story within the singsingleplayer in my opinion.

And the multiplayer has always been a fun mix of arena shooter and modern fps. The only exception being Halo 4 and sort of Reach due to them both having classes and eespecially 4 because of the lack of power weapons being picks up over the map.

May I ask of you've tried out the Halo 5 beta? It's reduced the skill gap in some areasn, but overall I feel it really brings back the old team based play that the original trilogy had with the removal of classes and addition of power weapons again, it is a bit more fast paced however with sprint and the new dodge ability.

I do have some negatives though, mainly the laggy and uninformative kill cam, as well as the ground pound and oodd thruster punch thing

I consider myself a Halo elitist which is a bad thing, but not one of those who goes around putting down the series but more so trying to convince others about the older games and why I feel they're better.

I have not tried the beta, I saw plenty of it and was turned off. I know I should probably give it a chance but there are too many things I dislike about it that have become key components of Halos new formula. No matter how the developers balance sprint, it's terrible for Halo. It doesn't work, it's defensive, not offensive, and has no role in an arena shooter. When you add on all the other stuff like the clamber, ground pound, Aiming down sites etc it just looks terrible. The thrusters are pretty decent, but I feel should be re-worked a bit as well. I've seen tons of videos of people caught in 1v1 sprint, chasing battles set to the benny hill theme.. players should be punished but instead are given multiple options to escape.

Now if I wasn't so negative, I'd probably talk a lot about how they seemed to tone down the auto-aim, and aim assist in the game, although I still notice a good level of magnetism. That should help increase the shooting skill gap, which was honestly always a minimum part of competitive Halo.

I think this could have been a pretty good shooter if it wasn't Halo, which is no longer is but to me it seems like a CoD/Halo/Destiny hybrid that has an identity crisis. It's just like the Shadowrun FPS. AMAZING GAME! Horrible tribute to shadowrun.

There's a real good write-up I could look for if you're interested. It showcase how sprint severely slows down the pace of the game, while creating an illusion that the game is "faster paced".

I agree with you to a point, but I promise you in gameplay it is near impossible to make a run for it as often whenever you'd think of running due to low health you have no more shields, when you have no more shields it is basically a one hit kill from any weapon. Even in 4v4 gameplay you'll almost always have that one guy that pops up and one hits you.

Now does this mean I enjoy sprint? Not exactly, though i don't exactly think it does as much harm as people believe.

Lastly I DEFINITELY don't feel thst Hali has become CoD, Halo 4 was iffy, but what I've played in the three weeks of the beta it is tons of fun and much more to the roots of Halo or really... Arena style gameplay, if not a little different.

But don't get me wrong, I can completely respect your opinion and can also understand why you believe what you do. I'm just pretty open minded and feel the game still has some of the core elements that made Halo "halo" to me. One of the biggest things being the push on team based gameplay as apposed to a team of lone wolves like today's tactical shooter genre.

Edit: Please excuse any errors, at the moment I only have access to my phone.

In fact @teapot I feel I must give a few examples of sprint being used offensively (normally when used in combination with the dash ability to get large forward jumps)

I'll try to record some gameplay of me playing, now Im not the best player by far, I'm silver league at least.

(Halo 5 finally gives halo a skill based ranking system again)

I'll see if I can keep my part short, because two posts I'm gonna copy are long winded explanations as to how sprint negatively effects Halo in multiple areas besides movement speed. I don't like classify myself as an elitist because often they're dicks, but I tend to share the same opinions of them. Halo CE to me on a completely different level from any other Halo, and the reasons why are pretty complicated and hard to explain with out going into every detail.

I mean I can compare and contrast all these things all day long but what it basically comes down to the change in balance between individual skill and team skill. There should be a healthy balance between the two in my eyes for the game to be successful, but also because that's what Halo was to me. It was an opportunity for an individual to control the pace of a team game simply because of their skill. Halo CE's individual skill was huge, and in 2v2 gameplay it also required a **** ton of team skill and knowledge, just in a different way from later Halos. Team skill in CE is more spread out through positioning, getting your teammate good spawns (the spawn manipulation in 2v2 CE is the greatest form of spawn control in any game) and obtaining the multiple power weapons that are up constantly unlike previous games. Halo 2 comes around and puts waaaay more emphasis on team skill but in an arguably simpler way, but actually creating set-ups and teamshooting. Now despite this, I had an amazing time on Halo 2 and it was a great game. It still was a great game competitively too, it was just different. It at least contained an individual skill gap, despite heavy auto aim on the battle rifle. It allowed button glitches that empowered the individual.

So all that is fine with me. Halo 3 was the one I placed the best in and had the best opportunity to make money in. It wasn't because of how good I was, but it was because the game's skill gap had shrunk a crazy amount. Halo 3 provided almost no individual skill, and limited the players range with a shitty battle rifle. This indirectly created and forced a meta game of what we called linear aggression, which was basically holding forward and teamshooting. It was rather simple, but unfortunately the later games like Reach and 4 kept this style of Team Skill > Individual Skill which I feel has hurt the game.

I won't get into reach or 4 because those suck. Although in theory people shouldn't sprint and get away in Halo 5 because a teammate would clean them up, it still happens frequently because of the map design. It's too easy to run away when theres cover and corners everywhere. I didn't like how Reach or 4 felt like different games than Halo but Halo 5 to me is the closest form of CoD we have in the franchise. Skill jumps are gone, and everyone can climb/clamber/mantle. We have Aim Down Sites which was never ever supposed to happen, sprint, slide etc all this dumb ****. Thrusters like CoD. My biggest problem is that since Reach till Halo 5, all these ideas that people want us to "adapt" to or call "innovating" are such ****. They haven't innovated anything. They took mechanics and ideas directly from other games that they worked in and forced them into Halo without any thought, just like prometheon vision.

Here's the first post, couldn't fit it in mine.

Spoiler

Sprint is not the problem with Halo. There could absolutely be a great Halo game that allowed a player to sprint. The issue with those statements is that Halo is one of the most poorly defined terms when it comes to gaming. The Halo franchise is completely fractured and is really three different games at their core. There is Halo CE, Team BR Halo (2&3), and Halo: Abilities (Reach & 4).



Sprint merely exposes and exacerbates a problem that already existed in Halo, and that was time to kill (TTK) being doubled From CE to BR Halo and the ease of shooting shrinking the gap between perfect kill time and average kill time. Those two problems need to be expanded on before one can explain why sprint is so detrimental.



Kill times are one of the most argued and disagreed upon topics in the ever-so fractured and divided Halo community. This again stems from the hugely different entry points to the Halo franchise and which of those three Halo games the fan loves the most.



Speed of a perfect kill is one of the most important things about a Halo game. It completely dictates the pace of the entire game. Equally important is the average kill time, which is influenced primarily by difficulty. Understanding how these two work together is vital. Average kill time will be expanded on in the Rifles section, where we can examine difficulty of shooting in more detail. Essentially, you want your average kill time to be significantly higher than the perfect times. The larger the disparity between the two, the more opportunities a player has to separate himself from his opponents.



Watch Halo CE tournament footage and start looking for short to midrange encounters. Count the number of shots it takes to kill. It’s usually 6-8 or so. Now do the same thing with Halo 2. The average number of shots to kill is 5-6. That means average kill time is 100% longer in Halo CE than the perfect three shot kill, while the average kill time is roughly 30-50% longer than the perfect kill time, a four-shot. When missing shots becomes the exception AND killing takes twice as long, we are then talking about two fundamentally different games.



This in mind, let’s talk about perfect kill times, and what modifying them does to players who shoot very accurately. Lowering the perfect kill times creates a dynamic that is more about shooting and less about mitigating and minimizing damage taken, especially when the gun requires a significant amount of skill to use. This is intrinsically correlated to a person’s ability to react. The average human reaction time is about a quarter of a second. By my estimate they’d need about another half second to turn the thumbstick, aim, and start shooting back, which makes the average FPS counteraction about 0.75 seconds.



In a game with a perfect kill time of roughly 1.4-1.7 seconds, a person cannot be killed with a primary rifle without time to think and react. The brain works very well at processing information for a fight or flight response and they can make this choice near-instantly.



If they choose to engage, they can hurt the aggressor to the point he will have to retreat to recharge shields or he will most certainly lose his next encounter. If they choose to evade, the aggressor may have to chase the kill and he will always lose the element of surprise no matter what happens. Most times they will choose to evade, especially if they have an effective method of doing so, such as sprint. Slower kill times coupled with viable and effective defensive measures utterly devalues intelligent movement and the ability to get the first shot. This makes the game focused entirely on teamshooting.



When you halve the kill time via two people shooting at once, you can put someone down before they have a chance to react and evade or react and put shots on the aggressor. That is one of the reasons that teamshooting is so key in pretty much all of the Halo sequels. If you can bring back a time where a perfect kill is faster than an average person can react, you begin to reward smart play and not penalize the aggressor with being forced to chase or going into his next battle with half shields. StK figured this out very early in Halo 2’s life, they realized that two people shooting at someone killed an enemy in the same time as a perfect Halo 1 three-shot-kill. They adapted their playstyle to focus on communication and further enable teamshooting to happen more consistently. Mitigating damage taken by your team arguably became the most important thing in the game.



In a game with a perfect kill time below 1 second, you do not give a person adequate time to react. If the aggressor’s shots are perfect and unaware person doesn’t have time to react, they simply die. They are never presented with the option to engage or evade. They have no chance to run and no chance to weaken the aggressor. This creates the opposite situation. Awareness, accuracy and intelligent movement are consistently rewarded because perfect shots yield a kill without taking any damage and sometimes without even giving away the aggressor’s position. Again though, the formula only really works when the average kill time is much higher and the gun is difficult to use.



When perfects shots are something special, separation occurs more naturally. When perfect shots are commonplace, the game becomes much less interesting. You see many more of the rock, paper, scissors and checkmate scenarios that were discussed at length in Section One. Speed without difficulty does not a good Halo game make. Halo 4 has thirteen instant kill weapons (rocket, incineration cannon, fuel rod gun, sticky detonator, railgun, sniper, beam rifle, binary rifle, boltshot, shotgun, scattershot, sword and hammer). That isn’t even counting the SAW, which is the third most powerfully versatile weapon in the Halo franchise behind the Halo 4 beam rifle and the Halo 1 Pistol. It can be a very fast game, but unless you bring the primary rifles’ perfect kill times down and average kill times up, people still feel powerless.



I don’t understand how developers can look at the Call of Duty franchise, with incredibly quick kill times, destroy Halo in terms of sales and playing and they just keep making the game slower and nerfing the rifles more and more. By doing this, they are alienating the Halo crowd and definitely not attracting the Call of Duty players. In my experience, a common complaint that CoD players have about Halo is that “It's not realistic” and "I shoot people and they don't die." Halo may never be realistic, but they could do a bit more to make enemies die more quickly.



So, let’s come back to sprint. Sprint is, at its core, defensive. It gives a player who is not shooting a distinct advantage over a player who isshooting. Running away from fights in Halo CE is simply ineffective because the kill times are short and the weapons are powerful. Turning your back to your aggressor is just plain suicide the vast majority of the time.



This is not true in Team BR Halo. Team BR Halo gave people the ability to evade semi-effectively. Not so effectively that it essentially broke the game, but it gave them the ability to run away from battles that were not going in their favor. Sprint absolutely breaks Team BR Halo because it tips the balance back in the favor the person running away; the problem that already existed becomes much worse. A player can now choose to sprint away from nearly any encounter that he finds undesirable. Sprint enables players to run away from even more dire circumstances than they already did in regular Team BR Halo. Bloom made this even worse in Halo Reach. It was nearly impossible to finish kills on people who were even half-decent at evading. That dynamic was simply not good for competitive Halo because it allowed leniency for countless poor decisions. It prevented punishing poor routes and added to an already helpless feeling when shooting someone and not getting the kill. A person had to put their gun away and chase if they wanted to stay in an engagement.



I saw someone's advice for improving on the subreddit r/halo during Halo 4 and the advice was simply "always run away." I'm personally not for making a defensive play advantageous in terms of the core mechanics of the game. I honestly believe that sprint, in a game with mechanics, difficulty and kill times close to Halo CE’s, would not be a huge problem. It might not make the game better either, but it certainly wouldn’t cause the problems that it did to Team BR Halo. It’s not a huge issue in Team Snipers and SWAT in the Halo sequels. All sprint did was exacerbate a problem that already existed, which is that it give people the choice to evade a battle that was not going the way they wanted it to. So if we want to play Team BR Halo with long kill times, then yes, sprint is going to significantly hurt the game’s competitiveness and should absolutely be removed from competitive play. However, if we are willing to start really empowering the players and lengthening the gap between perfect kill time and average kill time, then sprint won’t really be a huge issue.



The current competitive Halo community may not agree with me, but I don’t want to play Team BR Halo. I want to play a game where I can put opponents down quickly and make evasion an option that is barely viable. Sprint was a serious problem in Halo Reach and Halo 4 but it only made a problem that already existed worse. If your goal is to make a game that plays like Halo 2, sure, sprint "was the problem" with Reach and 4 (along with bloom, no descope, etc). However, sprint can live nicely in Halo if you take the core mechanics back to their roots.

Here's the second post from another guy why sprint is bad for the series.

Spoiler

The very first thing that we're going to tell you is that your method of thinking is completely backwards from what needs to happen for the Halo franchise. I discussed this in the middle of a profanity-laden rant on a Bomb Planted episode when I said that the Halo series' mutliplayer is not in a state where we need to think about going forward; it is in a state where we need to think about going backward to fix the overarching problems that have nagged this series ever since the first sequel, before we even begin to think about adding new content on top of it. You're speaking about trying to create a fresh experience, but nobody at Bungie or 343 has ever communicated to us that they understand what the actual issues are that plague Halo's multiplayer and interfere with that kind of world-building attitude.



First of all, stop using gameplay elements to justify your aesthetic (or the other way around, whatever). I question the need to even employ this manner of thinking outside the campaign, as Halo's mutliplayer has always been a somewhat cartoonish side aspect compared to its single-player experience. There is no immersion in LoL's multiplayer, there is no immersion in CoD's multiplayer, because when pushed to the bleeding edge of competitive play both of these games look simply ridiculous. We're not focusing on realistic callouts from our teammates' avatars (an utterly ridiculous concept to start with), we're not focused on what our Spartan should be able to do based on lore and fair portrayal of a super soldier in the future. Let me restate this for emphasis - nobody who is trying to win at Halo cares about these things. Halo is not a simulator.



And before anyone even begins to bring this up, casual players do not matter in this discussion. The last two Halo games have seen massive dropoffs in both casual and competitive populations, so there is a global problem festering here, and no amount of spinning will distract anyone with a brain from that fact. Casual players had their shot to show just how into things they were with the broken gameplay elements of the last two installments that were presented so shamelessly fed to them with a silver spoon, and they dropped the ball. They don't get a say in this because they turned their backs to Halo just like the competitive community did. After getting the shaft for more than seven years, I think it's now our turn to get what we want.



But getting back to the problems, Halo players do not need "fresh and interesting combat options". What we need is for the developers to understand some very basic tenets about what Halo's gameplay is made of, because this is the thing that seems to be sorely lacking. Halo is a weird arena/squad mutant hybrid baby. Initially, there was no running or standing bloom. You can run at full speed zoomed in our out, there is palpable vertical access, and there are weapons on map. But then you have reloading, recharging shields, a max of two weapons, and grenades. In addition, there are some weird - but extremely important - aspects to Halo that lie somewhere in between, such as the medium running speed, the concept of a utility weapon plus the idea that you are supposed to hit the grand majority of your shots with it, and the specific resolution of kill times which lies squarely in the middle of squad-shooter-instant-death and the long, drawn out jousting matches of arena combat.



Now, let's get in depth on that for a second. Arena shooters have very extrapolated gunplay exchanges, and yet...squad shooters are the biggest culprits of camping. Do you notice how interesting that is? The mobility, the kill times, the weapon access and mechanics, these all have a multi-tiered interplay that produces results which are not necessarily the most intuitive. The point of me saying this is that Halo does not have a comfortable resting place between these two concepts. On the contrary, it sits on a very delicate fulcrum between them, where any minor adjustment can have drastic consequences for the gameplay. Take a look at Halo 2, for example. This is a game littered with problems, but the one thing that broke combat for years afterward was the lack of power that the battle rifle had compared to the pistol. It took literally more than twice as long to kill an opponent with perfect shooting, but if you were shooting someone in the back or at an unfortunate angle, you now had to blow an entire clip just to kill that one enemy. That, along with the change in map design philosophy, completely altered the way that Halo was played...for the worse, as most of us would tell you.



The only actual gameplay element that has been brought up so far is sprint. We say sprint is broken, you say that sprint enables creativity. Well, first of all, that would be true if Halo was actually a game with different classes that had incredibly distinct mobility differences, but that's not the case and never has been. Halo will never be a class shooter, no matter how much anyone tries to force it, as long as it still vaguely plays like Halo. So we're left with every Spartan awarded the ability to burn out and take off across the battlefield. As I mentioned in a post a while ago, this has many detrimental effects on gameplay:

• Sprint influences map design by pushing developers to make larger maps, which is inappropriate for Halo's core gameplay
• It creates a large area of "no man's land" on a map where nobody is actually expected to have a gunfight
• It also creates areas that are just segues into different parts of the map, e.g. the hallways on Adrift - those are not ideal fighting locations (see Chill Out for proper map-making inspiration)
• Sprint deconstructs the spawning system because players are able to get back in the battle too quickly, especially with a straight-shooting weapon like the DMR and lots of open spaces
• Sprint ruins map geometry by creating gaps that can only be traversed with sprint-powered jumps; jumping and shooting is kind of important in Halo
• Most significantly, it causes the Spartan to lower their weapon - at no point in a Halo game should a person be unable to shoot their gun unless they're holding the objective (lol, flagnum)
• It downplays the vertical aspect of Halo hugely, creating maps that are horizontally gigantic but vertically insignificant

This is probably not even the entire list of problems that sprint brings to the table. But the thing is, man...I don't even have to think that long or that hard to come up with a list of reasons why sprint is bad news for this game series. The lack of consequential logic here baffles me to no end, as does the complete absence of respect for Halo's fundamental gameplay.



Look, if you want to turn Halo into something completely different, then fine, that's your prerogative and your right as the people who have their legal fingers around the franchise. At that point, however, asking us our feelings becomes completely irrelevant. You guys know how to write Halo's programming, we know how to win tournaments. We push this game and exploit it and abuse it, and as a result we are very acquainted with all the seemingly trivial minutia and we know how things are going to play out when you've got eight people in a match who want to beat the other guys. Asking us to warm up to deviant changes in Halo's gameplay style, when they are clearly not intended to cater to us, is a fruitless endeavor. You can consider us an outlier in the grand scheme of things for selling your game, and that's fine. I would argue, first of all, that the tournament scene is the single biggest element of post-release exposure for the Halo franchise, and it had always been that way before we finally threw in the towel. But even beyond that, letting us influence the development of a Halo game (and I mean in a MEANINGFUL way) shows a very strong commitment to forging a creative product that is fundamentally sound, not just something that satisfies the shareholders.



Nobody here knows precisely how the politics work up there in 343 studios. Nobody knows who makes the real decisions, nobody knows if you've got black suits with sunglasses and earpieces peering over your shoulders, or if a bunch of corporate hacks are the ones calling the shots. We just know Halo, and you know what, we're pretty good at it. We're a valuable source of information about how to make this game function right on the bullet-to-helmet level.



I ask with as much patience as I have in me that you don't come here with the intention of calming the revolt. I want you to understand what we're saying - even and ESPECIALLY if you can't make what we want happen.


Alright let loose in this thread hopefully they will hear us if someone could also please post all the Polls for sprint that would be nice i'm terrible at forums and can't post pictures.

Halo is the closest Console players have to that sort of game, and really despite Reach-and-onward's gradual implementation of CoD-mechanics; they still feel like their own games, and the only series that's managed to stay a huge FPS franchise on consoles without devolving into a Modern-Military-Shooter-Mess of .23s TTK, hundreds of identakit guns and gritty SO REALness.

Granted, 343's take on the series doesn't fill me with any desire to play. The series always ends at 3 for me, with ODST being a neat little experiment, and Reach really just having me spend all my playtime in Forge mode.

Halo 4's sandbox was cluttered with 3 of the same weapons. Assault Rifle, Plasma Rifle, Storm Rifle, Saw, and another I'm missing. It's literally turning into what you're describing kvalheim, and is a big portion of why it's failing. Halo was one of the only shooters to remain popular despite not following that formula, well Gears kinda as well.

What was always important for Halo but is an area the developers no longer care about is the average TTK vs the perfect TTK. There should be a pretty big difference between the two. Halo CE's pistol could kill you in .6 seconds flat, which is extremely fast. That's 3 bullets, however the average mid range engagement takes 4-6 shots at least, and often more. There's waaaaaaay under a 50% perfect TTK ratio even for the best players in the game.

Almost everything that made Halo incredibly fun to me has been stripped out of the game unfortunately.

I very much disagree with this, and must say that I believe if you had tried the beta you'd finfind that with the addition of the thrusters evade ability that average ttk can be vastly different from the optimal ttk.

Also from what I experienced from the beta Halo 5 has the best weapon balance compared to any of the other Halo's (though I must admit many of the weapons assumably haven't been put in yet.)

Though this was only in the first week and last two days of the beta, as it had AR/pistol starts which make map control actually matter. (AR/BR or BR/pistol starts ruined map control and the aquisition of power weapons.)

Halo 5 might have put some features back, but Halo to me was about positioning, obtaining power weapons/power -ups while denying your opponent the same luxury. While the concept or theory might still be underlying, it has changed. Obtaining power weapons to me is ideal in CE. There are multiple weapons and power-ups that usually spawn on set cycles, and create diversity in gameplay by providing more weapons at once than there are players on your team. Halo 2's system kinda sucked and wasn't balanced imo. The weapon timers only reset once the person holding the weapon dropped it for another. It made timing practically impossible for the other team. Halo 3's was a bit better but had some issue. The rest to me pretty much desertted the importance of timing.

However the TTK is all an illusion. Did you read those sprint posts? The game feels sped up while in reality it's slowed down. Why are average times to kills higher? Is it because the utility weapons are strong but come with difficulty of use? Nope, it's because all these "advanced movement techniques" act as escape tools that prolong the outcomes of battles. Sure you can claim that sprint can be used offensively to obtain weapons, but so can walking at a higher base speed while being able to shoot. These tools allow players to escape situations that they would normally die in. That's why I can't get behind it. I've seen so many one shot people thrust behind a corner. Sprint dilutes the importance of positioning by being able to run where.

It's very very bad for a franchise to have such a high time to kill without it being due to the difficulty in aiming. When TTK are high because people are running away too easily, you get too many stalemates and games that end from the time limit. We'll have to see what the sandbox includes in Halo 5. I don't know if you disagree with Halo 4's being too cluttered, but I certainly did.

To me the best sandbox is CE's because it's so simple. Pistol, Snipes, Rockets, Shotty, Assault Rifle, Plasma Rifle all have play a major part in the game. Ask anyone who isn't into competitive game and they'll complain that the Pistol is the single greatest over-powered weapon in the history of any game. However, in reality it is very strong, but difficult to use. It loses to sniper at long situations, rockets at mid/close, shotty at close range, AR at close range, and plasma rifle at close range. Needler is useless but even Plasma pistol has as a role. It's the only game in the series where I can destroy a player who has Overshield and Rockets with simply a plasma rifle. I'm a biased elitist though, I do enjoy some of the other games it's just 2v2 CE is the deepest, craziest form of Halo.

I will consider giving Halo 5 a shot if I see upon release if I see some changes to the series but ya definitely can't blame me as a Halo fan for not being interested when I just naturally dislike games that contain sprint, aim down sites and all this other fluff on top. Thats why we're still playing 6v6 MNC private matches lol.

I need to be quick about this so I'll make a more detailed response later, but out of my whole time in the beta not one game ended because of the timer, and that's going up to 50 kills in a 4v4 match up.

Well that's definitely good. I've heard a good number of reports from others that the stalemates were very bad, especially when pro teams were scrimming. I hope you understand what I'm saying about the TTK though. I think it was outlined in those giant sprint posts.

How do you know all this!? speak heathen!

I will say though I disagree with the Sprint comments Teapot makes.
For me really, movement is a HUGE part of an FPS. Halo always felt slow - often painfully slow - but that was negated by the fact there were a lot of open vehicle areas. It feels like a game where you should be able to Rocket Jump, or at least have a somewhat faster movement speed. I'm not calling for it to be like, Titanfall levels of jetpacks and parkour, but it just wasn't fun. You get spotted by someone with a pistol or sniper, you've got no means to effectively avoid them.
Sprinting may be the laziest way of adding mobility to a game, but they're at least trying to mix things up with the mechanics - and while I think ADS is just unfitting, the way it slows you during a fall is a curious touch.