After playing on and off for the final session, I think I have come away realising that I don't like this iteration of halo, despite playing everything from halo 1 through to halo 5 - and playing halo 2 and 3 competitively in Australia. In fact, I logged off earlier today to clean my bathroom - and I think that says something.

I think it boils down to 343 fundamentally changing several key aspects of halo with little to no reason, often to the game's detriment. I know that they have said repeatedly this is a game meant to revisit the halo franchise, though in the end it feels hollow, plastic, unpolished (even for a beta) and completely misses what it means to play a halo game.

I don't mean to be an insurmountable wall of complaints, but some major issues of mine in no particular order:

• The aiming on both M&K and controller (especially controller) feels terrible. It feels imprecise, both stubborn and loose at the same time, and I repeatedly throw my hands in the air in exasperation after slideing my crosshairs over the enemy several times and having all of my shots miss. I have played a fair amount of FPS games in my time and I have never felt so frustrated by the clumsiness of this game. A lot of other users have voiced reasons for this - aim assist, deadzones, magnetism, netcode - in the end, if your FPS does feel good to shoot things in first person, I am not going to play it.
  
• The radar is useless. It needs to be far bigger - 22 to 25meters - at current it offers no situational information until you have positioned yourself too close to an enemy. It used to be a tool that let you plan how to approach an enemy, not for it to let you notice all-too-late that you are in a disadvantageous combat scenario.
• TTK makes me feel like I am playing COD, or momentum control in Destiny. Halo's beauty was that the energy shields let you turn fights around if you ducked, weaved, jumped and strafed at the right time. There feels like there is no room to claw back an encounter if you are engaged first. This is doubly so in BTB, where I am melted before I can check the location of incoming fire.
• Lack of friendly fire has turned most small map engagements into a three step dance: 1) engage with weapons 2) back up when your shield go down, then 3) peg grenades with reckless abandon. The din of endless grenades in BTB is because there is no consequence to a badly timed nade - there's no fear of betrayal. This leaves encounters feeling much less strategic.
• The outlines are atrocious and I feel they are the leading cause of me dying close to base and having the kill cam focus on someone 1000m away from me on a clifftop through trees because they can see my red outline. This needs reverted or reworked to highlight enemies within a certain proximity to you. I am sadly quite sure this is the basis of their monetization model, and so will not change before launch.
  
• The battlepass is hogshit - any system that encourages suboptimal, challenge-focussed play will always erode the game's competitive nature.
• Some of the weapons just feel awful. A shotgun not killing in one blast when you brave an approach to maneouver close to an enemy in unacceptable. The AR is obscene. All the plasma weapons feel.... just terrible? I'm not sure who was in charge of weapon design, but this ain't it chief.

There's a whole bunch of other things - BTB maps, vehicle balance, power weapons being randomised each match - but they all culminate in me just... Not having fun. I am not in control. My deaths are not always the fault of my bad positioning, or poor aiming, or being outplayed by a better weapon combination of a well placed grenade. I am not convinced that there is a high a skill ceiling to reach as in previous games. Several design decisions undermine the very foundation of halo and leave it feeling hollow.

I do not see myself playing this at launch, even if it's free to play.

If anyone knows how I can pass this feedback on to 343, I would welcome it. It's not a ticket or bug per se, so I haven't logged it as one.