I'm so going to get evicerated for this, but here goes. I'll be honest that I was really, really late to online multiplayer gaming even though I've been gaming since the Atari 2600 days. I think my first experience with competitive online MP was Unreal Tournament in college that the PC gamers next door in my quad installed on my school PC back then. Having never played a shooter with a mouse and keyboard before it was ugly. Fast forward to Halo 3 for the 360. This was my first console online shooter experience. Call it a bad first impression or that it was my first online shooter, but no matter how hard I tried to get better I felt like the MP was impenetrable. I felt like I was playing against MLG guys who knew respawn rates for power weapons down to the milisecond even in social, unranked playlists.
Now with Reach I actually started to get okay at Halo and had fun, but the whole power weapon memorization and camping thing was still there for casual players like myself.
Do you think the solution they came to, Global Ordnance, really fixes that issue without disrupting the fundamentals of what Halo MP was before, though?
Personally, I don't think so. As a player who doesn't memorize weapon spawns and timers, what would you think of the system Gears 3 has, where before a match starts a map overlay comes up with the locations of each weapon spawn location? If you'd like, add in a HUD waypoint when the weapon spawns in to notify everyone it's in play. As a hardcore veteran player, I feel like this would be a decent compromise of allowing the classic Halo map pace to exist while giving newer players the information they need.
As for the rest of that post, I don't think anyone is against making changes around the edges to help new players out. I think it's always been a mistake that Halo hasn't ever had a true tutorial for the multiplayer, which is baffling considering the H4 MP team was trying to make
"Halo for Everyone." But I also don't think that fundamentally changing the core design to make it more accessible (ex: gametype design in H4) makes for long-term success, because I have a feeling that those players weren't going to stick around anyway.
Also, I hear people bemoan the loss of firefight, but, am I crazy, or is Spartan Ops essentially firefight with objectives?
Spartan Ops has zero customization options, is often the victim of Halo 4's relatively poor AI (hello, Elites standing there doing nothing while you blast them in the face), and has some of the worst encounter design in the entire series. Putting it on Normal and blasting through the enemies is dumb fun because you can overcome the stupidity of every other enemy spawn wave being what was essentially a Boss Wave from ODST Firefight, but it's a pretty poor replacement. Which is a shame, because the initial idea they had for it, which was basically a series of randomized objectives in a Firefight setting, sounds like it would have been way better than the set, unchanging mode we have now.