Whenever new leadership takes over a company or product, a lot of people are worried. The workers might be wary of what kind of new boss they get, the fans might worry about what kind of new product they will receive and this is something that the new power in control needs to be self aware of. Ultimately you only go scrapping and overhauling in large quantities when the company or product you are taking over is failing and in the same vein you don;t scoop water out of a sinking ship. However Halo was no sinking ship. So why so much change? If you made a list of Halo "features" in some spredsheet program you would realize most of the checkmarks are in Reach and Halo 4, because those two games have added the most "stuff" As Bungie's swan song Halo Reach had every right to try new things and be the most different Halo. As 343's first full Halo game (Lets not count CEA really) lets realize that they probably needed to be a bit more moderate when changing the formula that has worked so well for so many years. You know possibly test the water first. The "more traditional Halo" that they mentioned they scrapped was probably the thing they should have stuck with while increasing features and the features powers they had within Halo. Which if you notice Halo 4 has less technical features than Reach and Halo 3. For example things that come right to mind are Halo 4 scrapped campaign scoring, skull effects, campaign timing for speedrunners, campaign theater, and a visible ranking system which every Halo with XBL has had.
As another person already mentioned if you look at the games MP population you notice the sharp decline of players. Some decline is expected but you now have the game peaking at 30K. Many times if you are on at night its very very low. Last night while I was playing it hit 6K. This effects my experience through playlist search times and quality of the matchup I receive. As a knowledgeable semi-skilled Halo player the chance of me and my friends getting a quality game is very very low. We usually are just trying to see at that point how much we can beat the enemy team by, not IF we can. This leads to some very non-challenging games without a true ranking system. Alright stealth brag over. The reason is because this game has introduced elements of CoD, and this cannot be denied. Instant Respawn, More one-shot overpowered weapons to reduce the importance of Halo's Shield/Health player dynamic, Personal and Global Ordnance to introduce more randomness and take the focus off map control as traditional Halos have always rewarded map control. These things are inherent beauty spots of the game that have been removed to pander to the masses to get CoD sales. That may have worked looking at the sales figures and I will never mention Halo 4 was a failure as a product, not even as a game. It was a good game, just not a good Halo!
Now lets talk about change. Change is inevitable, in life there are factors that you cannot control. Death, the rising taxes, your gut getting larger with every night gaming session you know should be spent on the elliptical. However the gaming world is different, its a magical world where programmers can control every little knob and lever of the world we play in. You technically could release Halo 2 and just cross out the title and put Halo 3 and re-release it. While Madden adds new features, the core game is still football a game that hasn't changed in forever besides a small number of rule changes. So every year a new one releases and every year players buy the game for the new player changes, the graphical enhancements, and possibly a new feature or two. Or you have CoD, a game that's stayed sort of true to its core gameplay besides the CoD4 to MW shift, and even Blops tries to alleviate that gap. Halo has done nothing to alleviate the changes it makes, they try and shoehorn a classic mode in Reach and Halo 4 and always fall sort of flat. Mainly because the core is so warped and changed you cant set options to make it feel like the past Halo's.
They constantly talk about how to make Halo more accessible to players and new players. This ends up catering to the masses of casual players who will play Halo for awhile. They will play through the campaign maybe once or twice, play through it with friends maybe once or twice, and maybe play through it a year or two later before the next game comes out so they can remember more about the game. They will step into MP for an average of 24.5 games* (*this number is completely made up) and then they will stop after winning 20% of their games and never care to notice the intricacies of everything they've just played. Then they will say oh yea "that game was fun". Meanwhile you have hardcore players playing a game that wasnt designed with their needs in mind, and these players now probably make up a much higher percentage of the people who are still on your game night after night. The CoD players left the week after Halo 4 was released when Blops II came out, you can even see the sharp decline of players right after Blops release on the Halo population charts. You can see the Christmas spike that lasted a week and you can see other small bumps that are mostly weekend and DLC bumps, but besides these bumps its been a game of pure decline.
Another note now that players can choose loadouts with perks, AA's, and everything that is locked behind unlocks. You actually have to grind to level up and unlock gameplay altering abilities. This means a kid at SR-130 the highest experience ranking has every ability unlocked in multiple loadouts. You can switch loadouts throughout a game. So this person essentially has more things available to him in game than a player who just started does. Gameplay altering abilities should never be in Halo. The only thing keeping a player from beating another player is his knowledge and skill. If a kid comes home and gets to play eight hours of Halo 4 all week and I have to be at work come home make dinner and put the kids in bed and then I finally get two hours to sit down at night and play I shouldn't be penalized before I even pick up that controller. Unlocking of items needs to be purely aesthetic.
Also maps, because of the fact players can have two mobile AA's at once. Sprint is now default and then you can have say jetpack, you now have much more mobility and abilities all at once. This is too much. It makes larger maps feel smaller so Halo now has to have all these large maps, and what small maps are there Haven and Abandon? Then they released the first DLC which was once again all large maps!? Really!? Give us some arena maps like Halo has always had! Halo has always been about sort of knowing what your enemy can do and predicting and analysing what hes going to do based on that essential assumption. You no longer can do that though because there are so many abilities and variables players can have and you never know if they just got some random ordnance drop that gave them a sniper that can one shot even if they hit your body? Really!?, you are more playing rock paper scissors guessing what he has against what you chose at spawn. Nobody wants their gameplay that close to a gamble.
So lets stop catering to the casuals who leave because you've removed all depth and skill gap so they could play, let people learn the game figure out what works what doesnt let them evolve their skill and feel great about it, let them rank up to 50 and let them say "I am now good at Halo!" and feel proud of their accomplishment. Lets create a game with competitive players in mind. Lets release a game with a ton of smaller maps and maybe 2-3 large maps. Then your first DLC can be 2 small and 1 more large and continue in that fashion. Lets focus less on having the players fix your map problem by using Forge World and subsequently getting less than par maps into MM that effects everyone's experience when they play and more on releasing good pre-made maps from the get-go. Lets bring back campaign theater and scoring for communities like High Speed Halo. Lets get this game back into MLG so people can watch tournaments and play Halo professionally again. Lets have a HaloTV feature where when we dont want to play we can stop in and watch preloaded files of good games recently played, lets be able to chat about it too, lets be able to stream to JTV or Youtube from within the game. Let us remember that you can keep a game true to its roots and have great sales like Madden. Halo 2014, The next great Halo, HALO game, not CoD. Halo.
Also Hiring that Juices would be a great idea.