Say as you want, the Halo 2 cliffhanger from a horrible dev cycle at least gave a proper sense of adventure leading up to the next game. Halo 3 finished things properly, but at least gave you enough questions amidst the closure to keep thinking. ODST expanded what we knew while still giving us more questions to think about. Reach was tightly packaged as a finished piece when you look at it from an action perspective, but visually there were plenty of things to keep you wondering how deep the rabbit hole went (dead spartans in last mission for example).

I was worried there for a bit that there'd be some sort of stupid cliffhanger or something leading up to Halo 5 for rabid fanboys to drool over and continue to talk about how awesome 343i is. Can't say I'm a fan of introspective character development in video games. That shit is usually left to books for a reason. Yeah, they dumbed it down to MC looking out a window, but they're going to catapult with it in Halo 5. 343 weren't kidding when they said they wanted a story with the chief and not a story where the chief is in it. Seems like it's a linear first person mass effect to me. As for the "boss fight" there, I think it's funny that the big scary boss snuck up on the MC by floating down when the MC has a motion tracker that would be able to detect that. 343i is retconning old stable lore while ignoring the shit they keep and make use of. This is probably the worst case of, "hurry [player character], we've got to [go push that button to save the day]," syndrome I've ever seen.