Well it is not the SAME functionally. There is an ovious transition animation and the BR uses a red dot.
This is false, the zoomed in BR does not use a red dot. I took screencap comparisons of the zoomed vs unzoomed view and the reticule remains completely static and identical. Cosmetically it's a red dot sight, but functionally it's no different than the previous scoping method.
And from what I can see, the transistion to ADS is pretty god damn fast, if not just as fast as the zooming animation of previous games, but since the reticule is static it doesn't stop you from shooting or affect your accuracy like ADS in other games.
So given that we also know:
- no penalty to hipfire
- no movement speed penalty
- no flinch
- descoping is back
it's starting to look more and more like it's simply a cosmetic change to traditional Halo zoom. I know a lot people won't like how much screen real estate it takes up, but previous Halo games also obscured your peripheral vision when zooming, that's the penalty for increased range.
As for decreasing the zoom length on the BR, I'd wager that they did it to justify the DMR as the long range precision rifle in the sandbox, but we'll see.
At first glance I was as worried as the rest of you, but I'm personally more worried about ground pounds and shoulder tackles at this point. And I totally get the outcry too, after the radical changes in Halo 4 and 343s other questionable decisions I think it's more than fair to have reservations about Halo 5.
