Just got to watching the Warzone ViDoc and 15 minute match. Some impressions:
1. The way Personal Ordnance is handled looks to be better in this, but the fact that you can change your requisition on respawn leads me to believe you could just spawn in with your Personal Ordnance without a Req Zone, which I don't like.
2. The textures / art style look to be a lot cleaner, overall. I think switching the texture finishes to matte on a lot of the objects and generally reducing reflections / glossiness as part of handling so many variables in War Zone is a part of it, but it looks like they deliberately designed the gametype around the limitations of the engine, rather than trying to push it for all it's got, like with Halo 4 and the 360.
3. Bro Banter seems to be reduced in frequency, but the actual quips don't seem any more efficient. I still heard a couple "hey, Spartan!," "sorry," "watch your nade spam!," etc. messages.
4. I guess after Palmer botched capturing Halsey she's relegated to choreographing / announcing stuff for the Infinity sims? (War Zone is just a simulation, btw. No further attempt at contextualizing their universe was made, thankfully)
5. The Knight Warden(?) boss class is a whole new breed of bullet sponge - it looks to have taken at least five or six volleys of Mantis missile fire on top of sustained chaingun fire. Thankfully it seems to have some visual indicators that it's a separate rank outside of the actual boss icon, at least.
6. The Mantis looks to be buffed, even more so - shielding appears to recharge faster, it has a faster movement speed (or the frequency of its pacing was ramped up), it looks like the stomp overall takes the same amount of time but comes out quicker (resulting in a slightly longer cooldown animation), and the full missile volley can be charged more quickly.
7. Spartans were panting and grunting way too much. Reducing it to the tail end of your sprinting, falls that actually take damage, and taking near-lethal damage without shields should be the only times they do it, imo. Bumping into teammates in the base at the opening sounded like a casting couch.
8. ADS on Carbine looks absolutely ridiculous in a bad way - traditional scope needs to come back with it. The new ammo indicator on what used to be the scope looks awful, too - it's just a pentagon of five little hologram things that diminishes as you fire, rather than the "diminishing bar" effect.
9. ADS on the SAW looks horrible and distracting - on top of the labyrinth of super hi-tech "zoom lines" around the crosshairs, someone thought it was a good idea to throw a crapton more dead center of your screen and gaussian blur them. And they aren't even in your peripherals, they're actually taking up screen real estate! And they shake around as your SAW recoils! It seems insanely obstructive.
10. Relegating vehicle spawns to the garage / bases seems fine provided that's the only place they can spawn, mind you.
11. New Sniper ADS is a massive improvement over the old one, but I still don't see why they're so adamant about completely blocking out your peripheral vision while using them. Just reducing the opacity would be fine.
12. Thankfully Req cards appear to be exclusive to big team / War Zone and not Arena, but it is possible to unlock cosmetics for Arena. I really, really hope they don't mean weapon skins, because some of the random bullshit like the steampunk weapons completely throw the visual identity of the weapons out the window.
Also, lol at the Legendary Limited Bad Kid Edition having two statues and being a $150 difference in price because of a single large statue.