Quote Originally Posted by Cazero View Post
And if the rest of the opposition reacted to gunshots, you would be forced into rushed alpha strikes to kill as many enemies as possible before they can regroup then get back into overwatch crawl to thin down the pods remaining on engagement.

So IMO the pods mechanics don't contribute to that problem. Quite the opposite actualy, since it artificialy splits engagements into chunks that are manageable even when rushing towards a time sensitive objective.
Quite apart from the way the game is "balanced" around the pod mechanics instead of just dropping a certain number of enemies in, a podless system would allow you to try to take on enemies individually, or try to funnel them into a killzone, or just cover the obvious chokepoints. The sort of thing you could do in the original games.