To start off, I’m not here to flame anybody or to insult anyone’s opinion on the matter. I just want to share my reasons for why sprint isn’t a completely bad thing for Halo.
Like many have said, there never has been much of a counter argument that’s in favor of sprint. The reason for this is because you are all mostly right about it. For 4v4 on small maps, sprint just really isn’t necessary. It doesn’t completely break 4v4 Slayer, but it doesn’t work perfectly for it either. If Halo was purely an arena shooter, then I would agree that adding sprint would just be a gimmick, creating more problems than it’s really worth.
But Halo isn’t just an arena shooter. There is so much more to these games. The game can’t just be completely designed around one of its many gameplay experiences. It has to find a healthy balance that will work in the entire game. You have to consider the whole package. We all can agree on that, right? Campaign and Big Team Battle are what I’m talking about mostly here. There is no problem at all with being able to sprint in Campaign which is an enormous chunk of what Halo has to offer. Sprint does nothing but enrich the Campaign experience. There is no problem with sprinting in BTB either. Who wants to jog across huge maps? Adding in vehicles helps, but it doesn’t solve the main problem. In Halo you move slow as balls. That’s a serious problem when you have huge maps, especially in this day and age.
Sprint got the nerf bat and it helps, no longer can players run around like chickens with their head cut off, with no real punishment. It’s still not perfect for 4v4, but it works. People are enjoying it and it helps improve the other modes. A lot of people say that sprint isn’t actually getting you anywhere faster. I don’t think this is necessarily true. Sure, maps grow to compensate but I’m still choosing when I need that boost of speed to make it to cover in time. I’m not saying that the travel time across maps is faster. I’m saying that it adds intensity to the game when I want to get to a specific thing (turret, vehicle, player to assassinate, flag, oddball skull).
Instead of jogging away from gunfire only to be killed because I couldn’t make it back to cover in time, I can sprint to said cover. Even if the end result is the same and I still die, it feels like I had more power to do something about it. There were more variables to the situation. It made the game more complex. I’m not saying complex = automatically better. But I am saying that it made the game less predictable. Not more random, less predictable.
In old Halo, gameplay feels very predictable. If you just saw someone at the sniper tower, chances are that he’ll still be around for your team to kill him by the time you get there. In Halo 5 if you see someone in a room, he could be completely gone in multiple ways by the time you get there. He could have clambered up a ledge or sprinted and thrustered out of a window. Maybe he just walked out the front door? Did he sprint out or walk out? The difference is huge and creates more variables. The game takes longer to stagnate and becomes harder to guess. There’s more for you to think about in encounters. In old Halo you know someone has to have taken a predictable path like a staircase or a door. He only moves at one speed so predicting his location becomes an easier task. The only real way he can surprise you is if he’s crouched somewhere waiting to ambush you. Does predicting a player take skill? Maybe, but I’d be more willing to bet that all it takes is experience, not necessarily your skill at the game.
So what do people think? Is this a counter argument that can be taken seriously by the anti-sprint crowd? Let me know what you guys think and please be civil.
We’re all fans here. Thanks for reading!