This is basically a way to take on and dismantle all of the popular defenses for sprint in Halo. Let’s get right into it.
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It makes me run faster
Well, actually you’re not moving any faster, considering maps are built around the feature anyways. At your highest sprint speed, you’d be traversing the map at the same pace of running across a map in Halo CE. It’s not that you run faster it’s the illusion of speed. -
It’s immersive
For obvious reasons this is a stupid defense. In a multiplayer game, the gameplay is the most important part. If we really wanted to go down this stupid immersion route, shouldn’t our Spartans be able to shoot while running? They are super soldiers after all. This is an argument where it’s own existence defeats itself. Should we should also make it so Spartans can do backflips and throw gravity hammers and deflect missiles because they do that in cutscenes and in books? No, because it’s stupid and doesn’t have anything to do with balanced gameplay. -
It’s an extra layer of skill
There’s no skill involved in holding down a button, much like there isn’t with clambering onto objects. This argument honestly confuses me because what basis is there for skill? Knowing when to sprint and not to? That never factors into the actual game because the only time you won’t be sprinting is when you shoot somebody. There’s no skill involved in that. -
It keeps Halo “fresh”
Yes, that’s exactly why both the games to feature sprint had a significant population drop-off. I also seem to recall Halo 3, a game with none of these gimmicks, remaining in the top 3 for 3 years, while it was fighting off MW2, COD 4, Gears of War 2, Rainbow Six, and other shooters trying to take it’s place Don’t even begin to say there was no competition for the game when there was quite a lot of it. Secondly, why is sprint the answer to “stale” (and I use the word stale because Halo never even got it’s chance to run it’s course with the original formula before Reach completely mixed it all up) gameplay when the answer could have easily been a better forge, or faster base speed, or no more auto-aim or bullet magnetism? Why is a completely redundant feature the solution when a faster base speed would have sufficed? -
Sprint makes it harder to get kills, making it more skillfull
The reason it makes it harder to get kills is because people use it as a get out of jail free card for EVERYTHING. Because you can’t shoot with it, who’s going to use it offensively or to flank? Nobody. But you know what they will use it for? Running away. I’m sure people will say “Well, you could have shot him before he ran away”, but you need to realize that this game’s slow TTK in comparison to say, CE, makes it near impossible for a kill to happen before your target takes the path of least resistance and sprints away. That, combined with thruster, is a guaranteed survival. Now your options are A. Chase after him with sprint, ensuring you don’t get a kill because to sprint, you have to put your weapon down, or B. Don’t pursue, allowing a kill that should have been yours run off. In CE-3, if you tried running away, you did it with the knowledge that if you got pursued, you could still get shot.
These are ones I hear around Waypoint a lot. Feel free to discuss how wrong I am and how I’m not a true fan of the game.