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> I appreciate your point tsassi and I am not trying to force opinions on anyone. My point is that sprint has hugely changed Halo. This is a fact. Whether or not you like the change is opinion.
Thank you. This is a very reasonable statement.
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> My own assumption comes in when I assume that this change is responsible for the series decline.
To this all I’ll say is that to believe the changes are the only significant reason for decrease of Halo’s popularity would be as crazy as to believe they are not a significant reason at all.
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> - Sprint causes maps to be larger.
Correction: 343i has decided to make maps larger in an attempt to conserve things such as the average time between encounters.
This is a great example of something that is so easy to say with great confidence, but that isn’t absolutely true. It’s really up to the map designer to decide how large a map is. The importance of sprint only comes to play when the designer wants to set some pace of gameplay for the map. And at this point the increase in movement speed from classic Halo means that a designer who wants to conserve things like the average time between encounters will decide to make maps larger, on the average.
You might want to say that the distinction is not important, that I’m just nitpicking, but it is important. There’s no a priori reason why maps would have to be larger with sprint. Historically 343i just decided that larger maps are better, but they could’ve gone the other way, had they had a different vision, and we’d be having a somewhat different discussion.
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> I have to give up my ability to shoot to get around at the same pace as I would have in classic Halo.
What do you mean by “pace” here? I guess you don’t mean speed, but I’m not sure how I should interpret this.
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> Distance from cover to cover increases making it more difficult to push on an opponent. Punishing movement like this rewards defensive play and in turn slows the game down. With this reasoning it is a matter of fact that Truth plays slower than Midship. I can’t “prove” that a slower game is less fun, but I can assume that most players don’t find encouraged camping as exciting as being able to move and attack at all times.
Here I’ve just italicized all the statements that don’t logically follow from any of the prior statements. They’re all intuitively appealing conclusions, but they are not inevitable logical conclusions. Therefore, while you’ve given an intuitively appealing explanation of why one might expect Truth to play slower than Midship, you have not proven that Truth actually plays slower than Midship. In fact, I express some doubt towards the claim that Truth plays slower than Midship.
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> - Weapons are optimized for these larger maps. Weapons like the Assault Rifle or Shotgun are given more range and power to compensate. In close quarters situations these weapons have more power than they would have had in classic Halo. As a result, when someone charges you by surprise around a corner with the AR, unless you have a power weapon, there is nothing you can do as the nature of the AR makes good strafing ineffective in dodging its shots like you might against a precision weapon. Whether you think that this is fun or not is your opinion but it is a fact that there are more situations that you cannot skillfully react to and counter in Halo when weapons are optimized for larger maps.
I can’t bring myself to object to anything here, even though the last clause of the second to last sentence strictly speaking doesn’t logically follow from anything said.
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> - To move at max speed (Sprint, thrust, slide, jump) you have to press 4 buttons.
This is completely true as far as I know.
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> - Multiple movement speeds make the game less predictable. Predictability is crucial to making a game fair and competitive. There is a fine difference between mind games and guess work. Strategy has been huge in Halo and the presence of strategy in a match is weakened by the random element introduced when you can’t assume when and where people will be on a map. I’m not saying everyone should have waypoints on the heads but there should be a good level of predictability for a game to be strategic. It is a fact that spartan abilities make the game less predictable.
Again, I have bolded statements that are reasonably intuitive, but not proven to follow from anything.
The interdependence of strategy and predictability is actually a really difficult topic. It’s clear that neither a completely predictable (i.e., completely predetermined) game nor a completely random game has any semblance of strategy. (if we take strategy here to mean something along the lines of: the ability of players to affect the end result of the game with their choices.) Because we know that between these extremes there are games that have some strategy, it’s reasonable to conclude that there is some optimal level of predictability that maximizes the strategy.
In other words, up to some point decreasing predictability makes the game more strategic, but then it’s downhill from that point on. So, if we assume that Spartan Abilities make the game less predictable, which sounds pretty reasonable, we don’t know whether that decreased predictability makes the game more or less strategic, because we don’t know on which side of the optimum Halo is.
The bottom line is: proving things is really difficult. For example, what I said above about the existence of a maximum strategy isn’t a proof. It lacks some definitions, and ultimately a sufficient belief towards the definitions. There is almost nothing relating to this discussion that can be proven.
Then there are facts, which you claimed some statements to be. I think it’s fair to say that facts don’t need to be proven, but they do require evidence to be believed, and what amount of evidence is sufficient is something everyone decideds for themselves. For example, while I believe there is enough evidence for the claim that maps have incerased in size from Halo 3 to Halo 5, I don’t think there is enough evidence for the claim that Halo 5 plays slower than Halo 3 (for more, see this comment of mine and the criticism directed at it).
Keep in mind that I do agree with you on most of the points you made about gameplay, with the only exception being the relative pace of gameplay on Truth and Midship. I just don’t find your arguments (or my own, for that matter) regarding those point rigorous enough to prove anything.