The sprint discussion thread

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> > When Sprint was first added to Halo I was pro it’s inclusion. However after a while I came to agree with those opposed to Sprint.
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> If you don’t mind me asking, how did this change of mind come about? Did the arguments against sprint do it mostly by themselves or did your mind change through personal experiences? Has this changed how you feel about playing Halo with sprint, or has sprint just not been a huge factor for your enjoyment one way or the other?
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> I’m curious because people usually tend to hold their opinions tightly, so I can only imagine that a change of mind like this would only come about either because you never had a really strong opinion to begin with, or through some hard hitting realization(s).

I was the same, I was pro sprint when I heard Halo 4 had it, and I was asking for clamber before it showed up in Halo 5.

For me it was playing both these games and realising that the mechanics take something away from the game. It took it a long time for each of them to put my finger on it, but once I realised sprint ruined travel times and combat readiness, and clamber ruined the art of crouch jumping that was it. So for me it’s not like I really liked them to start off with, I just liked the idea, and the reality fell far short of the concept.

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> > CE was pretty fast, and Halo 2 was even faster, but for some reason you didn’t move as quickly in H3 as before.
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> CE, 2 and 3 literally have the same movement speed, to the decimal point. BMS wasn’t changed between games at all. Don’t know about acceleration, tho…

No, the reason Halo 3 felt slow is because of FOV. It’s been reduced. A huge backlash of the time was MC’s “tunnel vision”.

It’s like we’ve been saying, with video games, speed is an illusion.

I have zero problem with sprint coexisting with halo and I hope to see it in the next game.

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> I have zero problem with sprint coexisting with halo and I hope to see it in the next game.

Why do you have zero problems with sprint? What do you think of the anti-sprint arguments?

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> > I have zero problem with sprint coexisting with halo and I hope to see it in the next game.
>
> Why do you have zero problems with sprint? What do you think of the anti-sprint arguments?

Reverting back to no sprint in the next halo game would slow down the game, limit movement speed, and lose interest for upcoming future halo players. Having sprint in the game allows maps to be more accessible, interactive, and dynamic. I think 343 needs to move on from the older halo veteran players and focus on having their next game cater towards a larger audience.

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> > > I have zero problem with sprint coexisting with halo and I hope to see it in the next game.
> >
> > Why do you have zero problems with sprint? What do you think of the anti-sprint arguments?
>
> Reverting back to no sprint in the next halo game would slow down the game, limit movement speed, and lose interest for upcoming future halo players. Having sprint in the game allows maps to be more accessible, interactive, and dynamic. I think 343 needs to move on from the older halo veteran players and focus on having their next game cater towards a larger audience.

@bold: Says who? You do realize there’s more than one way to go faster in a game, right? The fact that Speed Boost exists in Halo 5 contradicts your idea entirely.

Look at how fast DOOM plays without Sprint. You can’t beat that in Halo 5 even with Sprint.

“Having sprint in the game allows maps to be more accessible, interactive, and dynamic.”
Any examples? What can Sprint do that simply moving faster cannot do?

“I think 343 needs to move on from the older halo veteran players and focus on having their next game cater towards a larger audience.”
They tried that in Halo 4’s Multiplayer, look how well that worked out for them.

More importantly, why are you pushing away a dedicated audience of players already invested in the game, in the hopes of attracting people that might play the game? You’re making a gamble that has no reason to be a gamble if you didn’t push people away to begin with.

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> > > > 2535432010167589;14306:
> > > > I have zero problem with sprint coexisting with halo and I hope to see it in the next game.
> > >
> > > Why do you have zero problems with sprint? What do you think of the anti-sprint arguments?
> >
> > Reverting back to no sprint in the next halo game would slow down the game, limit movement speed, and lose interest for upcoming future halo players. Having sprint in the game allows maps to be more accessible, interactive, and dynamic. I think 343 needs to move on from the older halo veteran players and focus on having their next game cater towards a larger audience.
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> @bold: Says who? You do realize there’s more than one way to go faster in a game, right? The fact that Speed Boost exists in Halo 5 contradicts your idea entirely.
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> Look at how fast DOOM plays without Sprint. You can’t beat that in Halo 5 even with Sprint.
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> “Having sprint in the game allows maps to be more accessible, interactive, and dynamic.”
> Any examples? What can Sprint do that simply moving faster cannot do?
>
> "I think 343 needs to move on from the older halo veteran players and focus on having their next game cater towards a larger audience."**They tried that in Halo 4’s Multiplayer, look how well that worked out for them.**More importantly, why are you pushing away a dedicated audience of players already invested in the game, in the hopes of attracting people that might play the game? You’re making a gamble that has no reason to be a gamble if you didn’t push people away to begin with.

This is probably one of the issue since gaming became as large as it has, especially in the larger businesses.

It may not be a particulary safe “money making” design philosophy, but I’d rather make a game which can attract a large audience, rather than make a game to attract a large audience.

I’m going to put my head in the firing line and boldly claim that the vast majority of the large franchises we see today, were not initially made for “the large public”, but the “large public” found the game.

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> > > 2535432010167589;14306:
> > > I have zero problem with sprint coexisting with halo and I hope to see it in the next game.
> >
> > Why do you have zero problems with sprint? What do you think of the anti-sprint arguments?
>
> Reverting back to no sprint in the next halo game would slow down the game, limit movement speed, and lose interest for upcoming future halo players. Having sprint in the game allows maps to be more accessible, interactive, and dynamic. I think 343 needs to move on from the older halo veteran players and focus on having their next game cater towards a larger audience.

Translated: “I didn’t read the anti-sprint arguments. I’m still clueless about game mechanics and game design and have only ever heard the tired pro-sprint arguments, so I@m just going to ignore half your question because I don’t understand the argument well enough to be able to counter it.”

  1. No, sprint is not the only way to increase player movement speed.

You can increase the base movement speed as you can see in other Arena FPS. This method is better for the faster gameplay, because you aren’t forced to swap between two states of play (combat or movement), you can do both at the same time. Games like Unreal are miles faster than Halo 5.

  1. No, increasing movement speed isn’t the only way to speed up map traversal and game pace. Nor is it the only way to make a map “more accessible, interactive, and dynamic”.

In fact that’s a very poor reason. Sprint only affects map traversal, not the way you interact with the map as such. Things like barrels, doors windows, energy shields, buttons, trick jumps, etc are much more important to ‘accessibility, interactivity, and dynamism’. These are things that games like Halo 2C, Halo 2A and Halo 3 had far more of than Halo 5 does. In contrast Halo 5’s maps are very quite static, despite the appearance of sprint in the gameplay.

  1. 343i have tried that. Halo 4 and 5, and their whole reason for include these stupid additions was all done for the sake of making Halo “more accessible for the larger audience”. The irony is that as they have done that Halo has become more complicated, less accessible and less popular for the larger audiences. It’s dropped in sales, in popularity, even just on Xbox One, the game struggles against multiplatform titles, when the xbox one is the only place you can play Halo 5. Imagine that, every Halo 5 lover still doesn’t equal just a fraction of the communities of games like Destiny, Battlefield, Battlefront, Overwartch etc. Sprint is not saving Halo from dying.

Here’s why (again). The audience 343i are trying to cater to isn’t “the larger audience”, it’s the larger modern MP FPS audience, but that audience is already bombarded with games and have a wide choice of games to play. Even then they’ll most likely only ever play their franchise of choice, that is why COD stays so popular. Moreover they won’t be persuaded to leave their chosen franchise for another franchise that isn’t offering something new. The rise of games like Overwatch, Battlefront, and BF1 over Halo is because their experiences differ from COD greatly, Halo 5 doesn’t, classic Halo did.

There’s more to this as well. Classic Halo brought in non-MP FPS players, and even non-gamers. Because the gameplay was so simple, so easy to understand, and was, get this, more accessible to the larger audience (and casual gamers are the larger audience). With the addition of all these unwanted mechanics 343i not only pushed out Halo veterans but also Halo casuals. That is why Halo 4 and Halo 5 have been so unpopular compared to older Halos and other shooters on the platform.

If you can counter these three points I’ll take your stance seriously. Otherwise you are just shoveling the same thoughtless arguments we’ve all seen a thousand times before, on this thread alone.

> 2535432010167589;14308:
> > 2533274944267503;14307:
> > > 2535432010167589;14306:
> > > I have zero problem with sprint coexisting with halo and I hope to see it in the next game.
> >
> > Why do you have zero problems with sprint? What do you think of the anti-sprint arguments?
>
> Reverting back to no sprint in the next halo game would slow down the game, limit movement speed, and lose interest for upcoming future halo players. Having sprint in the game allows maps to be more accessible, interactive, and dynamic. I think 343 needs to move on from the older halo veteran players and focus on having their next game cater towards a larger audience.

-Speed in this context can be translated in multiple ways, faster player movements however do not directly correlate to faster game pacing, level design I would argue has a bigger effect. In fact I think Halo 5 is actually on the tamer end of the scale in terms of pacing. I think what you are referring to is the speed empowerment fantasy. If Sprint was removed there is indeed some risk some players would feel deterred, feel less empowered by a perception of feeling slow, even if it isn’t true, even if base movement was increased, even if maps were smaller. In that I agree.
-I don’t agree with the ‘accessible, interactive, and dynamic’ points however, I would like to see support for such statements.
-I am a what they call a ‘veteran player’, I don’t want to be pushed out and alienated, also I don’t think that would be a good business strategy anyway.

Sprint like in Halo 5 was fine, no-sprint would mean either the game gets a speed boost to play like Quake and dies in a matter of weeks or it’s a boring piece of -Yoink- like Halo 3, the inbetween is Halo 2 but I don’t think I can cope with any more hours of Halo 2 at this point, I need something different, Halo 5 offered that and it worked really good.

As for sprint itself, it provides speed but adds an strategic cost to it, this can lead to an increase in gameplay depth, it also opens up new mechanics (see Spartan Abilities)

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> Sprint like in Halo 5 was fine, no-sprint would mean either the game gets a speed boost to play like Quake and dies in a matter of weeks or it’s a boring piece of -Yoink- like Halo 3, the inbetween is Halo 2 but I don’t think I can cope with any more hours of Halo 2 at this point, I need something different, Halo 5 offered that and it worked really good.
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> As for sprint itself, it provides speed but adds an strategic cost to it, this can lead to an increase in gameplay depth, it also opens up new mechanics (see Spartan Abilities)

The base speed in Halo 5 is already faster than the original trilogy. Furthermore, the Legacy settings, or whatever they were called, were said to be really good. No Spartan Abilities, increased BMS and jump height, to name a few changes.

The inbetween is Halo 2? The original Halo trilogy had the same movement speed across all titles. Is Sprint the only thing differentiating Halo 5 from the original trilogy?

Then there are those who argue that depth is removed when sprint is added, Halo becoming a more shallow game. Partly, if I’m not mistaken, due to the overall increased chance of succesfully disengaging and escaping an encounter when sprint is enabled, than when it’s not.

Charge and slide could easily have been implemented without sprint, or not tied to sprint at all.

Prepare the hot take cannon!!!

I like sprint in Halo 5. I was not a big fan of it in reach or in H4 but with the introduction of Warzone and other spartan abilities, I have grown to love it. There are a few things I dislike about sprint, mainly the radar doesn’t show someone sprinting far away enough. That is really important to balance and it needs to be fixed, otherwise spartan charge becomes a major issue in games. Mostly because unskilled players can get a bunch of kills by running around and shoulder bashing people all day. I also think the “cooldown” time between sprinting and using a weapon needs to be shortened, this would drastically improve game play in my opinion.

Now to the positives. It makes map movement more important for arena games. This cuts down camping, which if you played H3 and H2 anniversary, you know was a serious issue in FFA and in some team slayer. It also makes it easier to get out of danger when you have a sniper which allows for better rotations and taking advantage of the angles built into the H5 maps. On the other end, it makes it harder for a sniper to give you a hair cut so it makes that more of a skill weapon and less of a free kill (like rockets cough cough). The addition of slide is really useful, love that for entering bases in WZ and dodging shots.

Overall, I really like the abilities and sprint in H5. It makes halo feel like more of a modern shooter and less like a throw back game. I have been playing halo since CE, and love the old mechanics but I can just open up MCC if I want to play that way. I would be really bummed if sprint were taken out of H6, I would likely not play as much if it returns to the same old same old.

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> > > > 2535432010167589;14306:
> > > > I have zero problem with sprint coexisting with halo and I hope to see it in the next game.
> > >
> > > There’s more to this as well. Classic Halo brought in non-MP FPS players, and even non-gamers. Because the gameplay was so simple, so easy to understand, and was, get this, more accessible to the larger audience (and casual gamers are the larger audience). With the addition of all these unwanted mechanics 343i not only pushed out Halo veterans but also Halo casuals. That is why Halo 4 and Halo 5 have been so unpopular compared to older Halos and other shooters on the platform.

except for that not really being true:

One week after launching worldwide on October 27th, 2015, Halo 5: Guardians made history as the biggest Halo launch and fastest-selling Xbox One exclusive game to-date, with more than $400 million in global sales of Halo 5: Guardians games and hardware, pushing the franchise to over $5 billion lifetime.

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> Prepare the hot take cannon!!!
>
> I like sprint in Halo 5. I was not a big fan of it in reach or in H4 but with the introduction of Warzone and other spartan abilities, I have grown to love it. There are a few things I dislike about sprint, mainly the radar doesn’t show someone sprinting far away enough. That is really important to balance and it needs to be fixed, otherwise spartan charge becomes a major issue in games. Mostly because unskilled players can get a bunch of kills by running around and shoulder bashing people all day. I also think the “cooldown” time between sprinting and using a weapon needs to be shortened, this would drastically improve game play in my opinion.
>
> Now to the positives. It makes map movement more important for arena games. This cuts down camping, which if you played H3 and H2 anniversary, you know was a serious issue in FFA and in some team slayer. It also makes it easier to get out of danger when you have a sniper which allows for better rotations and taking advantage of the angles built into the H5 maps. On the other end, it makes it harder for a sniper to give you a hair cut so it makes that more of a skill weapon and less of a free kill (like rockets cough cough). The addition of slide is really useful, love that for entering bases in WZ and dodging shots.
>
> Overall, I really like the abilities and sprint in H5. It makes halo feel like more of a modern shooter and less like a throw back game. I have been playing halo since CE, and love the old mechanics but I can just open up MCC if I want to play that way. I would be really bummed if sprint were taken out of H6, I would likely not play as much if it returns to the same old same old.

I find it funny how you say that because Spartan Charge was created because of Sprint being too powerful with regular melee. Same thing with having to change how the radar works because of Sprint.

Map movement was always important, in fact it was probably more important back then. You were always capable of being shot and you were always capable of shooting back while moving, no matter which direction you’re going and which direction your facing. Now, you have to make a decision between moving at your max speed and shooting, promoting this start-and-stop gameplay and cat-and-mouse-encounters.

I also find it funny how you talk about the Sniper and the Rocket Launcher when the H5 Sniper has an absurd amount of aim assist and the Rocket’s blast radius has increased because they were meant to hit Sprinting targets. Don’t see how it’s more of a skill weapon when making shots is essentially easier.

See what’s happening? Because of this one mechanic that’s forcibly added to the game, we have to basically change how the game works just so it can be balanced in the first place.

> 2535422275901409;14316:
> except for that not really being true:
> One week after launching worldwide on October 27th, 2015, Halo 5: Guardians made history as the biggest Halo launch and fastest-selling Xbox One exclusive game to-date, with more than $400 million in global sales of Halo 5: Guardians games and hardware, pushing the franchise to over $5 billion lifetime.

Yes, in terms of how much profit it made it did the best, because of bundles, digital sales which are hard to track, and most notably REQ packs. Notice how you’re never told how many copies were sold.

Before Halo 5, Halo 4 had the biggest Halo launch, grossing $220 million, surpassing Halo Reach’s record of $200 million, and $300 million in its opening week, which is about as much as Halo 3. But clearly it didn’t last long, right?

> 2535422275901409;14315:
> Prepare the hot take cannon!!!
>
> I like sprint in Halo 5. I was not a big fan of it in reach or in H4 but with the introduction of Warzone and other spartan abilities, I have grown to love it. There are a few things I dislike about sprint, mainly the radar doesn’t show someone sprinting far away enough. That is really important to balance and it needs to be fixed, otherwise spartan charge becomes a major issue in games. Mostly because unskilled players can get a bunch of kills by running around and shoulder bashing people all day. I also think the “cooldown” time between sprinting and using a weapon needs to be shortened, this would drastically improve game play in my opinion.
>
> Now to the positives. It makes map movement more important for arena games. This cuts down camping, which if you played H3 and H2 anniversary, you know was a serious issue in FFA and in some team slayer. It also makes it easier to get out of danger when you have a sniper which allows for better rotations and taking advantage of the angles built into the H5 maps. On the other end, it makes it harder for a sniper to give you a hair cut so it makes that more of a skill weapon and less of a free kill (like rockets cough cough). The addition of slide is really useful, love that for entering bases in WZ and dodging shots.
>
> Overall, I really like the abilities and sprint in H5. It makes halo feel like more of a modern shooter and less like a throw back game. I have been playing halo since CE, and love the old mechanics but I can just open up MCC if I want to play that way. I would be really bummed if sprint were taken out of H6, I would likely not play as much if it returns to the same old same old.

How does adding sprint make map movement more important?
How does it cut down camping if your prey is even more defenseless when moving at full speed?
Why is it a positive to make it easier escaping danger?
Sniping in Halo 5 is quite easy, and that stuff is balanced by magnetism and other related things.
Slide and charge could have been implemented without sprint.

Halo should not strive to mimic modern shooters, do we not have those already aplenty? Why can’t it look at what it did well, and didn’t do well, and work on that? Instead of conforming to what others are doing

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> As for sprint itself, it provides speed but adds an strategic cost to it, this can lead to an increase in gameplay depth

Forcing players to switch to a separate melee weapon instead of being able melee with a firearm also adds a strategic (or more precisely, tactical, as is the case with sprint) cost to melees, but we can ask is it meaningful? Is the optimal choice in the given situation a difficult one to make? Do the choices that players end up making have a significant impact on the end result over the course of the game?

The problem with mechanics that force players to make choices is that these artificial choices pale in comparison both in numbers and subtlety to the choices players naturally have to make (e.g., where do I believe the enemy is, what route should I choose, where do I need to go, am I winning or losing this encounter, and so on and so forth). Therefore any depth added by this artificial choice is nothing but a drop in the bucket. At the same time, the artificial choice might have consequences on other aspects of the game, which has certainly been a case with sprint (for a recent outline on the topic, see here).

> 2533274906476574;14313:
> it also opens up new mechanics (see Spartan Abilities)

None of these mechanics require sprint to work, even though some make use of it. In fact, I challenge you to describe me such a mechanic which is only possible with sprint, and for which I can’t describe a functionally identical mechanic which works without sprint.

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> > > > > I have zero problem with sprint coexisting with halo and I hope to see it in the next game.
> > > >
> > > > There’s more to this as well. Classic Halo brought in non-MP FPS players, and even non-gamers. Because the gameplay was so simple, so easy to understand, and was, get this, more accessible to the larger audience (and casual gamers are the larger audience). With the addition of all these unwanted mechanics 343i not only pushed out Halo veterans but also Halo casuals. That is why Halo 4 and Halo 5 have been so unpopular compared to older Halos and other shooters on the platform.
>
> except for that not really being true:
>
> One week after launching worldwide on October 27th, 2015, Halo 5: Guardians made history as the biggest Halo launch and fastest-selling Xbox One exclusive game to-date, with more than $400 million in global sales of Halo 5: Guardians games and hardware, pushing the franchise to over $5 billion lifetime.

Hyped up release and vague sales figures aside, where has Halo 5 placed on the Xbox most played list compared to other games? To other older games?

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> > it also opens up new mechanics (see Spartan Abilities)
>
> None of these mechanics require sprint to work, even though some make use of it. In fact, I challenge you to describe me such a mechanic which is only possible with sprint, and for which I can’t describe a functionally identical mechanic which works without sprint.

Spartan Charge? Pressing melee button during normal results in a basic melee; holding that button during normal speed is used to initiate assassinations in the proper context. Activating sprint seems like a necessary precursor for the controls to recognize that the melee button should do something different.

Think I meant to post that quote in a different thread.

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> > > it also opens up new mechanics (see Spartan Abilities)
> >
> > None of these mechanics require sprint to work, even though some make use of it. In fact, I challenge you to describe me such a mechanic which is only possible with sprint, and for which I can’t describe a functionally identical mechanic which works without sprint.
>
> Spartan Charge? Pressing melee button during normal results in a basic melee; holding that button during normal speed is used to initiate assassinations in the proper context. Activating sprint seems like a necessary precursor for the controls to recognize that the melee button should do something different.

You could push it onto a double press if you wanted. Alternatively you could use the now vacant sprint button for it. After all, the only reason we contextually associate Spartan Charge with melee is because it’s on the same button. In a different world with different mechanics Ground Pound could be activated by holding down melee in the air, and we’d have a similar association with it and melee.