It was suggested to me that I come here to provide objective, evidence based, and detailed feedback on what I think about sprint and why, so here are my two cents as someone that has played every online FPS from Halo 2 and CoD4 up to Overwatch and Destiny:
First, let me define “native sprint” because I’ll be using the term a lot:
All players always have and always spawn with sprint. “Native” means that it is a base part of the movement system, everyone always has sprint. Sprint can still have a place in Halo as a pickup, but “Native” is what I’ll be discussing here.I believe that:
-Native sprint for all players is objectively bad for Halo and its competitiveness
-We don’t need native sprint to have fast paced gameplay (increase base movement and strafe speed by a bit)
-Sprint can have a place in Halo! Just not native sprint. (Sprint would be great as one of many pickups on the map.)
**1)**Native sprint requires an increase to engagement distance and map size.
Why? To support increased player movement speed. This is why we have controversial features like aiming down sights for automatic weapons, and long range engagements across the board. Things like this naturally fit in a game designed around native sprint.
This is bad because: This is not what Halo needs to be. This is what Call of Duty is, what Battlefield 1 is, what Destiny is. We have a suffocating amount of this. Halo is losing its niche as the king of arena style play by homogenizing itself as another game where you spam sprint to get across the large map, take potshots at someone 50 meters away who you won’t be able to kill, and hope that you don’t run headlong into someone who is camping. Long-distance engagements are also not well suited for a console controller, this is a well known topic we are all acutely aware of, increased map size only serves to make this worse.
**2)Native sprint causes more bad spawns.
Players can move more quickly and unpredictably. The spawn system may have to spawn you in an objectively poor place just because of how spread out the players are on the map. This results in bad spawns like “low ground” spawns, spawns where you’re confusingly far away from the action, and spawns where you are visible to the enemy, and able to be shot at, but just not physically close to them. This can be avoided with a map designed around it, but then we are damaging the integrity of the playable space to accommodate for sprint.**3)**Native sprint requires the game to have a faster Time to Kill.
Sprint allows players to run away from fights or between cover very easily. The only way to make sure that people die at all with such a system is to make the TTK faster.
This is bad because: This requires weapon design to be more shallow and as a result the whole sandbox feels worse. Automatic weapons have to melt people because they need to be tangibly better at close/medium range than the already buffed marksman weapons. Marksman weapons have to be consistent hitscan weapons without much recoil to manage or they wouldn’t be able to kill anyone. It also makes things that one-hit kill like a sword or a sticky much less valid, you can and do get melted before even skillful use of a weapon like that gets you the kill.
And TTK isn’t just a number: Tangible, ingame TTK includes ease of aiming the weapon, recoil, etc. While the Halo 5 BR and the Halo 3 BR might kill in a similar amount of time if all shots hit, Halo 3 asked much more from the player to hit those shots. The relevancy of this is often glossed over by people having this debate.
**4)**Native sprint cheapens the positioning game
With sprint players can more easily evade bad situations they have gotten themselves into, and more quickly retake positions they have been removed from.
This is bad because: It makes the game less thoughtful, it makes escaping a bad situation less skillful. The game as a whole becomes less about who and how to engage, and more akin to yet another game about twitchy reflex. It cheapens the meaning of holding down defensible positions when the more open positions can be traversed quickly and with little risk. It cheapens high ground advantage when players can escape in the time it takes you just to fall to the ground to catch them. Players losing gunfights can run away successfully even if they do so with a one-track ‘gotta run fast’ mentality… when they should have been easily followed and killed for losing the gunfight.
**5)**Native sprint creates a lose/lose player decision for map movement
Option A) You sprint as you move around the map. You run into an enemy who is not sprinting. You have to ready your weapon and they do not.
Option B) You don’t sprint as you move around the map. You get flanked because the mapflow and spawn system aren’t balanced around that speed of play.
Option C) You only sprint sometimes. You have both the chance to get flanked and a chance to start a gunfight with a disadvantage, but hey, roll the dice.
This is bad because: This is very “-Yoink!- if you do, -Yoink!- if you don’t” … sprint causes a lose/lose situation where the best strategy is to either sprint and hope to catch someone unaware, or camp and wait to get the first shot on someone rushing into you. Checking corners and moving tactfully around the map is not a viable option because you’ll just take it from behind via a long sight-line and it feels bad. Giving all players this option to sprint at all times effectively adds another element of “well sometimes you just get boned and there’s nothing to be done about it,” to the game.
**6)**Native sprint mandates that melee weapons perform poorly
This is why the sword in Halo 5 feels so much worse than the one in Halo 3 or 2 or even Reach. This is why there are practically no melee weapons on maps any longer. Sprint allows you to rush at the enemy faster, so how do you balance that? First the maps are generally larger so that’s already a nerf, but then you reduce lunge distance, you make the lunge animation take a silly amount of time to deliver the death blow, you make melee weapons require much more aim than they should. You nerf the way these weapons feel in your hands until they just aren’t good any more. Swords and Hammers end up becoming vending machines for Bulltrue medals while they as a “power weapon” are outperformed in their own ideal ranges by a standard SMG or sometimes even a loadout weapon.7) Native sprint has changed the way a fight in Halo is won
Halo has historically had a long TTK and heavily emphasized positioning. Sprint, and to a similar extent “B to boost” has cheapened the core gameplay loop to such a degree that Halo is now less a game about outsmarting, predicting, and outgunning and now almost purely about twitch reflex and your ability to shoot while boosting.
This is bad because: When players can’t really set up engagements due to the speed at which everyone can easily launch into the fray, it ultimately becomes shallow.
It’s now: “I see you, you see me, I’m gonna rush in at mach speed right past your grenade and hope you miss your first shot. But if you hit it, I’ll run.”
When it used to be: “I’m low, but he’s coming into an area he can’t escape from. I’m going to predict where he’s pushing and nadeshot him when he comes in for the kill.”
I really could go on about this forever. I hope these are some well-defined concerns with sprint being standard on all spartans and I hope that they showcase the transformative harm that native sprint can have on a game like Halo.