Warning: Huge Nerd Post Inbound. @Rusty Shackelford/ Whomever wants to take the time to read it. Can spoiler if need be.
So I said I was going to go in depth as to why Sprint doesnt belong in Halo, and hopefully shed some light on to why its so harmful to Halo multiplayer and should die and never come back. For starters gonna lead off with something that I've mentioned multiple times before in this thread. The first 343 poll about Sprint. The threads now been deleted but the most recent screencap I can find of it shows that over 70% want Sprint and Flinch (was originally no sprint then the Flinch issue got merged in) at 70% no's.
Me personally? The buck should have stopped here. They asked, we answered, cased closed. On 343s own website no less, and I expected them to take this into account when building H5 but what we were met with in the beta was an even more powerful version of Sprint, the opposite of what they should have done. The lack of shield recharge did little offset the fact that one of Sprints primary features is to get away from dying with ease. People still got away as often as ever and just hid for the shield recharge
Things like this work better in a Twitch Shooter like COD because the average kill time is like .4 seconds. You can shoot a player once and they will die. Halo is not that game. Outside of Halo CE, Halos weapons primarily the utility ones (BR, DMR, Carbine, Needle Rifle) all take more than one second to kill a guy. Running plus a mid length time to kill allows people to get away more often than not because they take way longer to die.
Along with that it did nothing to solve all the other issues that Sprint brings into the equation. Sprint’s effects on the game go a lot deeper than the obvious complaint made about players running away when they should have died. It makes the game play much much slower. Being able to run doesnt make a game play fast, that is a very shallow analysis of how things work. Being able to run in a shooter game is a much more defensive tool than it is an offensive one when you're not allowed to shoot by running. The thing about the old games is that your base movement speed was your "Sprint" and you were able to "Sprint" while being able to shoot your gun which encouraged you to move up and obtain power positions on the map. With a real Sprint mechanic this is all negated, because you cant shoot while doing it, so you dont use it for offense because of that 1-2 second cooldown period between ending your sprint and being able to shoot your gun. You do that and run into an offensive scenario you are going to die. You're going to be 1-2 shots down on that guy and unless he has a terrible shot/you're God you are dead. This happens in Twitch shooters like COD and Battlefield all the time because of how encouraged Sprinting is. This happens in Halo too, but not at the high levels. People learned not to Sprint around constantly because it made you die more than it helped you, this combined with the way the maps were designed lead to passive play at high levels. Almost every game played like a game of Lockout TS, no one moved ever because the game made moving around a bad idea. The relative easy of pulling off a 4shot adds to this.
Adding Sprint makes the game play slower because when the games built around sprint, playing defensively is a more effective strategy than playing offensively. That mindset existed before on a few maps, but with Sprint its the goal for EVERY map. Games last longer, the average time to kill is increased across the board and peek shooting becomes the go to strategy.
Thats stuff that you guys have all probably heard before, the real issue with Sprint is the one that I've been harping on all along in here; Sprint completely rescales the game. Now what do I mean by that? Scaling refers to the dimensions of a map, in relation to the dimensions and abilities of a Spartan. Halo gameplay has been consistent in the past regardless of weapons, kill times, maps, gametypes, grenades or perks. So basically everything that really makes the game play it once did is affected by Sprint. Adding Sprint into the game forces all these things to have to be changed to accommodate Sprint; thats how much it does. Things like movement speed, and jump height, height of the environmental objects (Boxes, ledges, etc etc. Clamber ruins this too I also hate Clamber)Average encounter distance VS melee & average weapon effectiveness range, Distance between cover and movement speed, and a host of other things have to be changed due to Sprint.
These are just a few examples of how scale dramatically affects the game. If any one of those things mentioned above changes too much, the entire way the game is played changes. We saw it from CE to 2, 2 to 3, these things happened but never to a degree that may flip the game upside on its head because there was a limit to how much altering those things would change the core elements. That is until Sprint came along. This is why sprint is such a big problem - the game has to balance sprint, against itself. It has to sacrifice the integrity of all properties above, in order to make sprint"work".
The average encounter distance is also increased which means a lot of the components that make Halo so unique and successful are made less effective and viable; Strafing, jumping, melees, tactical grenades, CQC strategy. These aspects cannot thrive or have much effect when distances are increased to account for sprint.
The best examples of this are to look at the maps. Halos always been a game that relied on remakes when it came to filling up the map pool. Remakes accomplish a very simple need of the public ,give them maps that they like, but also gives the developers a chance to put their own spin on things provided that they dont change too much from what the OG map was to the new ones. This worked fine until Reach came along and we saw remakes of maps that had to compensate from Sprint. One of two things happened; either the map had to be upscaled to such a ridiculous degree to accommodate for Sprint that it totally altered the way the map played (Reach had the most remakes of any Halo game, Coag, Ivory Tower, Blood Gulch, there was even an entire map pack of nothing but remakes) or a situation where the map isnt drastically upscaled for Sprint (The Halo 4 Pit remake Pitfall) that being able to Sprint alone changes the pace that the map once played at (The Pit was one of the slowest maps in H3 at high levels whereas Pitfall pretty much revolved around trying to sprint over to the other teams side after respawn).
The Midship "Remake" in H5 might be the most egregious one of them all. Midship was one of the smallest maps ever placed into a Halo game, the Halo 5 Midship remake is almost three times the size, and it has to be because Sprint is now more powerful than ever. The geometry of the maps have to be changed, the Pink Tower in Halo 5 is huge now, you can fit all four players there which was never a thing of the past and its pretty much impossible to nade now due to the wide open space. This is completely a result of Sprint, you add Sprint to Midship and now Pink Tower becomes way too small, so you enlarge the tower but now the exact properties that made it good are lost, it becomes too horizontal and has too much distance between each area for it to work like it did before. Pink Tower was the most important position on Midship due to its verticality, and sprint forces maps to expand horizontally.
One quick point I want to make but wont delve too much into is that Sprint and Clamber each do their part in ruining verticality, one of the key advantages in Halo games which is why I hate them both equally.
Upscaling maps is extremely bad, I cannot stress this enough. Angles get ruined completely. You now no longer can rely on your shot as much because there isnt anywhere to see someone from due to the maps being scaled up and more cover being added, so you may WANT to Sprint, but know you really shouldnt because it will result in your death. It turns competitive games into a campy mess because pushing up is now discouraged as opposed to encouraged in the previous games. Power positions are reduced because of all the cover and the ease of running away. I had the displeasure of playing pros twice in H5 and this was how both games played. Slow slow slow slow.
Also simply making Sprint a toggle option wont do much of any good because the maps will still be scaled around Sprint. They will be huge like all the H5 maps were huge and lose the arena feel. The hike in base movement speed may not be enough (I'm certain it wont be because if it was then they would just take out Sprint all together) to make up for the size.
No one wants to hear me ramble on all day so I'll close with two videos. One is professional Halo CE gameplay and one is professional H4 gameplay. Ask yourself which one of these games plays slower?
Mind you these were two of the four best H4 teams at the time. Look how much they stood around doing nothing/Hiding/waiting. A minute in and the game already slowed down, and thats not just me saying it, the commentators realize this, and these are people who understand competitive Halo on a fairly decent level. This is what ALWAYS happens.
Where as in CE if you dont move you lose. High base movement speed, a spawn system that you can learn to master and quick respawning powerups and power weapons which give you an incentive to move around the map. The maps also have highly visible lines of sight and a short range of cover distance vs movement speed.
Hope that was enough to get past the "People just want 2004-2007 Halo" stuff. Thats never been the case, changes are welcomed and in a lot of ways have benefited the franchise. This one does not belong though. This one game mechanic is what started the decline of this franchise in both the casual and hardcore community. Its a total detriment to the games and can never be balanced in a Halo game.