Another sprint debate
#1
Mon, 12/15/2014 - 09:02
Another sprint debate
Good post here. I am in the no sprint camp still, however I really didn't think even amongst casual players it was ad vastly undesired as it appears.
http://teambeyond.net/forum/index.php?/topic/7177-halo-5-guardians-multi...
I don't believe that poll is unbiased. Saucey courts what ever opinion he wants and goes out of his way to draw the attention of his chosen crowd for these polls.
I am not interested in Sprintless Halo. Of course, even Sprint features can be fucked up. 343i is already courting the BE crowd with the shield deplenishment during Sprint.
Team Beyond tends to have more serious players and so the voting will be more skewed toward the people who see sprinting as problematic. I'm sure if the same poll were on a forum called "SMG starts R us" everyone would be clamoring for sprint (and armor lock, jet packs, x-ray vision, etc.).
This leads me to an interesting thought:
One aspect of why developers and certain types of players may want sprint is how the weapons are designed. 90% of your encounters are going to be dictated by what kind of weapon everyone spawns with. When you have a starting weapon that has an effective range of 20 feet (the AR or SMG), then the only way to engage people is to run up to them until you're within spitting distance and then spray each other with bullets at point blank range. Sprint facilitates that type of play. It's like a band aid fix for a terrible design. "Alright, let's make this epic, huge map. But we don't want to spawn people with a gun with decent range and accuracy. Now the map is a tedious running simulator because you can't shoot anyone unless they're right in front of you. What to do? Let's add sprint!"
To illustrate the point with an extreme example, there was hardly any need for sprint in CE because the pistol's range and accuracy meant that even on a big map like Hang 'em High, you didn't have to run right up to people before you could shoot them. You could have all sorts of interesting angles and encounters from all over the map. The same principle holds true for the somewhat weaker BR on medium-sized maps (Sanctuary, Colossus, Turf, The Pit, that size). For AR/SMG spawns, though, even a mid-sized map like Sanctuary requires more running than gunning because the starting weapon is so limited. Hence the preference for sprint, so you can get within SMG range and start shooting sooner.
In other words, people who are for sprint tend to like it because it helps them get [i]to[/i] the action more quickly. People who dislike sprint dislike it because it lets people get [i]away[/i] from the action too easily and ironically slows down the game. Getting to the action is much more problematic with weak, short range starting guns.
I think sprint is just an expected feature in all FPS games. It's like jumping for most players now.
I want sprint in Halo. I think it adds rather than takes away.
it's sad that it's now "expected." This is CoD think.
Just up the movement speed as a whole. I don't need another button to move.
No such thing as COD-think. You either like a game mechanic or you don't. In my case, I never played COD with sprint and yet loved its addition to Reach and Halo 4.
Mono speed Halo is being re-visited right now in MCC and I don't like it at all. It's boring for me.
Deep is one of those where every new game is better than the last and he can't go back to old ones. It's weird to me.
I like Sprint in Halo as well. But, then again, I also play CoD. Mono-speed Halo seems weird to me now. I keep trying to sprint in MCC games that don't have it.
Yeah, the fact that the community died almost overnight when Reach came out suggests that it's more a matter of the series straying from its roots than losing to CoD or whatever. I had tons of friends on every night throughout Halo 3. We weren't the hardcore MLG competitive types. We played BTB, social slayer, Team Mythic, stuff like that. After giving Reach a try for about a week, my friends list was like a ghost town. Everyone quit playing. Most of those guys never came back. Some bought H4 and tried it out for a week or so, realized it had most of the same problems as Reach + new broken design choices (random ordnance that completely removed the meta game), and then quit Halo again.
That said, I don't think sprint was what killed Halo. If Reach had been something like H2A except with sprint added (and a lobby system that actually works), the game would probably still be going strong.
I've always felt that MCC was a test. 343 would give you everything you said you wanted. Then they would sit back and watch what types of gameplay are "really" important to the biggest portion of players. Unfortunately, 343 fff'ed it all up with broken code.
The days of stripped down gameplay are behind us. Bungie, the god of MM, abandoned stripped down play and gave us more of everything with Destiny, including players with super powers. If H2 was the end-all-be-all for maintaining big populations of online players, they would not have gone in the direction they did. Stripped down gameplay is commercially dead. (though I do like snipers and swat in H4....)
Like the Halo population as a whole, this community is a fraction of what it once was. All the people that left because they disliked the changes are already gone. It's not surprising that the few that are left don't mind armor lock, jet packs, x-ray vision, infinite camo-on-demand, guns that don't shoot straight, etc.
-Captain Obvious
This, and even though I wanted no sprint/AA's, I never asked for it on clan nights simply because clan nights were reserved for more wonky gametypes/settings and to play with friends, not for serious games.
And as far as the sprint debate goes, I read his post about why sprint was included in H5. I haven't really read the responses, but I'm sure they cover they myriad of reasons why sprint doesn't work in Halo, but what irks me is that 343 is still trying to play the lore card. Really? Because if they went the lore route, we would still have the HCE pistol. Or is 343 telling me that technology regresses over time in the Halo universe? The shields the spartans use came from reverse-engineering the jackals shield technology.
The whole lore argument is bullshit. We went from armor abilities in Reach, to not having them in HCE-H3. If you want to make the argument based on release dates of the game, the lore aspect still doesn't hold up. Based on release dates, we went from a great jetpack, armor lock, and dropshield in Reach to an inferior version of jetpack, no armor lock, and no dropshield in H4. We went from having our spartans being descoped, to no-descope, back to descoping in H5. No sprint, to sprint, to unlimited sprint, to a no shield recharge sprint in H5. I could go on or even refer to how in the books, spartans can flip, crawl, adjust their shields, etc, but I figure I've made my point.
CE look alikes will never sell. It would be like the old toys in the closet. Fond memories but you'd never pay to play with them again.
Halo can do Armor Abilities and stay true to gameplay, or even an updated version of it, which is desirable now. The problem is that it wasn't well balanced/implemented, despite the extensive testing. It just didn't mix well.