Dedicated servers are a must this day in age, a game is competitive only if it is balanced. Not having dedicated servers will abolish any hope of the game being a huge competitive title like those we see on P.C in Dota 2, LOL and SC2.
All 3 of those game are hugely popular competitive titles which set the benchmark for any game aiming to be competitive. The things they all have in common are dedicated servers, balanced gameplay, constant updates, high skill caps, ranked matchmaking and developer support.
So lets look at what Halo 4 had:
Halo 4 had Developer support, constant updates and after one year we had ranked (which was fail because the game was not competitive) and eventually we had custom games with balanced gameplay.
Overall the game was imbalanced due to heavy advantage to host, imbalanced weapons, poorly balanced load outs and minimal skill cap with such high rates of aim assist/bullet magnetism, no de-scope and SPRINT (I explain below why sprint has no place in halo).
Halo 4 was a casual game and in the modern day games, competitive titles take the cake and play on for many years.
The biggest problem with Halo is sprint and below I will try to explain why:
Sprint's effects on the game go a lot deeper then the obvious complaint made about players running away wen they should have died. People can sprint off-spawn to finish a weakened player which lowers the punishment for dying and make trading kills more prevalent. Previously , a victor could regain their shield and get ready fir the next encounter by obtaining new weapons or positions in te downtime - an advantage to the winner. This works well as an appropriate disadvantage for dying.
Sprint wreck the advantage because you or a respawning ally can run straight back to the winner of the previous fight and finish him off. It removes the downtime to regain shields and prepare for the next encounter.
These issues disrupt the flow, depth, integrity and intelligence of the game. They cause more anger then enjoyment and these are the only obvious effects.
Sprint completely destroys the scale of the game. This is the real underlying problem with sprint.
Scale refers to the dimension 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, because the scale was done right.
-Box height vs Spartan & jump height.
- Box width vs Spartan & strafe width.
- Hallway width vs grenades explosion radius.
- Average encounter distance vs melee & average weapon effectiveness range.
- Map & line of sight distance vs grenade throw distance & weapon range.
- Distance between cover vs Spartan speed. (this is very important, too much distance between cover and you can't move without dying, too little and you can't kill anything, which is equally as bad)
Geometry Proximity:
Areas and geometry need to be close to each other to provide interesting, strategy and unique combat tactics using verticality. The further areas get from each other the less verticality and synergistic-use there is between tem. Snipe tower on Lockout is a perfect example of close areas and geometry creating interesting, strategic and unique combat opportunities. However when sprint is add te tower becomes "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 well in combat.
These are just a few examples of how scale dramatically affects the game. If any component in any the above examples it too much or too little, the game will have huge problems. 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 the 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 viable; Circling players, strafing, jumping, melees, tactical grenades, close quarters combat strategy. These aspects cannot thrive or have much effect when the distances are increased to account for sprint. The game ends up functioning like another generic long-distance shooter with no flavour.
When a player tries to hold a position down to run a flag, to protect his base, to kill other players, or to land shots across map to hep his team mates, sprint makes it ver hard to.
For example Midship's pink tower in halo 2: To use the tower you need to first defend it so you don't get assassinated or caught off guard by a flank. With no sprint you have small windows of opportunity to shoot from it as players cannot sprint up there, all it take is a periodic check to see if anyone is moving in on you. With sprint added, you need to be continually checking, and have no time to fire from the tower to other areas of the map.
The power position value is diminished which remove structure, variance and direction from the map.
This works everywhere - the idea that players have to constantly check their back and be on the lookout for players running into their area, instead of actually playing the game. it makes it very chaotic, unstructured, at time random, and completely ruin and chess-like mind games that happened in previous title. This is why Halo has been failing so much, the lack of combat structure and strategy makes it boring no matter what gizmos and gadgets you're using.
I play online chess on the same very simple board I always have, they could add rockets and guns to my chess pieces and try spice up the game, but I only play for the immense game of strategy chess is, and Halo once was.
Sprint overall reduces the strategic values of Halo creating a dull FPS where whomever has a better shot wins rather then the player who makes the correct decisions.
I have no objection to sprint being a "loadout" or "armour ability" in gametypes like big team battle and maps that are huge, but in the competitive arena that makes Halo the stand out FPS of our generation, it needs to be non-existent, maybe experiment with putting a power up for sprint on a map at some point in competitive but please don't ruin the strategic arena FPS we used to love.
