Just to explain a few things that seem to be misinterpreted:
Without pressing the sprint button, Sam already runs very fast, like in TFE/TSE (which is much faster than in "realistic" games). Sprinting is added on top of that, and is useful for large area exploration, speedruns, and similar. If we allowed for firing during sprinting, then there would be no need for a separate button which everyone would just hold down all the time. We could just make the default speed higher. But it already is very high.
Reloading can serve two purposes. One is to allow a weapon to have a higher rate of fire, without outbalancing other weapons (because average total rate of fire is still the same, while short bursts can fire a lot of bullets in quick succession). Weapon drawbacks are one of basic tools of a game designer in creating an interesting game. This approach brought a lot of interesting details in previous games: minigun spinup, double-shotgun reload after each shot, cannon holding longer for stronger shots, etc.
Another is to introduce more complex and interesting rhythm into fights. It breaks a steady rhythm of shots with a different beat that happens at regular intervals. This does not dumb down the action - it makes it even more frantic. Just when you thought you have the situation under control - you are out of clip. Your "dance" has to be more complex and adrenaline rises higher. It also makes you care more about not missing. E.g. if a particular weapon takes X shots to take down one enemy and you have a clip of N, in a wave of them, you have N/X kills per clip. One miss usually means you've lost the count and lose one enemy per clip. This can make a big difference when playing on high difficulties and gives greater opportunity for differentiation on leaderboards. Note that it is only available on select few weapons where we deemed it was beneficiary to the gameplay.
While some people may think it would be best that absolutely nothing was changed, it would then be boring and feel like it is just a new set of levels for HD:TSE. So we decided to change a few things taking care that the changes actually improve the action gameplay, not hinder it. I hope everyone will try those things in actual game for a while before making final judgment. In our tests this really works well.
