What does this actually mean?
You claim they're strategically useless yet controlling them obviously allows you to control the movement of the enemy team. Do you mean that if you were to position yourself in one of these areas you were in a poor position?
Controlling what? The areas that people rarely traverse? What's the value of controlling these areas? The power positions on Truth ARE the exact same as they ever were.
The difference is, if you want to travel from blue base to P2 for example, you can't do so at the optimal speed for the route unless you sacrifce your ability to engage enemies or scan the area 360 deg around you.
In contrast, in H3, you can move from blue base to P2 at optimal speed, while simultaneous engaging an enemy who could threaten from any direction.
And as I said before, negative space is present on every Halo map. They all have areas of "no man's land". I'd argue that this so called "negative space" is actually useful in map design for a number of reasons. They can be used to provide movement options with a high risk to reward ratio (top mid on Lockout for example is extremely exposed but allows for you to quickly traverse across the map). And as I said before you can use no man's land to emphasise and increase the strength of power positions. No man's land is not an inherent negative, it's an important aspect of map design which needs to be balanced properly. A map with absolutely no areas of no man's land wouldn't play very well, just like a map too much no man's land wouldn't work.
A map designer can emphasize power positions without implementing mechanics that negatively influence the game in several other ways. map control has been a central component in Halo long before sprint was screwing up scaling.
Frankly, I disagree that Halo 5's maps aren't filled with "negative space". As I said before Truth is probably the map with the most but still plays very well.
Is Truth and improvement on midship?
First off we're discussing sprint's effects on map design, I really can't be bothered to branch out to everything else sprint has an effect on.
Nothing happens in a vaccum. The mechanics, map design, and weapons design all go hand in hand. You can't really talk about one without recognizing how they impact the other.
Secondly, I'm very much arguing devil's advocate here; I also dislike a number of the effects of sprint. I'm neutral on the topic, I enjoying playing Halo with and without sprint. What I disagree with is that any of these effects are somehow objectively negative.
Agree to disagree. I like playing halo with And without sprint . That said I can't ignore the fact that the inclusion of sprint has limited combat opportunities- a direct result of "push forward" map design. Objectively, There's nothing that sprint adds that can't be added without it. Objectively, there are plenty of good things it inclusion has taken away.
That said, the idea that the weapons have to be tuned for sprint is completely speculative. Sprint absolutely does not necessitate higher aim assist. Halo 2 for example has far easier aiming than 5. Also, the pistol is probably one of the more difficult to use weapons in the series.
I suppose devs don't HAVE to tune weapons for anything , but you'd be a mad man if you believed mechanics don't play a part in how weapons are designed.
H2 was poised to be THE Blockbuster console FPS and it took several drastic measures beyond heavy aim assist to make the game palatable for people who never even played a twin stick shooter before. The games that followed took extra measures to make shooting more skillful. Now we're approaching H2 levels of handholding again. Why?
The H5 magnum isn't hard. It's just weak within the sandbox
I don't agree, I prefer playing on Truth than I do Midship. The weapon layout has nothing to do with sprint, that's a fault of the sandbox design.
Again, these things aren't designed in a vacuum.
On a side note, this idea that players need to always be moving at one speed to be predictable is just wrong. The only difference which sprint makes to movement predictability is the exact time of arrival at a given position. Even then all it does is slightly increase the range in possible arrival times. Movement in 5 is still predictable, even with maps which allow you to go almost anywhere at any time. It makes movement marginally more difficult to predict but even so is that actually a bad thing? If anything, making movement slightly more difficult to predict makes it require more greater skill.
I know this isn't for me, but sprint isn't required to make movement unpredictable. And the sprint mechanic hasn't increased the skill gap.
This idea seems to be almost unique to the Halo community as well. Look at games like TF2 and Overwatch; they're very competitive games which allow for different players to move at wildly different speeds. Quake has bms, strafe jumping, rocket jumping etc. but movement is still predictable. Sprint does not ruin movement predictability.
I feel like this is a terrible comparison to make. TF2 and OW are hero shooters. Varied player attributes are the genres defining characteristic- what works for those games doesn't neccisarily work for Halo. That's like saying COD has kill streaks...
I don't think predictability in Halo is a problem, let alone a Sprint problem. But I don't think bringing up quake helps your argument. The best Quake games are prime examples of an Arena shooters enabling a ton of mobility, without mechanic like sprint forcing players to constantly push forward.
If anything we should be taking movement pointers from quake not Overwatch.
