If you find yourself in a room full of Halo fans and the desire to sow chaos takes hold in your heart, just toss out this question like a grenade: Should Halo have sprint? Halo: Campaign Evolved, the upcoming remake of the original game, is letting you choose your own answer to that question.
“You can sprint now,” as the devs say in an Xbox Wire post detailing the newly announced remake, “if you’d like or disable it if you don’t.”
The original Halo didn’t feature a sprint option, and that tradition continued through Halo 3 – even as popular FPS titles like Call of Duty were making sprint feel like a genre staple. In 2010, Halo: Reach offered sprint as an optional ability and in 2012, Halo 4 made it part of the standard control mechanic, which is what it’s continued to be throughout the rest of the series.
Of course, letting you sprint is a pretty fundamental change to the basic feel of a game, which is why it’s always been such a controversial topic among the Halo fandom. Offering it as an option sounds like a nice compromise, but how’s the pacing of the levels going to feel? The original stages were built with Halo 1’s original feel in mind, but the devs say there are some tweaks to the level design, particularly in the Library. I fear the true debate over sprinting may just be getting started.
Halo: Campaign Evolved is building on one of the best Halo games of all time.
