Rock-Paper-Scissor forces you to give up core abilities in order to use other core abilities which is exactly what Sprint makes you do.
There's a big difference you're missing out on. Rock Paper Scissors is turn-based, presents you with three choices, and you're intended to choose the advantageous one to counter your opponent's choice based on factors ranging from deduction to opponent personality (how likely they are to try and repeat, switch things up, etc.). You're not "losing" the other abilities in any sense of the word - you're always intended to make a single choice, and flubbing your hand into another choice to try and save face is considered cheating. It's a simple memorization exercise with reflexive elements.
Not only is Halo not turn-based, but in classic Halo's infantry-based combat you're also permitted to use all four of your major functions concurrently. These are:
- Movement (analog stick, jumping, utilizing ladders, crouching etc)
- Aiming (zooming in, looking around)
- Dealing damage (throwing grenades, firing a weapon, melee)
- Taking context-sensitive action (flipping a vehicle, picking up a weapon, picking up an objective)
Save for possibly picking up a new weapon or an objective like a flag,
all four primary elements possess overlap and can be used concurrently. When you start getting into the nitty-gritty, certain elements may cancel eachother out - such as throwing grenades while zoomed in - but bottom line is that a variation of all four options have parity with one another. Sprint obviously breaks this flow, yes, as do elements like Clamber, but with your Rock Paper Scissors comparison you're crudely bending Halo's mechanics into a caricature with several false attached qualities:
1. The implication that Halo's actions are trinary. In Rock Paper Scissors, your singular mechanical action - using your choice - there is the ability to win, the ability to tie, and the ability to lose.
None of Halo's four primary mechanics are this cut and dry. Aiming one direction will not win you a match, while picking up a Beam Rifle will not single-handedly lose you a match. It's a matter of
combining these properties that allows you to force one of three possible outcomes, and while I'm not an advocate for Sprint or even most Spartan Abilities, they don't bottleneck your outcome the way you're making them out to. Do they bottleneck your
mechanics? Absolutely. Do they decide victory, tie or loss? Not by a long shot.
2. The implication that Halo's gameplay is turn-based. Even slowed down to a crawl, Halo's actions are for the most part real-time, where players are always existing second by second, frame by frame within the playspace, even if they don't make an explicit decision. Spartans and Elites may lay low or express indifference at times within a match to
make decisions or formulate a course of action, but their indifference or lack of action is still a
presence within the game. They never disappeared, never expected the enemy to simply make actions parallel to their own but of different outcome. Now, I will digress, Halo may have
individualized engagements such as 1v1s where players test their merits in a similar fashion, but even then their actions are never exactly the same due to different players being behind the wheel, so to speak. Sprint does not somehow augment your turn the way you make it out to be.
3. The implication that Halo has a static, explicitly-defined series of advantages and disadvantages. Obviously, there are mechanical statistics put in place that may give certain weapons priority over another depending on situation and encounter - a Rocket Launcher would likely be more useful than a Light Rifle in dispatching a fully-loaded enemy Warthog, for example - but it's what the players
do with these mechanical possibilities that define the match. This is where the concept of a metagame comes in. For one, note Armor Abilities in Reach and 4. While the broad functions of Armor Abilities never really changed, they did receive some minor balnacing tweaks, notably in the case of Armor Lock. And yet, despite this, players knew what these mechanics were and player populations gradually shifted interest in Armor Abilities over time. There wasn't a set rhyme or reason to it - on some days a majority of the population chose Promethean Vision, on others they might have chose Hologram, on others Active Camo. These were all due to an evolving community whose interests waxed and waned aconcurrently to the mechanics of the game itself. And again, we'll likely see a similar metagame fluctuate over the course of the Halo 5 Guardians Beta lifespan. The Spartan Ability usage at the start of the beta and at the end of it will likely be substantially different as players carve out every nook and cranny of their mechanical worth - Stabilizers could end up being the real MVP of Spartan Abilities, for all we know. This is the most substantial difference to Rock Paper Scissors. While there's obviously a personal metagame to be had, it's an instanced metagame
per match, it's not ever-evolving in the way a community playing a game's is. You may know the ins and outs of the strategies a friend uses and be able to beat him by going rock-rock-paper, but he'll also likely change up his strategies or keep losing. While on the most basic possible level, this
does happen in Halo, it's a global metagame that's become something of a mechanical primordial ooze that's never going to truly stagnate unless it's a bad foundation to work with. Halo 4 had traces of this with players establishing decisive advantages by camo-camping, Prom Vis abusing, personal ordnance dropping Incineration Cannons and roflstomping the enemy team ad nauseam, and that's because the Infinity featureset was simply an unhealthy sandbox to work with. Halo even has a
developmental metagame where things are taken in and out by 343 or Bungie or Saber or
whoever depending on feedback and playtesting. Rock Paper Scissors is going to be a lot more shallow than that, and you might get some dumb ass hipsters to play Rock Paper Scissors Lizard Spock with you, but it's not ever going to work the same way as the original.
If you
really want to compare it to another game, use, like, competitive Pokemon or something. The Rock Paper Scissors analogy just makes
nooooo sense when you're isolating it to Sprint.
