I will never understand this complaint.
If someone gets the jump on me and I know I don't have a chance, I'm going to get out of there. I don't expect people to just accept death if they're behind a couple shots.
In Halo 5's case, I just always used thruster/clamber as opposed to sprint.
Let me try and bridge these two standpoints here. There's nothing inherently wrong with knowing when to fold and getting out of a fight - obviously, if you're outgunned, there are situations where it can be beneficial to flee until you have a better chance against whoever you're fighting.
Here's a really basic example of me being unable to kill a dude with the Brute Shot and taking cover until I could catch him off guard. The difference with new mechanics like Sprint and Thruster are that there's potential to mitigate firefights entirely, or rather "not earning" your getaway. I'm not really seeing any substantial cases of players undeservedly getting out of firefights with Thruster or Clamber, but Sprint is a pretty big offender of screwing with the general dichotomy of run-and-gun. Reasons being:
- Sprint is not omnidirectional like Thruster or Clamber. You
have to go "forward" for Sprint to be possible, meaning in many cases where you avoid danger with it, you're literally turning your back to an aggressor. Not only are you hurting their chances at a firefight, you're hurting
your chances, because suddenly (motion tracker notwithstanding) you can't keep tabs on your opponent visually. They could be reloading, continuing to shoot, picking up new weapons, coordinating an advance with their teammates, etc. but you're stuck facing the opposite direction until you're safe.
- Tying in to the previous point, you're giving up your extensive mobility options while Sprinting in favor of a much more linear method of locomotion. While out of Sprint, you still have a variety of movement options at your disposal - backpedaling, strafing, crouch-jumping, gandhi-hopping to make yourself a smaller target, etc. in addition to whatever map movement options are at your disposal, such as trick jumps. It's entirely possible to avoid and evade out of Sprint and usually yields more fruitful - or at least
balanced - results when you're just making use of the non-Sprint sandbox. Obviously there are exceptions, but prior to Reach and 4 I can't really recall that many instances where I felt "cheated" out of a firefight because a player escaped a fight because they were
faster. I had moments where I felt like they
out-maneuvered me, for sure, but nothing felt particularly cheap. This is actually even
more exacerbated in Halo 5 Guardians, because you're giving up a whole
bunch of movement options such as Thruster and Clamber to Sprint.
- Perhaps most importantly, you give up your ability to shoot while Sprinting. As I (crappily) illustrated in the clip above, gunplay is just as vital to escaping insurmountable encounters as movement is. Depending on what weapon you've got, suppressive fire, grenades, etc. can all be used to harass the enemy long enough to get you a safe distance away from them. With Sprint, you're sacrificing just about every other option in your arsenal save from aiming and jumping in hopes that you can outrun whatever's giving you trouble.
It may not necessarily be that Sprint is an "unfair" method of escaping firefights, it's more that the linear nature of it dumbs down encounters
significantly and sucks a lot of the fun of a chase out. It feels a lot more satisfying being able to turn an encounter around after a quick escape or even being able to catch up with your prey and finish the job overcoming whatever movement obstacles they threw at you rather than just being forced to play catch-up with them.
