The MLG crowd is always about what is the most competitive settings and stripping it down and having a skill gap. Shadowrun was a incredibly competitive and skillful game, some would even say it mirrored Halo 1 in skill gap. With Sage coming on many assumed it would be like "peanut-butter and jelly" mix with Halo from Bungie and Sage with the competitive aspect. So that's why there was a lot of hype from them.
Ah fair enough so it was more the competitive balance than game design they wanted. That makes a lot of sense, Halo style gameplay with a Shadowrun style skill gap seems like a very good thing on paper, would probably be an absolute nightmare to get right though (I doubt Halo will ever truly hit its competitive peak again, there's too large of a casual audience). It doesn't seem like Sage took that angle with Reach, but it would have been interesting to have seen what could have come of it.
That said I barely played Shadowrun so anything I say has to be taken with a pinch of salt lol.
yeah, it was all about his looks for me
I made the mistake of thinking 1 newcomer couldn't possibly convince a studio of hundreds to screw up their decade old sacred gameplay values millions of people loved.
If they shoved him in a more secondary role I would agree with you, but from what I remember he was the multiplayer design lead? I just cant comprehend why that ever happened. I hate to say it but in my mind the only way he got that position is because all the Halo veterans where all working on Destiny? If so in a way that would suck, but in another way oddly gets me excited for Destiny.