Former Halo lead Jaime Griesemer has commented on the debate about whether Halo should have a sprint function after it was retroactively added into Combat Evolved's upcoming remake.
Halo: Campaign Evolved was announced last week, joining 2025's Gears of War: Reloaded in returning to a beloved Xbox series. However, Campaign Evolved is not an exact remake, as the game adds things like sprinting and changes to the level design. Former Halo lead Jaime Griesemer is wary of some of the changes, including the removal of some rocks that were intentionally placed so that you couldn't destroy your enemies from the safety of a Warthog, calling Campaign Evolved "like the dance remix of a classic song that skips the intro and the bridge and just thumps the chorus over and over."
In a thread on Twitter, Griesemer says, "Right, I'm going to settle this question once and for all in a definitive thread on the topic…'Should Halo have sprint?'" before following up with the type of rambling you'd find on a log in a horror game. "That's an absurd question. 'Should' implies a moral imperative. Game mechanics have no inherent moral value. This question has no legitimate answer and any attempt at answering it will result in a phone booth full of badgers."
Griesemer elaborates, "No mechanic makes a game unequivocally "better" because games are systems and changing a system is always a trade-off between positive and negative consequences." He then explains some of these in his view, saying that a positive aspect of sprinting is that it "allows players to get where they want to go in less time," and that "impatient" players want it for tasks like "back-tracking or they've played before."
But Griesemer adds that "sprinting breaks mission pacing and the sense of exploring a mysterious environment", and it "makes vehicles less useful and important." He cites playtests where "players complete an entire vehicle mission on foot because sprint makes it less obvious they are doing the wrong thing."
However, he doesn't believe that giving players the option to turn sprint off – the way Campaign Evolved will – is a good compromise, saying, "If you make a game mechanic optional you have abandoned your post, thrown up your hands and admitted you have no vision and that someone else should design the game. In this case, everyone else should design the game."
