I've been saying this forever. I am 100% sure sales and the player base would increase maybe not to what Halo 3 had but close. I always come back to Counter Strike when talking about this. That series has stayed pretty much the same and is still insanely popular. No one says that CS should have sprint or increased movement. All those things are just fads and it's disappointing Halo has become a follower rather than the innovator it used to be.
Counter Strike gets brought up all the time when this topic comes up, but I think it's a pretty poor comparison to make. Counter Strike has never been toppled in the area it dominates (console CS has never really caught on... which tbh is another reason why the comparison is flawed). Basically, Counter Strike has never faced its Call of Duty moment (despite CoD itself existing on the platform). Now, IF Counter Strike had its playerbase heavily eroded by a somewhat similar game that built on top of its foundations, but added many features/aspects that made it more appealing to the more casual player, then there's probably a good chance that CS
would then change to try a reach that playerbase again... and if it didn't it would probably end up like Virtual On did once Gundam VS rolled around. Despite a rocky as hell launch, the MCC should logically have served as home to much of the classic Halo fanbase... but it doesn't... because ex-Halo players are just that
ex-Halo players. They haven't been sitting around playing nothing until the day Halo decides to throw away sprinting. They're playing other games today (pretty much all of them far less Halo than anything after Halo 3 has ever been), and they'll continue playing them regardless of if 343i tried to ape the classics that they no longer play.
Thats not true at all...
Especially Halo 3 got A LOT of competition and it was still between 1 and 3rd place in the XboxLive charts until Halo Reach dropped.
Wanna know the Competition?
CoD4,CoDWaW,MW2,BlackOps, Battlefield Bad Company 1 and 2. This "there was no competition" is just BS.
Whilst H3 got a lot of competition, it gained that competition over time. It started as the champ and lost the title over time to CoD. For Halo's released after that though, CoD was already starting out as the bigger game, that you could assume your other friends would own. The only reason Halo 3 fared as well as it did, is because the competition had yet to gain its momentum. Now it's not a battle to keep the current players, but to actively take them from the competition... which is something none of the original Halo trilogy had to worry about.