Hey guys, here’s a thread I posted over at Bungie awhile back, the thread got bashed by Reach lovers, although this forum looks much more mature with everyone being open minded and overall listening to criticism, also known as constructive feedback! =P
Love to hear what you guys think, cheers:
The first big step to make is to bring back to 1-50 skill, the algorithms and what not are already running in the background according to your weekly updates, it’s just not visible to the public eye in-game. It is almost as if Arena which resets every month was created in an attempt to counteract boosters and stop buying/selling of accounts, although this is just speculation. One should not forget the success of Halo 2 and 3, and the fact that what made those games so different to any other was the matchmaking system with worked flawlessly with skill ratings 1-50.
Thus the difficulty of implementing the skill system is not hard when all Bungie have to do is make it visible, nothing more. The skill rating does not need to appear in the service record of a player, nor should it unlocks ranks, armor etc. The skill rating should merely appear in e.g. Ranked Team Slayer for the simple purpose of setting a goal in the mind of the player.
Here’s an analogy (for Arena), a stockbroker sells and buys shares, the number one stockbroker makes $50,000 (50 skill) a month, Bob decides to go into the stockbroker business/playlist/job, and in his first month he earns $39,000, “good Job Bob”. The next month he earns $42,000, and the month after that he earns $43,000, slowly getting closer to $50,000. But wait there’s a catch to the stockbroker ‘playlist’. Every month the taxman takes all your money, and you start all over again, sounds great doesn’t it? Maybe you’ll do better this time round…or worse.
- Hopefully I have made my point pretty clear as to why Arena is flawed, and I’m not going to bother going into detail about how the rating in Arena promotes betraying for the Sniper and going +20 Kill/Death Ratio due to the complete vice versa of teamwork, or how a player on the losing team can still get a good rating. I could start another analogy about a soccer team winning 1 - 0, with one player touching the ball only a couple times during the game, the player is still vital to the team blah blah blah…you get the idea.
Another major problem is the lack of maps, some of those firefight maps might as well be copied over into multiplayer. The game has on launch, 9 maps, and I just downloaded the Noble Map pack - 3 great maps. Lets all divide 9 by 3, now lets think for a second, OK moving on.
To summarize the above - The two biggest problems with Reach? Skill ratings of 1-50 missing and not enough maps, the latter a little hard to be instantly fixed.
(My wish list for the next map pack? Three…symmetrical…maps…medium…to…small…sized…ma ps…But this is unlikely, since from what I can see in the Noble Map Pack, map packs are there to make money, and in doing so you want the maps to cover as broad of an audience as possible, so more people will spend the Microsoft Points, fair enough, but damn don’t leave the hardcore halo community hanging with Forge World. Kudos to Anchor 9 btw.)
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Now for a few other MINOR issues I have with the game:
(My own opinion, pretty open to scrutiny, and I repeat the word ‘minor’…)
Personally I don’t think armor abilities should even be in the game, but this is a matter of preference, some people will love em, some people will hate them, I don’t think they belong in a Halo game, innovation is good, and Bungie had the right idea and tried to push the game in the right direction, but lets face it, there all designed so you can survive, and what does that lead to? A slower pace game, more frustration for players and, drum roll, an imbalanced game. Armor abilities will never be removed from the game of course, but there is definitely the need for a few playlist to have them completely removed, including sprint.
Again personal opinion; I would like to see a return of the Battle Rifle, this will most likely never happen, but how hard would it be to replicate the Needle Rifle for example, change the model and skin of the gun and change the bullets and sounds. Abracadabra you have a BR. This in conjunction with the implementation of skills 1-50 would be very quick and easy on Bungie’s part.
-Balancing issues? No, it’s the needle rifle.
-Something against 1-50 skill? Then don’t play that playlist, go play something that’s not ranked? Play Arena, it’s slightly more competitive than “social playlist”, I mean “competitive playlist”, wait what? Haha, good one Bungie, I get it!
A few other minor things I don’t like such as how hard it is to get assist medals, halo is a team game, this alone separates it from many many games, and one in particular. Arena encouraging individual play, assist medals really hard to achieve, the players speed being slowed down to compensate and encourage the use of armor abilities such as sprint and the reduced jump height, which I’m assuming is to encourage the use of armor lock, invasion a new playlist having it’s very own maps when there are so little to choose from to begin with, and so forth.
Overall, believe it or not, I think Halo Reach is a ‘good game’. The fundamentals of halo are there, things just need to be tweaked and changed. Not so much fixed, but some fine tuning so to speak. Reach has a little over 60,000 online, a number I only saw a couple years after the release of Halo 3, reach has been out for a couple months. Numbers don’t lie. The game needs to undergo some form of change ASAP.