Halo 4 and Reach, my opinion

Games Other Halo
1

Dear Halo fans (and 343i),

Just like me you’re probably very excited about the upcoming release of Halo 4. The recent glimpses at a Chiefier Chief, awesome armors, monstrous mechs, tightest graphix and the tastiest gameplay footage you could imagine has got you sitting on the furthest edges of your seats. Before I fall off my seat though, there are a few things I have to get off my chest.

I’m taking the time to write a letter to my fellow players where I will be discussing my thoughts on Halo 4, the Reach experience and the Waypoint community. I must warn you though, this letter may contain material that might cause some “Core” Halo fans (as they call themselves) to unleash some frightening fanboy fury upon this thread. I ask that these people take a deep breath and read this letter, word for word, before you lash out at me.

Now that that’s out of the way we can proceed with my letter (now in a fun, bite sized numbered point format).

Part 1; The quest for the core experience, otherwise known as complaining)

If one thing can be said about the current generation of Halo fans, it that they like complaining about the game itself, more specifically Reach. If you asked your average waypoint member to give their opinion on Reach they’d probably tell you something like:

  • Sprinting only exists to make the game look more modern.
  • Sprinting allows people to run up to me and get cheep kills.
  • Sprinting is a coward’s tool. When I try to kill someone they run away.
  • If the Spartans ran faster you wouldn’t need sprint.
  • Remakes of maps won’t work with sprint.
  • Sprint makes me uncomfortable. It wasn’t in Halo 2 or 3.

The uneducated observer would read this and say “wow, this sprinting feature really must of broken Reach! 343 mustn’t be listening to their fans or they would of nerfed it already!”

Hang on…

We weren’t complaining about sprint six months ago. Six months ago we were complaining about;

  • Armor lock is overpowered, it needs to be nerfed. NO STICKY SHEDDING!
  • Energy sword is underpowered. NO MELEE BLOCKING!
  • Armor lock is overpowered, it needs to be nerfed. NO SHEILDS WHEN EXITING!
  • Regular shields are overpowered. ADD SOME SHEILD BLEEDING!
  • Weapon bloom causes me to not shoot straight. REMOVE!
  • MAKE ARMOR LOCK DO NOTHING!
  • THE DMR ONLY SHOOTS 1 BULLET! BR SHOOTS 3! BUNGIE FAIL!
  • WHAT DO BUNGIE KNOW ABOUT MAKING HALOS? REMOVE BUNGIE LOGO FROM THE OPENING VIDEO! (Honest to god, that was a real suggestion I saw around TU).

Don’t get me wrong. You guys were allowed to voice your opinions, I just didn’t agree with them. Despite this, 343 listened to your suggestions and requests, and hence released a title update and new playlists using these new rules.

This wasn’t about fixing unbalance within the game though. For you, this was about Reach being different to Halo 3. Feeling betrayed that Bungie made a ballsy move and added loads of great new features to the game before leaving the franchise you lashed out and made your voice heard (once 343i was in the saddle).

“Bungie didn’t listen to my complaints” you yell at your fellow waypointers, “we asked for the changes, but Bungie did nothing!” This Bungie bashing conveniently ignores the fact that Bungie did support the game from its release with new playlists, subtle gameplay tweaking and an awesome 7th of the 7th event despite the fact that they were working hard with 343i to transfer the entire Halo ip and current online service to its new owner.

Once Bungie departed from the franchise you quickly rallied support for your anti Reach cause. Gathering the support from the “14 and under, can’t play shooter games well because I’m too young to fully understand the gameplay crowd” you told them that their poor skill was, in fact, because of new gameplay mechanics.

This was kind of true, vanilla reach features were (mostly) well balanced, but added a larger reliance on skill to the game. They weren’t that complex to work out though. Gun fights felt like real fights and not a shoot first kind of situation. Game play felt refreshing overall.

Even with the title update you still find new things to complain about. If you went back and told someone in March, 2011 that you found sprint to be an overpowered and frequently abused gameplay mechanic they would have laughed in your face forcing you to return to your time machine with your head slumped in shame.

Right now the waypoint community seems to be complaining for the sake of complaining.

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Continued:

Part 2; Changing stuff to look tough. Title updates and the transition from Reach to Halo 4)

Right off the bat I’m going to say it. The concept of the title update (classic H:CE style gameplay) was a good idea but the changes made to the rest of Reach just felt ugly to me. I’m not alone in this opinion. Head over to almost any other gaming site and they’ll say the same thing I’m saying (except for IGN commenters. They’ll just say stuff like “Reach>MW3”, “I’m Commander Sheppard and I support this post” and “Winner Darksouls”).

The TU Zero bloom playlists feel like some shallow clone of Halo 3 stuffed inside Reach’s much too large pants. Everything plays worse than the vanilla reach gameplay. Even the people who wanted it the most don’t even play it. Last I checked it was under 100 players (I may have been on at low traffic time though).

As for the other changes to the regular Reach service, the best way of describing it would be using the “Star wars blu ray metaphor”. When I get killed by an energy sword while I melee back, that’s an Ewok blinking. When the grenade radius is smaller, that’s Darth Vader saying no. 343 even realized damage bleed was stupid, that was the equivalent of using CGI to put a rock in front of R2 D2.

When building Halo 4’s multiplayer experience it would be wise for 343 to carefully observe the messy TU playlists. The issue there is that an amalgamation of Reach and 2/3 mechanics do not sit well together. Very careful planning will have to go into the implementation of classic gameplay concepts with modern gaming mechanics.

It’s very difficult for the gameplay to evolve if a major focus is on making it feel outdated.

Part 3; Why no beta?)

There seem to be two major camps in this discussion at the moment.

  • We want to play Halo 4 early, give me, give me, give me!
  • Frank said no beta. Praise be to O’Connor! No beta for me!

The exact words spoken by Mr. O’Connor were:

> “While we are testing Halo 4 code, gameplay, and systems at significant scale to get excellent data, input, and feedback, we are focused on polishing and shipping our experience for the duration of the year, and splitting resources to manage and build a beta is not on our schedule.”

If what he’s saying here is true it’s fairly understandable that they cannot actually release a beta with the limited resources at disposal. 343 is still a relatively new company and this is their first major game. They’ve got a dead line to meet and limited staff to get it out the door.
I’m not going to pretend to be an expert at networking a major online shooter matchmaking service, but I do understand that a beta can be crucial to the success of a game.

BF3 had an open beta. Turned out to be an ugly mess of the impossibility of loading a match coupled with the high chance the game would glitch on you anyway. If it had released like that it would have died a quick death but one successful beta later and it’s still going strong (against MW3, last year’s gaming powerhouse).

Gears 2 had a closed in house beta only and the multiplayer matchmaking bombed. It took epic a year to get it fixed. This was a huge fall from grace as the first Gears was one of the most successful multiplayer titles at the time. They didn’t make the same mistake with Gears 3. It’s still going strong.

If 343 are going into this without a public beta they better test the crap out of it. If matchmaking issues plague the release it might survive for a couple of months on brand name alone but will soon make a swift death.

I can live without a beta as long as 343 can release an unbroken, spectacular matchmaking experience.

I’m almost at the end of my letter now. I’ll sum up my opinions in a few wonderful dot points:

  • People need to accept that Reach is not Halo 3. In turn, Halo 4 won’t be 3 or Reach.
  • When you mention that sprint won’t work on maps like Lockout and Guardian you make it even more painfully obvious that you want no change in the Halo series (not even the maps).
  • Be grateful to both 343 and Bungie. Bungie always listened to their fans and it looks like 343i have your back as well; BR is back for 4 and so is Chief’s cod piece. You asked for it and they listened.
  • You can’t make something into what it isn’t. Halo Reach was never meant to be Halo 3. The anniversary playlist was pretty close to the mark, but deep down it was still Reach.
  • A lack of public beta isn’t bad news, but it definitely isn’t good news. 343 better know what they’re doing.

I look forward to everyone’s opinions on these matters. I’m interested to see who agrees with me and who can counter my arguments (without proving my point).

Remember, Reach is a game and a fine one at that. If you aren’t having fun playing it, just find a new game. There are plenty of games out there so if you don’t enjoy Reach, complaining on these forums seems to be a bad way of spending your time as a gamer.

Hope to see you in Halo 4!

  • Halas Kad
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> Dear Halo fans (and 343i),
>
>
> Once Bungie departed from the franchise you quickly rallied support for your anti Reach cause. Gathering the support from the “14 and under, can’t play shooter games well because I’m too young to fully understand the gameplay crowd” you told them that their poor skill was, in fact, because of new gameplay mechanics.
>
> This was kind of true, vanilla reach features were (mostly) well balanced, but added a larger reliance on skill to the game. They weren’t that complex to work out though. Gun fights felt like real fights and not a shoot first kind of situation. Game play felt refreshing overall.

REALLY?? well balanced? adding more skill? not a shoot first kind of situation?

How EXACTLY does bloom add more skill? It sure adds more randomness, AND yes it DOES make it a shoot first kind of situation. Reach was a more shoot first kind of game then any other game in the franchise. How exactly are loadouts balanced when one is hologram, and another is jetpack, the most gamebreaking thing ever. Or AL just slowing the game down immensely. Why is Reach so despised by the MLG community? Not because it was too hard for them trust me.
And on your point why wasn’t there a lot of complaining about sprint well heres the answer: Sprint really was the least of our concerns when it came to reach, looking at the sheer amount of absolute gamebreaking features it had (Bloom, Jetpack, AL, Horrible maps, Sword being OP with sprint, double beatdown with sprint just to name a few). This does NOT mean that it is not a bad thing, only means that there were worse things around. Oh and btw, the uneducated observer is usually a pro-sprint person, simply just because he is uneducated, and does not understand the game all that well.

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I see that you took my post as a personal insult to you Mr. Walker. I assure you that I meant nothing of the sort.

To be honest, I never much cared for the whole MLG thing.

My observation is this:
If someone is playing a game “professionally” like a sport they learn one game and stick with it. At the end of the Wimbledon tennis tournament Andre Aggasey doesn’t start complaining that he’d have more fun playing with the net down in the next one. If you do anything professionally you’re not there to have fun. Any difficulties the game throws at you are irrelevant. You’re there to win, if you choose to play an easier game you just aren’t as pro as the reach players (according to your argument).

Bringing MLG into this discussion is irrelevant; I’m talking about having fun in a game, not using it as an excuse to advertise mountain dew.

Upon release Reach was received as being a well balanced and well polished online shooter. It wasn’t until sometime after the casual shooter crowd migrated to Black Ops that people decided on the spot that the game was unbalanced.

Again, don’t take this an attack upon you. I’m just here to discuss.

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Wow OP what a very well written post very good read. I do enjoy TU reach more than vanilla reach I enjoy %85 bloom more than zero bloom. I can almost assure you that they are testing the living crap out of halo 4. most of the players on here just want a beta so they can play a free demo of halo 4 not to give informative feedback to 343 about multiplayer bugs and glitches lol. However like you stated there is no way for me to fully know whats going on but I have faith in 343 that they will make halo 4 an absolutely astonishing game. once again good post OP :slight_smile:

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good thread op, i respect that!

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We can make the game classical without turning it into crysis, just look at what halo 2 did to improve the formula of halo 1 and look at what halo 3 did to improve the halo 2 formula and this was all done by keeping it classic and innovating