I have mixed feelings about what halo 4 is going to bring to the community. Honestly, I feel like the halo name is now just a money pit and they are going to produce weak games for the sake of making millions. They already shred the halo storyline to pieces with reach, and yes they shred it, anyone who has read the first three books would know that. Reach is so far off of the halo norm that it killed off alot of the traditional halo population. If you do not believe me look at Reach’s current population. It barely pulls 125,000 at one time. Halo 3 was pulling 150,000 consistently after three years in.
Personally, I think it is obvious that Bungie was trying to make a game more like COD. A game that didn’t take much skill and that anyone could pick up and play almost immediately. If you don’t believe me look at the similarities. Dual weilding was taken out in place of every weapon being equal in damage or close to equal. Vehicles were nerfed, taking away the uniqueness that was vehicular strategy in halo…(Now all it is is seeing how many flips you can do in a banshee without dying). A working ranking system was replaced with a credit system that has absolutely no relation to skill, just like in COD. Play long enough and you will eventually be ranked the highest, weak…
Bungie’s performance over the years has gotten consistently worst. IMO the halo games are the best in the order they came out.( excluding halo wars and ODST). Reach was a large blemish on halo’s track record.
Now I hear good things from the direction of halofest about the upcoming TU. Maybe 343 will actually fix some of the problems with reach and make it a more playable game. Hopefully, 343 makes halo 4 with the interest of HALO in mind. Hopefully they bring back dominant weapons and vehicles that take time to master. And for god sake was it really so difficult to have a social AND ranked playlists? Hopefully they bring back a simple, visible, skill tracking ranking system along with the social playlist which would make just about everyone happy, and hopefully draw a crowd back to halo.
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Population is not a measure of greatness. There are hundreds, even thousands of amazing games out there that have less than 1,000 players at a time. I always use single player games as an example. Say a game like the first Assassin’s Creed. That was a REALLY good game. But it was only single player, no co-op involved. After 3 months, it probably posted less than 1,000 players at any given time. Does that make the game any worse because its popularity declined? NO. I don’t think Halo is being milked in the least. The community wants more Halo. We want to finish the story of Master Chief. There’s nothing wrong with giving us another trilogy. The only time you can say the franchise is being milked is if the gameplay takes a MAJOR turn for the worst. Reach’s gameplay, while somewhat unbalanced, is still very good.
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Bungie was not trying to make a game more like CoD. Call of Duty isn’t the inventor of the ranking system it currently uses. That’s just basic ranking. If you play a game, you get credit for playing it. Halo 3’s ranking system was very unique. Nobody knows exactly why they removed it. So rather than the “skill” rank, you get a rank for dedication. There is still a remnant of the old system in Arena.
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Bungie had an expired contract. At expiration, they were still under contract for 2 more Halo games (ODST and Reach). I didn’t likt ODST all too much either, but it was only SUPPOSED to be an expansion game. It wasn’t supposed to be some spectacular blockbuster. They wanted a game that could bridge the time gap between Halo 3 and Reach while giving a different style of play and insight on another part of the story. And with that, Reach is still a very good game. Whether it’s a good HALO game is up for debate, even though I think it is. I don’t think Reach is a blemish on Bungie’s record at all.
It sounds like what you wanted from Reach was a copy or remake of Halo 3. Personally, I think that would make the franchise more much more stale. I want something different. Innovation is what brings success. Copying everything from the previous game brings redundancy.
OP, could not have agreed more with what you said. I just recently learned that Halo: Anniversary will be using Reach’s multiplayer engine and weapons, and am pretty pissed off about it, not to mention at this point having no interest in buying it. I already have Combat Evolved, and the biggest thing for me was learning that I could finally play CE’s Multiplayer online (rather than the epic LAN’s of past years). Now I’ve learned that basically it’s going to be Reach with new maps. Awesome, cause that’s what Reach was missing, new maps. Bungie/343 needs to stop trying to shove Reach down our throats. I’m getting the vibe of “oh, you didn’t like it? Well we’ll keep giving it to you until you do!” Reach is dead, and it failed miserably. Rather than let it die however, they’re trying to take a past success and bundle it with the failure that was Reach in an effort to make people like it and/or rake in more money.
Ranked gameplay has been arguably one of the biggest reasons for Halo’s multiplayer success, the ability to fight for your level as it fluctuated had always been a big part of the gameplay for both myself and plenty of others. Unlike CoD, where you can only go up, it was something to be proud of. Whereas a player in CoD can get 1 kill and 20 deaths every game and still eventually be a 15th Prestige, Halo required that you consistently play well, and fight for your rank. Replacing that with a “OOOH, GOT TO EARN FAKE MONIEZ SO I CAN HAZ SHINY ARMOR :O!!!” system was an absolute joke, and anyone who argues that Arena was a success is out of their mind.
Messing with vehicles took away one of the most key elements of Halo’s success. I’ll never forget the thrill of driving a Warthog home to base, gunner blasting away at the enemies trailing us, and passenger triumphantly holding the enemy’s flag. Now it’s become “everybody run for the banshee and whoever gets it rain down with banshee bombs.”
I was a HUGE fan of the original trilogy, and I mean HUGE. I’m not some frat boy who picked up a controller as an alternative to CoD or Madden, I read the Novels and waited at midnight for releases. I went as a Flood to a Halloween High School Dance. I photoshopped Master Chief wielding a shotgun over myself in my German Club class photo.I know that there’s plenty of other die-hards out there, and i’m not trying to make this a contest, just saying, i’m definitely what i’d call a superfan.
(Please excuse my wall of text, I don’t post often, but when I do, I write a lot (and prefer Dos Equis))
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No, population is not a sole measure of greatness. But it does mean a lot. Compare the populations of past Halo games to that of Reach. I recall Halo 3’s Team Tactical getting the axe after it consistently drew in populations of around 1,500. Reach’s Arena has struggled to maintain pretty much that same population, and it is the only ranked team offering. A population so low that a gametype would be removed is now the population of the flagship ranked offering. What does that say? Second off, using Single Player games as an example is irrelevant. We’re not talking about a single-player only game here, we’re talking about a game’s ability to consistently draw in MULTIPLAYER populations. I don’t care how many people are playing the campaign at any given time, i’m referring entirely to matchmaking.
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Regardless of whether or not they were trying to, they definitely did. After 10 years of Halo they decided to include new things like crosshair bloom, a progressive ranking system, class loadouts, and abilities like sprint? Just out of the blue they decide to throw all these additions in that can easily be attributed to CoD? They’re definitely trying to make Halo more like CoD, no doubt about it. Problem is, if I want to play CoD, i’ll put in CoD. If I want to play Halo, i’ll play Halo. Halo trying to change itself to a watered down CoD isn’t going to draw anyone in. No one out there is saying “Man, if Halo were just a little bit more like CoD, i’d stop playing CoD entirely and switch to it!” People enjoy the two different games for that exact reason, they offer two different experiences. I don’t buy every first person shooter out there because it’s a first person shooter, I buy games like Halo because they have an identity.
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I’ve heard this one a million times. Guess what? This is the real world. You sign your name on the dotted line, and you’re committing to an agreement. And you have to fulfill that agreement, or risk consequences. This is how the business world works, this is nothing new to anybody. People are forgetting a huge part of this story, the fact that Bungie was being paid. This wasn’t a slave contract, they weren’t being forced to do anything. They signed an agreement to make “X” amount of games for “X” amount of dollars, with full knowledge of how many games they had to make under the rules of said contract. I don’t understand why anyone would be surprised when the contract holder came calling for the work outlined in said contract, nor do I understand why a half-a** effort to fill the remaining game is acceptable because “they didn’t feel like making another game.” From my understanding Bungie got paid, and then didn’t want to do the work for it. If I tried going in to my job and sitting around doing nothing, I probably wouldn’t expect a paycheck at the end of the week, hell I probably wouldn’t expect to have a job at the end of the week.
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And in comes the trademark, low-brow, one-liner response given to anyone who doesn’t like Reach: “It sounds like what you wanted from Reach was a copy or remake of Halo 3.” I really have to facepalm every time I hear this one. After 10 years of making and selling a product that followed the same core, Bungie decided to drastically change the formula. If you don’t think Reach was a drastic change from Halo 1/2/3 then you’re out of your mind. Whether or not you agree with said changes is up to debate, but the fact is Reach is a very different game than past Halo Titles. After 10 years of buying Halo titles, with the gameplay following the formula for what I considered to be a Halo title, I expected the next title follow suit. The first three had gradual changes, from health being removed to new weapons or minor tweaks on existing weapons, to new vehicles, but these changes were minor, the newer weapons were still basic weapons (the mauler was a shotgun, the beam rifle was a sniper rifle, the gravity hammer worked like the energy sword, etc.). Dual Wielding wasn’t a supreme answer to any attack, but it added to CQB. The vehicle additions weren’t too crazy, the Spectre was a Covie Hog, and I dare you to find me someone who argues the Mongoose is OP. The biggest change was Health vs. Shields and I got used to it pretty quick. These changes weren’t required to play the game, if you wanted to, you could still single-wield a slew of classic Halo weapons, and no one was forcing you on a mongoose.
Then comes Reach, which had changes that changed gameplay itself, from crosshair bloom to reinstating the health packs that I had learned to deal without. In came Armor Abilities and class loadouts, which I had never had to worry about before. I do not have to option to turn my crosshair bloom off, I can’t switch to a shields-only system, and I can’t select a “no loadout” option. I found myself using only Sprint, which I didn’t have much of a problem with, but I had to deal with other people’s Armor Abilities. After setting up the perfect line of sight, and having to rely on my useless cannons, I now had to worry that some enemy was going to Armor Lock as I tried to splatter him with my Ghost. Because paying attention to your surroundings to evade a splatter wasn’t fair enough, they had to throw in a foolproof way to stop anything. My radar went on the fritz as an enemy used his camo, because being invisible wasn’t enough of an advantage. I recall the days when finding a good sniping spot required that you do some work, jumping from structure to structure to land yourself in a palm tree or a rock, putting yourself in danger the entire way. Now you just hit the bumper and jetpack to it, because having to put yourself on the line as an easy target to achieve a prime spot took too much work. Awesome.
There are already existing threads covering all aspects of this discussion. Please use the link rukizzel provided, and for those of looking to discuss Halo: Reach, this thread is the appropriate place for that conversation:
http://halo.xbox.com/343forumsaccess/games/f/7/p/6441/54523.aspx
AND one year later Halo 4 is just a copy of reach on steroids. The population after one month is hitting a high of 110,000 and a low of 10,000. compaired to reach, H2 or H3 its pathetic. I feel I got jipt into buying it due to the 250 million spent in ads. There are more people not satisfied with Halo 4 than any halo game made. I didnt like reach and I played it for the first time after halo 4 was released. Now I feel reach is not to bad, pathetic.
Halo is failing miserably, and the worst part is, 343 knew they could have made the community happy.