Was having a discussion with a fellow spartan about how he says Halo 5 is the worst and most hated of the series and i had to disagree. I’ve been listening for years to all the hate for Reach.
Maybe im biased since it’s my favorite Halo , but that game seems to be CONSTANTLY picked apart.
From the perceived canon breaks and the armor abilities , that game seems to he reviled in the Halo community and i dont get why.
I don’t see much hate for Reach, I think it is the best halo.
Some people hate on it because of the fact it is so different to Halo 3 and a lot of things have changed.
Keep in mind, some people live to tear things down. No game’s perfect, but that doesn’t mean they’re not great games. And when some people use their personal preferences as the standard of “objective” game quality, they’re not operating on the same premises as the rest of us, so I wouldn’t put too much weight on their conclusions.
As far as Reach goes, My only complaint was the AI for Noble Team. I play Reach with Noble team exactly as I would if they weren’t there, because that’s about how useful they are. But every release since has significantly improved the AI, so I’m happy.
As for Halo 5, I’d have liked more story and a longer campaign with more Chief, but like Reach, the game as a whole is still good.
I don’t think Reach is the worst, but it deserves its criticisms.
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> I don’t think Reach is the worst, but it deserves its criticisms.
What specifically do you see wrong with it?
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> What specifically do you see wrong with it?
The majority of my complaints are multiplayer related and so that’s what I was referring to. Just about all the armor abilities created their own problems except for hologram which was just poorly implemented. I could see what they were going for with bloom, but it turned out terribly in gameplay. Only had one ranked playlist and it encouraged statting with how it was setup from what I was told. Several multiplayer maps were just sections of campaign maps and some didn’t play well. Whatever came first in development, it’s not a good look especially after knowing what they could do. Co-op Firefight was a frame dropping mess, but I’ll give them a partial pass for that. I’m sure there are other things, but that’s just off the top of my head.
Reach still felt like halo to me regardless of the poop bungie took on previous canon.To me halo 4 is the worst because of how much of a 180 it took from halo 3 and how much they doubled down on things people didnt like from halo reach
Reach made a lot of questionable design decisions. I think the failure of its gameplay can be summarized by saying that it tried to be a spin-off, but was at the same time afraid to be too different from its predecessors. In many ways, I think they could’ve actually pulled it off better had they went full-on with the “normal soldier” gameplay that was popular at the time. However, instead they took the gameplay from Halo 3, and tried to add to that features popular at the time (recoil, loadouts, classes). There are two issues with that. The obvious one is that you’re messing with people’s expectations. If you just make a spin-off that bears no resemblance to the original, people just accept that it’s not meant to resemble anything they’ve ever experinced. On the other hand, if you try to pull a fast one by making something that looks familiar but isn’t, you will create expectations that you will not be able to meet.
The second issue is that not all mechanics are compatible with all gameplay styles. For example, recoil management in a game with already long kill times just can’t be a thing, because it massively lengthens the kill times. This can be seen in how bloom doesn’t actually behave like recoil in games such as Counter Strike where the shots start going all over the place very fast, and the whole reticle moves. So, if you can’t have recoil that actually requires control to hit anything at all, you’re going to end up with something that doesn’t require control, and in fact rewards spamming.
Armor abilities were whole another can of worms. Most of the problems with them are quite complex and specific to describe. Briefly, they failed at two levels. On one hand, they were either too shallow to have any meaningful use, or were completely detrimental as off-spawn abilities for competitive play. This is why (apart from bloom and loadouts, of course) Reach was met with a lot of distaste from the competitive community. On the other hand, some of the armor abilities also failed to resonate with casual players. Armor Lock is one that was pretty universally disliked, and I think had Bungie not made the mistake of including it, the game might have been a bit more accepted by casual players. It didn’t help that there was no effective way of telling which ability a player had until they used it, which meant that you really had no way of preparing for when the opponent was going to use their ability.
Beyond the additions made to the game, there are also various issues with changes to existing mechanics. The weapons were easier to use than in Halo 3, which again bothered competitive players. There was the lack of melee bleed through. Then there are the infamous paper vehicles that made BTB fans unhappy. The multiplayer maps were mostly mediocre and it didn’t help player perception that they also appeared in campaign, even if Bungie swore that they were designed primarily with multiplayer in mind. Invasion took some of the map design budget for itself, and so Invasion maps were repurposed for BTB, and bunch of the developer made maps ended up to be forged (which isn’t a problem from gameplay perspective, but people undoubtedly saw it as lack of attention).
In summary, Reach did some things wrong by either being too bold, or not being bold enough. On top of that, it also had a bunch of issues that had nothing to do with boldness. These latter issues are nothing unusual, and every Halo comes with them, but if the game has received more criticism than prior games, it’s because of the former drastic changes to the gameplay formula.
I’d say H4 is the worst. Reach was bad because it introduced armour abilities, but H4 has abilities AND loadouts/ordnance drops. H5 has abilities and loadouts, but at least the abilities are the same for everybody across the board and loadouts are just a WZ thing.
> 2533274890899554;1:
> Was having a discussion with a fellow spartan about how he says Halo 5 is the worst and most hated of the series and i had to disagree. I’ve been listening for years to all the hate for Reach.
>
> Maybe im biased since it’s my favorite Halo , but that game seems to be CONSTANTLY picked apart.
> From the perceived canon breaks and the armor abilities , that game seems to he reviled in the Halo community and i dont get why.
I haven’t heard or seen one person talk bad about Reach yet, but Halo 4 is another story. Being one of Halos biggest fans I’m also going to be one of it’s biggest criticizers. I personally didn’t like bloom, but I can see the idea behind it. And as much as I didn’t like armor abilities the change of gameplay was amazing (besides armor lock of course). As for the loudouts I didn’t mind as long as it wasn’t like COD(Halo4).
Reach had a very loud group of people who did not like it at first. As time has passed, the bad feelings people had tend to subside while those who enjoyed it tend to remember that they enjoyed it. It has happened with every Halo game.
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> snip
That summed it up nicely. I forgot about the lack of bleed through and I just remembered sword blocking as well which was really annoying.
Halo 4 was be far the worst halo to ever be created but reach wasn’t to far behind… I see halo 5 as a step in the right direction with a lot of content and plenty if changing game types.
No, he’s right; it’s Halo 5: least sales, worst critical reception. Reach only seems elevated because it was the first game in the main series to receive a mixed reception from the fans.
> that game seems to be CONSTANTLY picked apart.
> From the perceived canon breaks and the armor abilities
> that game seems to he reviled in the Halo community and i dont get why.
You answered your own question.
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> Reach only seems elevated because it was the first game in the main series to receive a mixed reception from the fans.
No, it wasn’t. Halo 2 was. How the magnitude of the negative reception is of course something we can’t compare, but it was prevalent enough for Halo 2 that things like the Halo2sucks.com website and this video are still moderately well known in the community despite being over a decade old.
The issue here is that the perception of attitudes towards any game that wasn’t a complete flop gets skewed as time goes on. The people who disliked the game tend to move on, or at the very least will not be interested in beating a dead horse. If things keep going downhill (as some people think they have), the changing reference point might even make people’s attitudes more favorable. On the other hand, people who liked the game will still like the game. Those who liked it but do not like the subsequent releases will of course look back to the good old days. In short, the people who didn’t like the game stop talking about it, but the people who did like it don’t.
Halo 2 and Halo 3 have both nearly completely recovered from any negative reception. For the past few years, Reach has been in the process of recovery. Halo 4 has started its recovery, and the same will undoubtedly happen to Halo 5 after Infinite releases. The only thing I think is different about these three last games is that they will probably never recover to the same extent as Halo 2 and 3 did because they didn’t introduce as many new players to Halo (which can of course be seen from the decreasing sales).
No, it was definitely Reach. B.net was up in arms when Reach came out, which’s something that I can’t say for Halo 2. In 2010, six years after 2’s release, the general sentiment on B.net was that the best Halo game was split somewhere between Halo 2 and 3 (and it likely still is). Cut to six years after Reach and you were lucky to find a single thread where somebody wasn’t blaming it for kick-starting the downfall of the series—and that’s still true now. Again, can’t say the same for Halo 2. The reason halo2sucks.com is brought up so much is because it’s an outlier. With anything that successful of course you’re going to get detractors, When it comes to Reach, it got it in spades and then some. It pales in comparison to Halo 4 and 5 though.
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> No, it was definitely Reach. B.net was up in arms when Reach came out, which’s something that I can’t say for Halo 2. In 2010, six years after 2’s release, the general sentiment on B.net was that the best Halo game was split somewhere between Halo 2 and 3 (and it likely still is). Cut to six years after Reach and you were lucky to find a single thread where somebody wasn’t blaming it for kick-starting the downfall of the series—and that’s still true now. Again, can’t say the same for Halo 2. The reason halo2sucks.com is brought up so much is because it’s an outlier. With anything that successful of course you’re going to get detractors, When it comes to Reach, it got it in spades and then some. It pales in comparison to Halo 4 and 5 though.
There was obviously enough negativity towards Halo 2 for it to gain traction. I mean, if there hadn’t been a significant number of people who had something against the game, we wouldn’t be here discussing this because I’d have no examples to point at. Things don’t become popular unless they resonate with enough people.
Why Reach has recovered less than Halo 2 and 3 I already explained: it didn’t bring as many new people to the franchise. With a bit of hindsight, it’s clear that already by the end of 2009, Halo’s reign was over. It wasn’t the cool game to play anymore, the new cool game was CoD. There are not many universes could’ve turned the downward slope after Halo 3. Halo 2 and 3, on the other hand, had introduced a ton of new people to the franchise, as shown by the sales. If you look at the Halo community around 2010, just by sales alone you’d have to expect that at least over half of the people would’ve started with Halo 2 or 3, and that’s ignoring the natural outflow of people. Reach didn’t have that luxury.
And I’m not even making the argument here that Halo 2 was more, or even as hated as Reach. I’m just saying that it had enough detractors that you can’t say it was liked by almost everyone. It had a mixed reception among fans. Probably not as huge a divide as with Reach, but it still had a significant enough number of people who didn’t like it to make headlines, so to speak.
> There was obviously enough negativity towards Halo 2 for it to gain traction. I mean, if there hadn’t been a significant number of people who had something against the game, we wouldn’t be here discussing this because I’d have no examples to point at.
The same argument can made for practically anything with a mass following, yet it doesn’t necessarily indicate that the particular product in question received mixed reviews. From personal experience, I know that it’s just simply not true that the community was “mixed” on Halo 2. Though objectively, it’s difficult to determine the actual consensus on the game at the time; the only certainty is that we can determine the consensus on Halo 2 and Reach presently. I’m not denying that Halo 2 had its detractors, but the community reception of the game was hardly “mixed.” It’s akin to saying that Citizen Kain received mixed reviews because Robert Ebert didn’t like it (which isn’t true by the way).
> Why Reach has recovered less than Halo 2 and 3 I already explained: it didn’t bring as many new people to the franchise.
That’s completely subjective though. Whether or not prior experience with the series had any affect on peoples’ opinion of Reach is entirely unknown—so is the actual number of returning players. Reach sold a few hundred thousand copies more than 2, so it has that going for it in that capacity—but other than that there’s no way to know how many Reach players also played Halo 2, and whether or not it had an affect on their opinions of the game.
> And I’m not even making the argument here that Halo 2 was more, or even as hated as Reach. I’m just saying that it had enough detractors that you can’t say it was liked by almost everyone. It had a mixed reception among fans. Probably not as huge a divide as with Reach, but it still had a significant enough number of people who didn’t like it to make headlines, so to speak.
It may be true to say that some people were mixed on Halo 2, but it’s not even remotely true to say that the general consensus on the game was “mixed.” Even as a PC player at the time, it was apparent that Halo 2 was this sweeping craze, and the following sales numbers of Halo 3 reflects that. I appreciate the philosophical aspect of your argument, but based off of personal experience alone, I know that it just isn’t true. I don’t expect anybody to take my word on it, but that’s how it is.
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> The same argument can made for practically anything with a mass following, yet it doesn’t necessarily indicate that the particular product in question received mixed reviews. From personal experience, I know that it’s just simply not true that the community was “mixed” on Halo 2. Though objectively, it’s difficult to determine the actual consensus on the game at the time; the only certainty is that we can determine the consensus on Halo 2 and Reach presently. I’m not denying that Halo 2 had its detractors, but the community reception of the game was hardly “mixed.” It’s akin to saying that Citizen Kain received mixed reviews because Robert Ebert didn’t like it (which isn’t true by the way).
Well, we have to remember that with anything that doesn’t get totally slammed to the ground (and Reach didn’t, it was a popular and performed reasonably well in reviews), “mixed” means that only a small portion of the community genuinely dislikes the game to the point of complaining about it online. “Mixed” in this context obviously cannot mean “30% of people didn’t like the game” or anything such, because such a game would not survive, let alone get a critic score of 91 (or a user score of 8.1) on metacritic. We’re talking about small portions of the fanbase to begin with. So, I took “mixed” to mean somewhere along the lines “the detractors had a significant online presence”, not “the community was literally split in half between haters and lovers” which doesn’t even apply to Reach, or even Halo 4 or 5.
> 2533274836465274;18:
> That’s completely subjective though. Whether or not prior experience with the series had any affect on peoples’ opinion of Reach is entirely unknown—so is the actual number of returning players. Reach sold a few hundred thousand copies more than 2, so it has that going for it in that capacity—but other than that there’s no way to know how many Reach players also played Halo 2, and whether or not it had an affect on their opinions of the game.
Subjective? What do you mean? Whether Halo 2 and 3 introduced more people to the franchise than Reach did is a completely falsifiable question. Of course that doesn’t mean we have the sufficient tools to answer it conclusively, but considering the sales of the games, it requires some pretty strange assumptions to assume that Reach brought anywhere near as many new people to the franchise as Halo 2 or 3 did. You’d essentially have to assume that existing players were massively reluctant to buying Reach to the point that they’d not only offset the inlfux of new players, but would actually lead to less sales. Then there’s of course that fact that Halo 2 and 3 were significant culture phenomena, Reach not so much, and such phenomena tend to be good at drawing in people who wouldn’t otherwise be interested.
> 2533274890899554;1:
> Was having a discussion with a fellow spartan about how he says Halo 5 is the worst and most hated of the series and i had to disagree. I’ve been listening for years to all the hate for Reach.
>
> Maybe im biased since it’s my favorite Halo , but that game seems to be CONSTANTLY picked apart.
> From the perceived canon breaks and the armor abilities , that game seems to he reviled in the Halo community and i dont get why.
Personally, I think the red-headed stepchild would be Halo 4, or even Halo 5. Interestingly, they’re both kind of inversions of each other. Halo 4 had an interesting, or at least a properly told story, while it had a mostly unbalanced and kind of broken multiplayer (although I enjoyed SWAT and Fiesta). Halo 5 (currently) has probably the best multiplayer and forge since Reach (along with some of the absolute best sound design I have ever heard for any game), while its story is the easily the worst executed one in the franchise. It’s sad because Halo 5 has all of the necessary ingredients for a great story, but none of them are mixed together properly. Cortana’s return as a villain is a great concept, but her return is flat out told to us way too early in the game, when it should have been saved for the middle or end of the story, at least in the final few levels where her revival is revealed, along with her shift in personality. Also, Chief going rogue to search for Cortana has potential, but it is wasted by poor story-telling. Chief’s decision to search for her doesn’t build up after find possible clues or anything interesting. Also, Jul M’Dama is wasted as a villain, being killed off so easily in the first playable level with almost no buildup or a proper sense of antagonism towards the players. Jul M’Dama should have been kept alive until at least the middle of the game where he would die and then clues would be found that lead to the eventual discovery of Cortana’s return. That would be far more interesting, but sadly that is not the case. Also… the fight between Chief and Locke was… lame. Just lame, man. The Assassination animations from Reach and Halo 4 have more dramatic weight and entertainment than the fight between Locke and Chief… save for that one bit of dialogue between the two regarding Cortana.
Halo Reach may have some divided fans, but it is not a hated game. I think people just don’t like playing a game where you are destined to lose at the end. You know, Reach falls no matter what happens and Noble Six dies in a last stand. Yeah, no other game ends that way, but… If Reach didn’t fall, the Pillar of Autumn wouldn’t have needed to escape, and we wouldn’t have the events of Halo: Combat Evolved. Reach has to fall for that to happen. Ironically, Reach must fall for Humanity to win against the Covenant, and that is a bizarre thing to comprehend. Or maybe the fans just hate having their kills aborted by the opposing player using Armor Lock.