So can I just draw attention to the currently rather sorry state of Halo: Reach? It has gradually gone downhill over the years, and it can get fairly aggravating at times. Clearly the game isn’t exactly making 343 Industries much in the way of profit anymore, and the old games they need to support are starting to add up. Plus they didn’t even make this game in the first place, so I can see why they may not be quite as interested in working with it, but the lack of attention is really starting to show.
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Honestly the biggest issue I have is mostly down to population. The game is getting old so a good portion of the playlists are either completely dead or barely scraping by. So just use the active playlists, right? Well there’s another issue that comes in to play here. The playlists are separated in to two primary categories; those with Title Update settings and those without. Presumably this was to keep people from getting angry that they couldn’t play with the “authentic” Reach settings, and 343 being hesitant to force it on everyone back then. They actually did a nice job choosing where to place each playlist, as the non-TU playlists are mostly either the less competitive choices (Invasion, Infection) or ones where TU would have minimal effect anyway (SWAT, Snipers.) But then there is Team Slayer, which was stuck in non-TU as well and I can only assume was due to the previously mentioned desire to keep current players happy. At this point in the game’s life this serves very little purpose though. People either don’t notice this differentiation in the way the playlists are organized, much less the specifics of the TU settings, or they do understand and it gets in the way. Remember that quite a few of the playlists are dead population-wise, or close to it. Primarily Super Slayer, which was essentially the TU equivalent to Team Slayer. Even Team Objective and the Arena are dead. You are forced to non-TU if you want a 4v4 game, which is kind of a standard choice for Halo gameplay at this point.
I have yet to meet a single person that prefers non-TU settings over the last, what, eight years on this game? People either hate bloom, sword block, etc, and praise the TU implementation or they don’t know/care about the specifics. That update was probably the best thing 343 ever did for Reach, so credit where it’s due. Unfortunately it was only half implemented, and for some reason has stayed that way after all this time. Some playlist reorganization would be good for this game’s general health even if the TU/non-TU separation is kept. -
The fileshare system. This one has broken in multiple ways. First, the most downloaded/recommended system stopped updating a while back. I can’t say this was particularly heartbreaking, but it was a nice feature to have while waiting in a lobby and such. But that’s not the only issue. Sometimes when using the search function one file will for some reason show up duplicated a few thousand times (quite literally), which makes it completely impractical to scroll through. You have to slowly load pages of fifty files at a time, so when this happens you are effectively barred from seeing any of the other search results. Now that can get frustrating.
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Matchmaking/connection issues. There are so many weird things that can happen with the matchmaking system, and they are usually one-off causes of confusion, so I will just lump them together here. One example being two recent occasions where someone would fail to load a map, which happens sometimes usually due to a damaged disk, but now it seems to just kick everyone back to the lobby rather than choosing another map and eventually removing the culprit like it used to. The issues that reset matchmaking like this one are particularly annoying due to the dwindling population and increasing matchmaking times. Weird stuff has always happened when it chooses a bad host or people start leaving the game, however I can’t help but feel there have been whole a lot more connection issues lately.
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Theater, which has recently been next to useless. Frequently when saving a new film, it will let you watch through some portion of the game then kick you back to the lobby saying, “an error occurred during playback.” Trying to rewind usually causes the error sooner as well. I have yet to find any way around this, and it basically makes any new films with this issue useless. From what I can tell old films do still seem to work at least, but generally when using Theater I want to watch something that happened in a game I just played. It can no longer effectively do this.
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The nameplate system. This one is an old annoyance from when the Halo games were transferred from Bungie to 343’s responsibility. It was simply dropped when 343 took over, and we lost any ability to change these. Anyone who had one equipped at the time of the transfer kept it on their profile, but they couldn’t switch to a different one, and newer players have been entirely left out.
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Online statistics tracking recently being dropped entirely. This one left a bad taste, as I didn’t know it was going to happen until after the fact when a link I use to reach game history started redirecting to a generic informational page. No more game history or stats of any kind, it was all simply removed from Waypoint.
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The extremely outdated announcements upon launch. Not really a problem so much as a source of amusement at this point. Seeing “less than X days until the launch of Halo 4!,” some advertisement for Forward Unto Dawn, or the inexplicably re-implemented notice of the “August Update” whenever the game is launched is just ridiculous.
So sure, the game is perfectly playable and it’s still fun to occasionally jump on for a few games. But pieces are rusting off and “playable” is relative. I’m probably missing some fun examples in here as well, but this is all I can think of currently… Now do I expect the time and effort to be put in to fixing this stuff? Not really, 343 no doubt has other much more important priorities that don’t involve Reach in the slightest. I can dream though.
That is all, I just felt the urge to air my growing displeasure after having yet another saved film break. Have a good day everyone.
-Me