why I don't like default reach

Games Other Halo
1

An explanation of medium range weapons and their use

Why the Pistol and BR were good

These two implements were highly effective at this task of killing other players in a quick manner. From a technical standpoint though as Halo games have progressed the absolute fastest they could kill was made longer and longer.

That is besides the point at the moment though. These weapons have a high accuracy meaning that when you miss a shot this is because

  1. You weren’t aiming at them.

This is the first most common reason someone misses with the Pistol or BR. Your ability to accurately aim the weapon is just not good enough to hit the enemy. That isn’t to say you never hit them, but you are missing when you shouldn’t be.

  1. They strafed to avoid the shot.

This is the second most common reason for missed shots, but this is only relevant at high skill level gameplay. I will explain what strafing is and its importance in it’s own section.

Skill expression through the Pistol and BR

These weapons and their effectiveness in the right hands made for extremely controlled and skillful gameplay. When a player was better than another player they would win in most situations when all other factors are equal because the weapon in their hands is consistent and reliable in it’s ability to kill other players. Consistency and Reliability are important for these weapons because it means that when two players face off against each other, it is the more skilled player that wins a duel.

The Pistol and BR were able to fulfill this role handily. High skill gameplay in CE, Halo 2, and to a slightly lesser extant Halo 3 was decided by which of the two players was the better one in terms of ability to aim, ability to strafe, and ability to put themselves in positions which were advantageous to assaulting enemy positions.

Why speed is good

Remember when I said the speed with which one could kill opponents in a duel was important?

That is because the moment you start a duel with a single player, in a team game, their teammates will be moving from unknown positions to attack you and help their teammate. The ability to get in a duel, win the duel and take minimum damage after it, is needed in order to survive the second and even third duels you will most likely get into after you have killed your opponent. Assuming the player you just killed wasn’t completely clueless, you will have taken some damage and the ability to make sure that amount of damage was small rather than large is important, because the reinforcements will show up at full health leaving you at the disadvantage considering you have been damaged.

With a reliable weapon and more skill than your opponent, you can still kill these reinforcements.

Why the Default DMR is bad

The first noticeable difference between a BR and DMR is the fact that the DMR is a single shot weapon. This is unimportant.

The more important second difference is the extreme inaccuracy build up that was added to this weapon.

After three trigger pulls the DMR raises it’s inaccuracy level to the point that perfectly aimed shots can miss at a 5 foot distance to an enemy player. The counter to this gameplay change is to wait without shooting to allow the accuracy to reset. This change is extremely detrimental to high skill gameplay because it introduces randomness that has the ability to counter even the best player’s inherent skill and the only counter to this gameplay randomness is to slow down their shots.

This forces players to make a difficult choice.

Choose between a quick, but random decision of who survives the duel or a slow skill based duel.

At this level the speed of the kills is the more important factor because, as I said earlier, as soon as a duel starts you are going to have reinforcements show up to help kill you.

A difficult choice

The problem with this choice is that, should you choose the fast option because you are worried about the other player’s teammates, you will be forced to play a game of chance that no longer factors in your individual skill. Perfect shots can become misses and missed shots can become hits.

A detrimental effect of this game of chance is that after the game decides who won randomly, the surviving player is most likely in an extremely weakened state in which their shield is down and their health is most likely extremely damaged making them an easy target when the reinforcements show up. This is even worse considering the fact that strafing in default Reach is no longer an option.

The second choice is even more problematic.

Choosing to slow down your shots in order to make sure they hit leaves your opponent alive longer and and gives more time for reinforcements to show up while you are still busy fighting a single player. Should teammates of your opponent arrive before your duel is done you will most likely be unable to survive because the slowed speed of an accurate DMR can not keep pace with two accurate DMRs being fired at you.

In the past a situation like this could easily be resolved with the ability to aim well and the ability to strafe.

Since strafing is no longer an option and the DMR is either accurate, but slow or inaccurate while fast, a 2 on 1 situation will almost always lead to the 1 dieing.

These changes make the DMR an inconsistent and unreliable weapon. These are attributes which should not define the main medium range weapon.

Strafing

A strafe is movement a player makes to attempt to throw off the aim of opponents. Strafes are usually characterized by a back and forth movement that is used to attempt to get out of the way of an opponents crosshair.

The ability to perform a strafe is important at high level play because most of the players that are at that level have aim that is good enough to quickly kill someone that is not performing a strafe.

When two players find themselves in a l on l duel the winner should be the player that performed a better strafe and countered the other player’s strafe with better aim.

Strafing was most prominent in Halo 2 because the movement system had an extremely steep acceleration curve giving players precise control over their movement and allowing a high degree of control over a strafe. This means that as soon as you change the direction of the movement stick, your spartan will also almost immediately change direction.

CE and Halo 3 strafing are less effective because the acceleration curves of these two games are less steep. Despite strafing is still possible and can be effective, just not as effective as it is in Halo 2.

Reach Strafing

Strafing in default Reach is completely ineffective because the acceleration curve is the least steep. Compared to all previous Halo games, changing direction takes the most time in Reach. This means that movement is dulled and less responsive to player input and because it takes so long to change direction, attempting to strafe is almost equivalent to not doing anything in the first place in default Reach.

2

Movement Speed, Jump Height, and the Addition of Armor Abilities

On top of the dulled movement caused by the long time it takes to begin moving, the top movement speed and jump height are much slower and lower.

The movement speed and jump height in previous Halo games allowed players to take short cuts on maps through clever use of level geometry and its interaction with the high Halo jump height. This became called trick jumping. Trick jumping made it possible to speed up movement across a map when taking these types of built in shortcuts to move to disjointed areas. Trick jumping also allowed players to place themselves in advantages positions to set up ambushes or assault the other team’s location.

Trick jumping in Reach

There is no effective or useful trick jumping in Reach that can be done at the default movement speed and jump height without the use of Grenades or Armor Abilities.

The Addition of Armor Abilities and Changes to Gameplay Justify Them

Armor Abilities were added to the game with the express, developer confirmed, purpose of giving all players access to the game altering effects that Equipment had in Halo 3.

Sprint

One of the most prominent of these additions is the Sprint ability. Sprint allows a player to boost their movement speed in the forward direction for a maximum of 7 seconds. This ability is the first in a line of things that were added to Reach, but then required changes in gameplay to legitimize their presence.

Armor Lock

The second most prominent Armor Ability addition is Armor Lock. Armor Lock allows a player to become invincible, while stuck in place, for a maximum of 5 seconds. While invincible a user will be immune to damage and be able to severely damage a vehicle that comes in contact with the user.

Jetpack

This ability allows a player to raise their elevation vertically for 9 seconds if used in one burst. This can be used to move to higher ground or above a target.

Evade

This ability launches a player approximately 5 feet in a chosen ground level direction. It can be used twice in one charge.

Dropshield

This ability allows a player to deploy a destructible energy shield that has the added ability of healing the player’s health while they are inside it. The shield will last around 15 seconds on it’s own.

Active Camouflage

This ability allows a user to turn invisible, similar in effect to the common powerup found in past Halo games. The energy for this ability drains faster while moving than it does while staying still. It’s maximum length is 40 seconds while it’s minimum is 15 seconds. While in use the player’s sound will be muffled and a radar jammer effect will block the user’s radar and any enemy with a radar that come near them.

Hologram

This ability allows the player to send out a body double that walks in a straight line to the position that the player was looking at. The copy will last 10 seconds and will flicker while moving and while being shot.

Why these are all bad for gameplay

Let us start with the abilities that resulted in or from the lowering of the movement speed.

Sprint and Evade

These two abilities are unneeded in previous Halo games because the base movement speed allows us enough freedom to get to different areas of the map in a reasonable amount of time. The only place that a speed boost would possibly be justified is in BTB, but these are not limited to BTB and therefore are free to screw up smaller level gameplay.

A speed boost that you can use anywhere was intended by the designers to allow for players to move to different areas of a map in a shorter amount time than can be done with the slow movement they themselves gave us.

Players will actually most commonly use these abilities to run away from a duel that they realise that they can not win and why shouldn’t they? The main things a player will be concerned with are getting kills and avoiding being killed. When they have the ability to get behind cover in a short window of time they will use that to their advantage. This has the effect of slowing down individual battles as players run away from each other and give chase to runners after a duel has started.

When an enemy has run away you have two choices. You can look for a different enemy and leave that one alone or you can give chase.

In the situation that you allow an enemy to escape the best course of action is to tell your team where that player is currently and or where that player is going assuming that you can not kill them without putting yourself at risk.

In the situation that you choose to chase the player, you have now most likely given control of the encounter to the enemy player. If it is necessary to chase a player that means that you no longer have a direct line of sight on the opponent and that they can now prepare for your arrival. Chasing can be okay if you have an absolute advantage such as having a power weapon that would be effective in the given situation or they were extremely weakened before they decided to run. In most cases though chasing is a bad idea and should not be done.

In the end the ability to disengage and get to cover more immediately than another player can get to you makes more than a few encounters anticlimactic as they end half finished with the runner escaping.

Justification of lowered jump height

Jetpack

This ability was intended by the developers to be used as a stand in for the Gravity Lift Equipment of Halo 3 and therefore only used to get a player to higher level on the map and only that.

In practice this ability is used to fly above the entire map and use the height advantage found there to rain death on players that have stayed at ground level.

The ability can also be used to get to high points that are not ground accessible which can then be used to wait and regenerate shields because ground level players can not attack you or be used as a high vantage point from which to shoot players on the ground accessible level of the map.

To stop these uses maps have a return area that can be placed on maps and will kill players when they stay out of bounds to long. This solves the problem of Jetpackers using high areas as vantage points for long periods, but this does not stop them from hiding in these areas for a short while to recover shields or stop them from flying over the map and firing on those on the ground.

Being able to fly over the maps and shoot at those on the ground allows the Jetpackers to completely ignore the flow that a map was designed to have because a Jetpacker can fly over all the structures that make up the map. This also highlights another problem with the maps. The cover on Reach maps was not designed with this evolved use of the Jetpack in mind.

3

Jetpacks and Cover

Cover on a map comes in two common forms. Obstructions meant to block players from shooting you while at the same elevation as you. Rocks, walls, and other small Forge objects or map scenery are examples of this type of cover.

Rooms are the second common form of cover in most Reach maps. Rooms usually block off the player the area from attack of any direction.

Jetpacks easily get a player over obstructions, which were made as ground level cover. The problem with this is that a player most often uses obstructions as cover to keep themselves safe from ground level enemy fire while they wait for their shield to regenerate. A Jetpacker can just fly up into the air and just for this reason alone can probably catch at least one player unaware who has a low shield and was waiting for it to regenerate.

There are two way to avoid being caught off guard by Jetpackers and neither is a good option. The first is to constantly be looking in the air. This will let you see players that are jetpacking, but now you are no longer focusing on your own level and that leaves you vulnerable to the jepackers teammates.

The second option is to only take cover in rooms, but this cuts you off from being able to help your team and rooms are extremely prone to grenade spam giving the other team an easy solution if they feel the need to kill you or flush you out.

Both of these types of cover interact badly with Jetpack. When you go behind an obstruction you can be shot from above and when you run in a room you are safe, but cut off from your team and risking grenade spam.

Armor Lock, Dropshield, a lack of cover and slow movement speed

Armor Lock and Dropshield both have the express purpose of allowing a player to survive when they are in a disadvantageous situation. One makes the player invincible for 5 seconds and the other creates a destroyable cover that heals the player. Both cause an extreme slowing of the pace of gameplay by bringing duels to stand still when they cut the players off from interacting with each other.

Knowing these facts about these two abilities the first question you should be thinking is, “Why was this added?”

The answer is the new interaction between players with slower movement and grenades.

At default speed a grenade is easy to bounce directly to another player’s position and, because players move slowly and grenades explode quickly, they are very effective. Perhaps too effective.

This issue with the new grenades was noticed by Bungie as can be seen with these two additional Armor Abilities that were added.

Armor Lock and Dropshield were added to help players survive the powerful grenades that Bungie themselves had created. At least that was the intended use.

Once again we can see that what Bungie intended to be and how players actually react were extremely different.

Armor Lock

After adding Armor Lock in the designing phase, the developers probably immediately noticed that many players would just wait next to an Armor Locker until they came out of Armor Lock. This most likely lead to the addition of the Armor Lock EMP effect that we can observe in the retail release of this game. The EMP is meant to discourage enemy players from approaching a player in close quarters, but this assumed that players would not use Armor Lock while enemies were already near them.

In close quarters Armor Lock can be used as a melee weapon wit players jumping into and out of it in order to use the EMP effect to take out opponent player’s shields and then kill them with a melee. The ease with which this can be done thanks to the third person view and instant turning makes Armor Lock a close range weapon in the right hands. The fact that this powerful close range weapon is something that players can choose to spawn with is just another addition to list of things that are wrong here.

Dropshield

Dropshield was similarly made with the intention that players would use it to give themselves temporary cover when they were losing a distance battle.

Of course the obvious abuse of an infinite supply of shields was found and players most commonly used the Dropshield to camp on top of a defended objective with power weapons. This use plagued BTB and Objective games so much that the Dropshield has been removed from everything except for Invasion where this sort of abuse is still common.

Why Armor Lock and Dropshield may have been seen as necessary

The two problems that caused these abilities to come into existence are the lack of cover on most default maps and and the slow movement speed that you must deal with to move to that cover.

Most of the maps have areas of extremely sparse cover and should you be caught in one of these areas without one of the speed boost abilities it will take a good bit of time to move to a safer area. This wouldn’t be as significant of a problem if the default movement wasn’t inadequate for getting us to that cover.

Another thing to mote is the many changing scales that have happened between Reach and every past Halo game.

The player model is now shorter and smaller. The player field of vision is now wider. These two changes combine to make maps and objects look and feel bigger. Which only magnifies the movement speed problem. Distance to cover feels bigger compared to past games and the speed that you use to walk to it looks slower. These effects combine to unconsciously reinforce the idea that Reach is a slow game in the player’s mind.

So in short, Armor Lock and Dropshield were added to allow players to survive tough situations when they should have been dieing.

4

Active Camouflage and encouraging Camping

I will go ahead and say that I have absolutely no idea what the developers were thinking when they made this power up into an Armor Ability. The previous stance had seemingly been against camping, but I can’t imagine what high level logical fallacies had to be in play for this to get past the idea phase. The only possible use of Active Camo that stops working when you move is for staying in one place all the time and once again that is detrimental to the fast paced gameplay that Halo is centered around.

Players use Active Camo in the expected manner. Sitting around in or around their own base. Some players will occasionally use it just to screw up the enemy team radar, but these instances are few and far between. One of the most annoying uses of Active Camo that has evolved is the practice of Camo Sniping. A player that has chosen Active Camo will grab a sniper rifle and then sit at a secluded location and wait for enemy players to come into their crosshair.

The main problem with this practice is how powerful it can be at a distance where the balancing factors of the Camo user having no sound and and the radar jammer are both irrelevant. The sniper can perform this with little repercussions. The most effective strategy against it would be to either avoid areas that the sniper can see and watch for when they do choose to shoot or to have a group of players assault the sniper’s position.

Of course there is also camping with close range power weapons and Camo, this is slightly less of a problem because you will know of their presence thanks to the radar jammer.

Besides the problems with player habits that would come from just giving them free Active Camo, designing that Camo in a way that rewards camping only further slows down the gameplay and bogs it down.

Hologram

This does not mess with any of the workings of Halo gameplay. It is just funny.

In Conclusion on Armor Abilities

Most of these additions only serve to slow down that game and can only be justified by limiting the player’s base options through slowing them and their movement.

None of the Armor Abilities helped the base gameplay by being added to this game, except for Sprint being in BTB.

Besides Hologram, they all have detrimental effects in anything lower than 8 v 8 BTB action and most are still bad for the game at that level.

We should have kept our fast Spartans and the ability to minutely control our movement.

5

OPs are full of facts.

6

Everything was true in this essay.

7

The problems you have with Sprint are really problems with map design and utility weapon kill times. Is Sprint a problem in SWAT? No because kill times are so fast that Sprint can’t save you from certain death by allowing you to disengage. Map design is also to blame. Sprint is not a default ability. It is one of many loadouts that can be chosen. This means that maps were not designed solely for Sprint but rather a compromise of all armor abilities. IMO faster kill times with the utility weapon along with better map design would alleviate most problems with Sprint.

The problems you have with Jetpack are due to its ability to reach very high altitudes,as well as hover, and, once again, map design. If Jetpack was more of a Thrust Pack that only allowed for minor gains in altitude, like a double jump, then it would not nullify ground cover. Removing the ability to attain such high altitudes would most likely eliminate your problems with hiding in soft kill zones to finish kills or recharge shields but even if not better map design could solve these problems.

I respect your opinion but I feel like you, and everyone, got a very bad first impression of Sprint and Jetpack that causes you to react with “just get rid of them” when you should be asking how can we fix them. Jog, jump and crouch is a pretty limited set of movement abilities for a genetically enhanced super soldier in the future.

8

^Ya know, that is his and many others’ main problem with the Jetpack: it breaks map design. He even said it in his post.

And please, don’t say that just because something isn’t a problem in SWAT, that it isn’t a problem at all. SWAT is not the main gametype of Halo, don’t make that its end-all.

9

> The problems you have with Sprint are really problems with map design and utility weapon kill times. Is Sprint a problem in SWAT? No because kill times are so fast that Sprint can’t save you from certain death by allowing you to disengage. Map design is also to blame. Sprint is not a default ability. It is one of many loadouts that can be chosen. This means that maps were not designed solely for Sprint but rather a compromise of all armor abilities. IMO faster kill times with the utility weapon along with better map design would alleviate most problems with Sprint.
>
> The problems you have with Jetpack are due to its ability to reach very high altitudes,as well as hover, and, once again, map design. If Jetpack was more of a Thrust Pack that only allowed for minor gains in altitude, like a double jump, then it would not nullify ground cover. Removing the ability to attain such high altitudes would most likely eliminate your problems with hiding in soft kill zones to finish kills or recharge shields but even if not better map design could solve these problems.
>
> I respect your opinion but I feel like you, and everyone, got a very bad first impression of Sprint and Jetpack that causes you to react with “just get rid of them” when you should be asking how can we fix them. Jog, jump and crouch is a pretty limited set of movement abilities for a genetically enhanced super soldier in the future.

I understand that maps have a role in helping these two armor abilities become more of a problem than they could have been. Unfortunately the maps we got aren’t made to interact in a good way with these abilities. As I pointed out in the Sprint and Jetpack sections.

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> ^Ya know, that is his and many others’ main problem with the Jetpack: it breaks map design. He even said it in his post.
>
> And please, don’t say that just because something isn’t a problem in SWAT, that it isn’t a problem at all. SWAT is not the main gametype of Halo, don’t make that its end-all.

Well, if he actually played the main gametype for halo, he would know that.

Nice PMs Cold

If you can’t handle opinions, Stay off the internet.

11

This post has been edited by a moderator. Please do not flame or attack other members.

*Original post. Click at your own discretion.

All my PM did was challenge you to a game of Slayer which you declined. I didn’t want to derail someones thread because of your own childish need to make yourself feel better by attempting to put someone else down. Since you edited your post and removed that option I will respond once, here, and then dismiss you as someone who can talk but not back it up. If I was going to say someone is bad I would be prepared to play them and prove it. You, on the other hand, would rather hide behind your words than let your skill speak for itself. You started this. I offered a method of finishing it. You declined. Its OK, being good is harder than pretending to be good. Have a nice day.

12

This post has been edited by a moderator. Please refrain from making posts that do not contribute to the topic at hand.

*Original post. Click at your own discretion.

> > > ^Ya know, that is his and many others’ main problem with the Jetpack: it breaks map design. He even said it in his post.
> > >
> > > And please, don’t say that just because something isn’t a problem in SWAT, that it isn’t a problem at all. SWAT is not the main gametype of Halo, don’t make that its end-all.
> >
> > Well, if he actually played the main gametype for halo, he would know that.
> >
> > Nice PMs Cold
> >
> > If you can’t handle opinions, Stay off the internet.
>
> All my PM did was challenge you to a game of Slayer which you declined. I didn’t want to derail someones thread because of your own childish need to make yourself feel better by attempting to put someone else down. Since you edited your post and removed that option I will respond once, here, and then dismiss you as someone who can talk but not back it up. If I was going to say someone is bad I would be prepared to play them and prove it. You, on the other hand, would rather hide behind your words than let your skill speak for itself. You started this. I offered a method of finishing it. You declined. Its OK, being good is harder than pretending to be good. Have a nice day.

Nope

13

This post has been edited by a moderator. Please refrain from making posts that do not contribute to the topic at hand.

*Original post. Click at your own discretion.

lol SWAT dude

14

Nice post. I can agree on most things with you here.

I do love the changes that were made with the TU. I would much rather play the TU than the default reach any day. Thanks for this post.

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Nice post, but I doubt most waypoint kids would bother to read it.

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Great job OP. You Really hit the nail on the head with your posts. I like the way you think.

17

I could have writen all that same content with a defferent style.

Meaning that I agree with everything you said.

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> Nice post, but I doubt most waypoint kids would bother to read it.

They would read it, but hardly understand it. Well i can’t speak for most waypoint kids since not all of them are idiotic but i would be lying if the OP is going to be written off as a “try hard”. Sad, but usually true :confused:

P.S: I swear i saw the wall on B.net relinked by RC Clone. Coincidence? Not that i don’t agree, i do. Just didn’t expect this to show up here of all places.

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> > Nice post, but I doubt most waypoint kids would bother to read it.
>
> They would read it, but hardly understand it. Well i can’t speak for most waypoint kids since not all of them are idiotic but i would be lying if the OP is going to be written off as a “try hard”. Sad, but usually true :confused:
>
>
> P.S: I swear i saw the wall on B.net relinked by RC Clone. Coincidence?

It looks like it might be somewhat of a coincidence.

20

> P.S: I swear i saw the wall on B.net relinked by RC Clone. Coincidence?

This isn’t the copypasta you’re looking for; move along.