Slashdot Mirror
An Early Look At Halo: Reach
KatanAlpha writes "Based on all the information coming out about Halo: Reach, it seems that Bungie's basic philosophy has been: 'The sequels to the first Halo sucked. Let's fix that.' We've already seen a little bit of this with Halo: ODST, wherein Bungie returned to some of the core elements of Halo gameplay and ditched many of the changes introduced in Halo 2 and 3. Reach seems to continue this idea while trying to invigorate the franchise by introducing greatly improved graphics and additional gameplay mechanics."
I don't think they really did. They just didn't do anything vastly different than the first game. Slight bump in graphics, tweaking mechanics a bit... disappointing, I suppose, if you are expecting massive improvements between games. Maybe more disappointing if multiplayer is your focus, instead of the story and campaign.
Sometimes I think the industry is to quick to rebuild a game from scratch for the sequel, when the players really would be happy with just more story, more levels, more characters. We didn't need the special effects in the Empire Strikes Back to be better than Star Wars; we just wanted to see what would happen next.
IMO, as someone who moved from Doom through Quake to Half Life and then Halo, the only people who make a big deal about the tedium of Halo are those who've never sat down IN THE SAME ROOM, at the same screen, as a bunch of friends, and had an enjoyable couple of hours blasting things together. Halo stood out for its built in co-op for me. Sadly 2 and 3 didn't really add anything to the promising start.