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."
Bungie has never said the sequels suck. However they are very open about what they did wrong and right in their previous games.
As it stands, Halo 3 is still the best multiplayer experience. Halo 1's multiplayer is a glitchfest with maps that were made by a two man team with a guy that just learned how the extrude tool worked the day before. It is unbalanced and only two of it's maps supported vehicles (so of course, everyone just played those two maps). The maximum amount of Xboxes that can join a LAN is 4 so if you want more than 4 people playing, somebody is gonna have to splitscreen.
Halo 2 was leagues better but it suffered from animation glitches and the ability to escape from maps.
Halo 3 refined the balance of 2 and also fixed all the animation glitches and map escapes. After playing it, there is no reason to ever go back and play Halo 1 multiplayer beyond for a laugh. Single player I play once in a while, but the multiplayer is so bad now it's not even funny.
The removal of dual wielding doesn't even change things that much since people hardly do it in Halo 3 anyway. All it really means is that dual-able weapons will now get a damage buff, like they already did to the Needler (went from dual-capable in 2 to a single weapon in 3)
Reach so far appears to be continuing to build upon Halo 3's multiplayer design and balance. Heck, a Bungie employee is already quoted as saying that the weapons aren't going to be drastically tweaked or anything from their Halo 3 versions.
But then again, I'm probably one of the few people that started with Halo 1 in 2002 and don't worship the broke as hell pistol from 1 (which again, was actually a bug that couldn't be fixed in time for ship).
"We need to get over this notion, that, for Apple to win... Microsoft must lose." - Steve Jobs, 1997
Do not even get me started on the "back-story" ... a fascist government that kidnaps kids (replacing them with clones who are sabotaged to die young - and painfully - so that parents do not catch on to the scheme) and puts them through a decade of torturous experiments, maims and kills most of them -- and somehow those kids through some kind of twisted "Stockholm syndrome" become great champions of the fascists, aka the "Good guys", against a bunch of fanatical religious nuts, aka the "Bad guys".
Then again, this is a Microsoft product and so they probably think fondly of this kind of future where corporations like Microsoft get to do this to kids under auspices of "defense of freedom", "protecting the Dumb Masses from Terrible Foes" or some other such utterly self-serving crap.
It is also quite a sad testimony to the current goings on in the American culture that there is so many budding fascists who identify with such ends-justify-all-means "heroics".
"Unlikable" is a rather large understatement.