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."
Some parts were fun, I admit, but mostly the levels were extremely repetitive. I especially remember the Library level - where you had to do the same thing over and over - move through hall after hall which looks exactly the same and enemies which behave the same - I have never felt so bored by an FPS.
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.
No it didn't change anything, it was pretty much a Halo 3 expansion which cost more. It didn't really play much differently (For a non augumented human, an ODST is still strong enough to beat a brute to death with his rifle).
Halo 2 was worse than 3, but they were good games, not great. After the first time round theres not much else to it (unless you hunt easter eggs etc.). The only reason we still play Halo 3 is because its one of the few games that support 4 player spilt screen and LAN at the same time, so with a couple large TVs and 2 consoles we can quickly play 3v3/4v4, or have 2 per screen for co-op. Its odd such games (Im looking at you Call Of Duty) allow 4 player split screen, but as soon as you try a lan game your limited to 1 per console.
"I may be full of crap about this game, and I may be wrong, and that's fine." -Jack Thompson
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
<RANT type="no-more-pre-release-marketting" class="big">
Bungie is supposedly going to do yet another Halo, only this time it's supposedly going to be much better than the previous ones and here's an article with what the producer's PR/Marketoids think should be said on what it's supposedly going to be like.
Reminds me of all the articles we used to have a couple of years ago about the latest and greatest new software that was coming out: it usually turned out to be neither that greatest, as ground/breaking or the seamingly flawless experience the software house's Marketing people had described it to be for the preview.
Now we have the same type of bull as game previews in Slashdot, kinda like the almost-paid-for, page filling pap which is the standard fare of the "Previews" section of the large (and mainstream gaming industry fanboy) game sites.
Until we actually have a post by someone with hands-on gaming experience on the game, maybe we should save the space for more interesting news, like say, new developments in the area of waste treatment - more substance and less perfumed s*it.
</RANT>
For me it's about enhancing the feeling of immersion. The story doesn't have to be revolutionary (and that's just as well, because they're almost always not), it just has to be enough to encourage suspension of disbelief and give some level of empathy with the character(s). You're never going to get a story that comes close to the best of the written word because the two media are playing to their own strengths. In a game, you have to have the "game" parts which obviously detract from the story parts - Hamlet wouldn't be so good if five out of every six pages was just dedicated to Hamlet beating waves of enemies in sword combat, or exploring locations for health/ammo pickups.
Bioshock did this really well, IMHO - sure the main plot was nothing we've not seen before, but that's not where the feeling of immersion came from. It was more from the information you discover and piece together on your own, exploring and finding journals, tracking the journeys of characters you never actually meet in the game, discovering the origins of the characters you do fight/help in the game, it made the game world feel more real (dispite the slightly silly delivery mechanism of tape recordings dotted everywhere, which made if feel like these people experimenting with prototype tweeting). I know people who played through the game as a straight FPS without exploring this rich back story, without even realising it was there, and that's fine if the FPS experience is all you're after, but for people who want to feel a bit more involved with the game there was a much deeper experience to be had.
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.
Would you have felt more comfortable playing as a pacifist running like hell from the aliens the whole game, trying not to crap yourself?
Actually, that might make for an interesting game.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
All my friends who got into the game didn't bother with the halo books... they read what arguably inspired halo. Even an elitist snob might enjoy it.
"Ringworld is a Hugo, Nebula, and Locus award-winning 1970 science fiction novel by Larry Niven, set in his Known Space universe and considered a classic of science fiction literature. It is followed by three sequels, and ties into numerous other books set in Known Space. Ringworld won the Hugo Award in 1970,[1] as well as both the Nebula and Locus Awards in 1971."