been playing a bunch of multiplayer and here are my random thoughts
-halo 2 is still great multiplayer and I’m probably just saying it because I understand it the most but even with the “OP” stuff that exists (noob combo tracking, infinite sword energy, etc.) that was “fixed” in halo 3, I never really feel like I’m in a place where I’m just totally boned that was out of my control
-halo 2 spawns feel like they make more sense than halo 3? there have been multiple instances in h3 where I’m locking an area down and then suddenly get killed by someone who spawned behind me because I thought that the area I occupied was larger than it actually is. this is entirely just my feeling and probably not true in any measurable sense, but the spawns feel both really “sticky” to teammates but also spawn zone radii are smaller, creating this dynamic where it’s really easy to just spawn into a real bad situation with the rest of your team AND ALSO, spawn directly behind someone locking your team down. it’s weird!
-definitely leaving h2a off my rotation because it is just aesthetically trying Way Too Hard - I literally reeled back in my chair the first time I fired the BR because it is loud as shit, the animations are super over the top, the UI became worse, there’s a weird jingle as you wait for the game to start, even the announcer is going super hard while telling you to KILL ENEMIES TO SCORE POINTS even though the only people playing h2a are people who have been playing halo for a while? the BR is balanced so that you’re trading kills way more often if you just kind of stumble into each other and play the neutral 5-shots out? it’s just a whole lot and I don’t like it at all
-halo 3’s original maps are great and I love playing in them, but there are some maps that I can only assume were added in a DLC where it’s like, what were bungie thinking when they created it? like there’s one that takes place in a ship that feels like they took Longest from Halo CE and wrapped it around itself, but the spawn mechanics and the narrow corridors and lack of second story make it so that there’s no possible way for the map to become anything than “stack a bunch of people in a corridor against the other team who has done the same thing and whichever team has the power weapon wins”, and the lack of flanking routes makes it so that you’re entirely reliant on your spawn to hopefully get you behind the enemy team? there are more than a few maps like this where they feel designed very specifically for an objective game or more players but they get dropped into the team slayer 4v4 playlist and it’s just a shitty unfun 10 minutes
-halo reach grenades are by far the worst, because I haven’t had any complaints about grenade weirdness in h2 or h3
my take on the KILO FIVE TRILOGY (novels Halo: Glasslands, Halo: The Thursday War, Halo: Mortal Dictata by Karen Traviss) -
Legitimately very good novels even if they’re Halo novels! Like it just feels like good sci fi, at several points I had to remind myself “oh yeah this still happens in the universe with the Master Chief and the video games.” Basically it follows this ragtag bunch of ONI operatives in the murky post-Halo 3 universe who are running around stirring up trouble to make sure Earth’s Enemies remain all infighting and unable to threaten Earth’s imperial interests. There’s a lot of really interesting cross species interactions, you root for most of the characters, and you get some really neat delving into the horrific backstory of the SPARTAN program (what with the kidnappings and the child abuse and whatnot). Like it’s the first Halo novels I read that really went into, what would an average person with a moral compass think about any of this evil state-terror shit? And actually pulls it off without turning into a morality play.
There’s some really fantastic characters including: a Spartan learning how to be a real person, a couple of hard boiled ODSTs who are the Dumb Guys of the squad, a washed out ex-Spartan turned arch-spook, the ONI commander who’s basically the Queen of Darkness (must be modeled on Madeleine Albright or Margaret Thatcher), Elite dissidents, squabbling Jackal salvagers, disaffected colonial rebels, etc. The Arbiter and Lord Hood show up as slightly-dim front-of-the-cereal-box Good Guys who don’t actually know a third of what’s really going on. Good stuff!
I’m trying to figure out which of these other Halo novels can hold my interest after these. Are the first three published by Tor any good? (Contact Harvest, Cole Protocol, etc) Or any of the later ones?
I’d like to read more of like, the Halo Reach associated canon (not Fall of Reach I actually think the game is more interesting), or more of the post-war stuff that ties into like Halo 4 or whatever. I never played Halo 5 still.
Ghosts of Onyx is lore important to a lot of 343’s shit I think but I never got through it as a kid because the idea that there were just More spartans somewhere was fucking stupid to me. Contact Harvest was written by the guy who wrote most of the lore for Halo at Bungie. I had Cole Protocol and I can’t remember anything about it lol so gl with that one. Evolutions, the short story collection, is pretty good if I remember right? I like the story in it where a 14 year old writes an essay about how fucking stupid colonialism is. Honestly for a stretch of years there after Halo 3 they could’ve just published my extremely good 37 chapter fan fiction about two lady spartans being gay and wrestling each other as canon instead and Halo fans would’ve been better off.
I did read Ghosts of Onyx and it’s pretty forgettable although! It can be considered lore to Halo Reach (it talks about the Spartan-III program which is where we get Carter, Kat, Jun, Six, everybody but Jorge). Not that those characters actually show up in the novel. but yeah the prose is very by-the-book and you’re honestly best served just reading the Halopedia page for it.
I really do like Reach’s gunplay the more I play it. Just feels good running around the Campaign maps.
I think the main flaw of ‘competitive’ reach MP was treating it like Halo 2/3 and thinking the precision rifle needed to be the default weapon. I think that doing Reach 2v2 on smaller maps, without sprint, pistol start and the DMR being a power weapon spawning with limited ammo, could have some potential to it. slightly weaker shields? IDK, just thinking out loud.
Really like the idea, that plays well to Reach’s strengths.
DMR is absolutely a power weapon in Reach and it’s kind of insane in retrospect they just hand it to you constantly. Like the campaign is full of racks with 4 absolutely worthless SMGs on the one side, and 4 game-breaking DMRs on the other. I just played through most of Reach on legendary and basically the other non-power-weapons existed for when I ran out of DMR ammo
What’s up with all the 2 million and change Reach campaign IL scores? Are they hacking or did they find a trick to repeatably gain score and just repeat that for days?
The being suspiciously close to 2 million makes me think it’s the latter, i.e. they did a ridiculously boring thing until the psychological milestone of 2 million, then declared victory
(Gaming records are subject to a particularly strong version of Benford’s law, I could even say!)
yeah with the way the maps are designed in reach (they’re enormous) DMR is a power weapon because any time you’re caught outside you basically lose the duel if the other player gets the first shot off
in previous halos the range of that duel was such that you could duck into another room pretty easily and throw a grenade and be mostly fine, but the size of reach’s maps makes it so that there’s nothing to duck behind and the lack of grenades makes it so that you can only use 1 or so to ward them off of you and most of the time it’s just a winning trade for them to chase you down, which is pretty counterintuitive to the way that most of the original trilogy plays, where chasing is almost always a bad idea unless you see them reloading or you know they’ve thrown all the grenades
yeah, it’s interesting to look at the way “neutral” works for these games because it gets established with the pistol in halo 1 being far and away the best weapon to be holding that isn’t a power weapon, but the combination of move speed and map design made it so that the times a pistol wasn’t effective were pretty clearly delineated and additionally, the ineffectiveness of the pistol at certain ranges didn’t make the weapon completely useless - if you were good enough or got the jump on people you can still win engagements at ranges that the pistol isn’t good at
I think the main differences between halo 1 and 2/3 neutral are due to increasing the time it takes to kill someone from 3 shots with the pistol to 5 shots with the BR and then getting rid of health as an X factor if you miss a head shot on the third pistol shot; it makes it so that the neutral game is slightly more important because you can’t just skill check your way out of situations like you can in halo 1, you have to be aware of how the duel is going and also aware of where the duel is taking place because the increased TTK allows other people to jump in easier
with reach I feel like the DMR was trying to strike a balance between the extended neutral time introduced in 2/3 but keeping the lethality of the pistol, and I feel like the designers thought that armor abilities would introduce a meaningful decision during neutral that would allow people to do cool things, but in practice most of these abilities were a get out of jail free card that would completely reset the neutral game in a way that allowed someone else to just pop in and turn neutral into something else entirely. and because the DMR is effective over such a long range, the ability of other teammates to turn a 5 shot neutral into a 2-3 shot engagement is much easier and it’s pretty frustrating to feel like you’re just stuck out in the open with no way to get out
I’ve said to Veronica that it becomes a lot easier to accept Reach’s multiplayer when you just accept that the DMR is that game’s magnum. I actually started doing significantly better than my opponents when I limited my firing rate to get maximum headshot accuracy, instead of what everyone else does which is spray constantly with it. it’s a versatile weapon though. Reach is great and deserves merit
I feel like maybe this is a weird point to get hung up on but having bought Reach and been fortunate enough to be in the Halo 3 and ODST PC betas one of the biggest thing that sticks out to me about the Master Chief Collection is the completely awful loading screens.
In multiplayer matches maybe they make sense, giving loadout info and an overview map, but in campaign why the heck are you showing me a screenshot of the next map and the mission objective which the cutscene I haven’t seen yet will give me anyway? Why do I have to know the par score and time? Immersion breaking and completely baffling especially given how unobtrusive Bungie’s loading screens were on consoles in the first place. In some moments they felt like an important pause for consequences and events to sink in, even.
Anyway, I just feel like it’s a shame we’ll never be able to run this in 4K https://youtu.be/daLvkZqsVR8 and that we lost Auntie Dot.
