reach

It’s gruntpocalypse now - redux!

The conversion is luxurious - reach always looked good but it would choke and sputter on the 360. I used to have boring asshole opinions about how 30hz was essential to the ~feel~ of halo but those stopped holding water with the destiny 2 pc beta. you can have heavy and smooth, chunky and silky - somehow.

It’s weird to think that this is a different conversion of tiger (engine) than d2 and feels distinct independent of the game.

They added sabres to forge mode so I can make rogue squadron 4.

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Imgur

Take that hog, Six. (hog content)

The AI is the stark contrast from destiny. I get why destiny needs constant crits and “ads” and “mobs” et cetera but a single elite in reach is more interesting than most bosses in destiny.

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destiny is such a step back from halo it honestly makes me sad when i go back and play the bungie installments. reach also just dropped for xb1 mcc and its cool to finally see it not as a blurry fuckin mess

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If only we could get Destiny gunfeel against Halo enemy compositions

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i love this game so much

the pc version sounds like shit compared to the beefy old 360 audio but hopefully that will eventually be fixed :confused:

still so much fun to play though

i am meauxdal on xbox (beta) windows 10: https://account.xbox.com/en-us/profile?gamertag=meauxdal

everyone post your shit so we can play together

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this is a questionable port

the biggest problem is the terrible audio. the quality sucks, the mix sucks, everything about it sucks. apparently they’re working on it, which is great, but maybe they should’ve playtested this thing with the volume on instead of off, because it’s not even functional as is. there are no graphics options. you get “original” or “enhanced.” enhanced looks pretty good, I don’t have a lot of complaints about it, but not giving people the option to tweak what they want is just lazy. if you’re playing on borderline hardware, you don’t get to make worthwhile compromises; if you’re playing on higher end hardware, you don’t get to do anything, no render scaling, no AA options, no anything. you can set the frame rate to 60 capped or uncapped, there is no option to cap at 144, and apparently 343 are saying the unlimited is “experimental” and they won’t even stand behind it functioning. it seemed to work for me, but I’m one person. the game defaults to a 78 FoV, which is ridiculous, and some terrible mouse sensitivity settings.

I’m pretty sure multiplayer doesn’t have any skill based matchmaking

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The sound is unacceptable but adding tweakable options to ports is meaningful and dangerous work that I wouldn’t expect; the Enhanced setting just pushes the object LoDs out to maximum and beyond that would mean making new art. I’m glad they left the art untouched and wouldn’t trust their taste to improve it beyond a modder’s ‘HD texture pack’ or some nasty ‘realistic’ Reshade filter.

Although I never liked Reach’s aesthetic to begin with. Moving Halo away from glorious plastic soldiers towards Modern Warfare is grotesque.

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I like the environment art in a proto-destiny way.

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i hadn’t really noticed the audio issues until playing some campaign earlier on and one section in particular sounded like it was recorded on astro a40s in someone’s bathroom, hmm

on the other hand it is really nice to play good bungie stuff that doesn’t require getting 5 other people to give up at least an hour

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Destiny is so much stronger in its oily colors, though! And it doesn’t get bogged down with Tough Operators Talkin’ Tough Feelings (preferring the cold seduction of beautiful spreadsheets, instead?)

this is the heart of why I’ve never played reach single player. I played multi with friends back in the day, but seeing my friend play one mission of the single player really turned me off. it was obviously bungie trying to mix what they knew with what infinity ward figured out, and at the time that just read as an inert modern warfare to me. with a lot more distance today and the death of CoDlikes as the dominant gaming form, I think I can approach it with a bit more nuance than that, especially since I haven’t played a bungie game since and their core mechanics are so appealing. the squad based design of this game is great, it’s one of those ideas that seems so obvious after the fact given the way the halo games work. but the downside of that is instead of the chief/cortana banter and vague sci-fi narrative hokeyness, the trappings are pure in-the-thick-of-it jibberish and hooah nonsense. it’s a big loss.

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I agree with all that except I also hate squad games and NPC companions that just confuse me about the terms of my actions

the number of bugs I’ve had to send back to designers because they’re being flagged as audio bugs when IN FACT THE AUDIO IS WORKING CORRECTLY but the prop that the sounds are attached to is fucked up and it went unnoticed because no one listens to the game while they’re playtesting it

is too fucking many

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eventually I’ll get this game

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just waiting until this thread updates and tells me they fixed the audio

its 343, its gonna be a month or more

Oddly these days Microsoft has managed to combine the long code-to-release turnaround associated with shipped, highly-tested software, and the marginally functional QA practices of an agile outfit

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I always hate speculating about this stuff because making games is hard but the situation where either nobody noticed the audio issues, or more likely, noticed them but decided to ship anyway and fix it later is completely insane to me considering how badly they fucked up the MCC the first time. Putting these guys in charge of probably their biggest franchise was an alpha business move

they probably had to get it out by the end of the year to pump game pass numbers

not touching it again until the audio works, though. unfortunate that I burned the 3 months for a dollar thing to play this