wanna co-op on legndary with the no respawn skull on
also i always considered reach to be deliberately action-figurey and never felt like it was COD-ed out, particularly re: the squad of characters being power-ranger color-coded and like one’s a tank man and one’s a sniper person and one likes grenades or whatever, funny to see pushback against that here. makes me curious to play it again
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The Halo 3 engine had a lot of plasticky surfaces and Reach is essentially Destiny engine development on Microsoft’s dime so at least aesthetically it’s more muted. I still think it’s in line with the art produced for earlier games and there’s nothing Modern Warfare about the copious vehicle sections.
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its 343, its gonna be a month or more
MCC was done by third party developers, 343 did none of the actual development.
Color palette was definitely an intentional choice; look at how much more saturated Destiny is, with more advanced materials. Other choices line up with a ‘darker’ world, like removing English freakouts from the grunts. Or even look at the scenario of the first levels: alien marines protecting a rustic native population that reacts with fear and hostility, shouts a language that is translated for the player, that contemporary stylistic element in vogue from films depicting American military experiences in Iraq and Afghanistan, first put in games in Modern Warfare. That aesthetic style often hijacks the narrative from its high-level elegaic feel, which only surfaces briefly when the music stirs against an alien skybox.
Those campy squadmates may not stand up to the nuanced psychological portrayal of strange mustache-chops but given Bungie’s facility with character-driven stories…I think it’s the best they could do at the time.
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yeah but you’ve thrown in with the consoles, I’m committed to the personal computer life here
thought it was crossplay BOOOO
i thought it was crossplay?
anyway:
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8k cap on Performance XP from any match. what!?!? why the fuck?? now unlocking armor is gonna be even more of a slog. just bring back cR already, this xp shit sucks
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comments reminding me that Halo 1 has the best weapon balance of any halo game
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343 specifically said they have no plans to implement crossplay right now but will think real hard about it
I think the confusion is because it wasn’t clear if the Xbox PC version would work with the Steam version (it does).
i started a solo legendary campaign yesterday and the sabre section apparently has enemy damage/aggression tied to framerate
had to sit in the back the entire time to have any hope of finishing that
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I’ve never actually played much reach multiplayer, so coming into this after having 1-3 be my only halo multiplayer games is kind of weird?
it feels like they made the non-sprinting movement speed slower than in previous games to account for sprint being a thing
I feel really fragile compared to previous games - getting caught in the open results in death a lot more than I remember in 1-3. this is especially apparent in the map remakes; on the hang em high remake, I just feel like stepping away from the red/blue spawns in any way is tantamount to suicide, so a lot of the games on that map open up with people just sniping at each other with DMRs until someone gets killed, freeing people up to make runs for weapons
but in halo 1 I felt much more able to use the rest of the map and get angles on people. the seemingly decreased runspeed makes that map feel so much bigger than it did in H1 so I went from really loving that map when I played it on LAN to it being one of my worst maps and something I’d like to avoid
grenades are also way more lethal? and thus they’ve reduced the number you can hold, but it’s made it much harder to do any kind of real space control with them because I get only one to use offensively and the second one I have to keep just in case I get chased. they were pretty lethal in halo 1 but having a 3 shot pistol makes it so that if you mistime the situation and throw a grenade as someone gets an angle, you’re a shot behind and lose the trade
like, the rule in the first 3 halos was NEVER CHASE a one shot 1v1 because more often than not that time you spend chasing gives them the ability to set up a kill on you with a grenade or power weapon, but it doesn’t really feel like that’s the case here - I’ve been chased down by so many people because I ran out of grenades and the trading aspect of melee makes it so that it benefits the person chasing me to try and get the trade, rather than resetting and finding another angle or moving away
so this all makes it feel like I have way less ability to use the map space to do things I want to and it’s kind of frustrating to me
I don’t know if any of this is rooted in reality tho it’s just how it feels to me having never played reach multi before
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yeah reach multi is really bad with default settings, enough so that i held a strong bias against any discussion of reach on here for the longest time. idk if they decreased the walk speed but it definitely feels like they made the maps way bigger. the other thing with the DMR is i’m pretty sure its core spread (i.e. its randomness without bloom) is far less than the halo 1 pistol, so it can lock down an entire map way better than the pistol ever could
that’s a good point about grenades, honestly 4 of each worked great for halo 1, if anything they should be limited by map spawns not by a hardcoded limit of two. if you can collect 4 grenades then great, just make them rarer to get
honestly not having played xbox live in reach’s heyday and hopping on just now, those MLG kids weren’t kidding about how big a deal Zero Bloom No Sprint makes to the gameplay. especially with mouse controls, it changes a chaotic mess into something far more precise and controllable. Team Hardcore actually feels like a game i would play competitively
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bungie’s obsession with reticle bloom reach going forwards has been overall awful for their games. I’m glad people are finally realizing this after all these years
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yeah bungie bloom is peak appeasement of reddit balance complainers who will never be satisfied anyway and are generally dogshit at the games regardless of the meta composition
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we’re still running super turbo tournaments 26 years later & every online community has a contingent of 30+ year olds who post about quakeworld whenever a new bad multi fps launches but every lifestyle game with a community manager and a meta change every x months in the name of balance will be forgotten an hour after kotaku post about the server shutdown
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it’s funny because if you go on TeamBeyond.net you can find Actual Halo Scientists who have written thousands of words on the impact of each game mechanic, synthesized into a Grand Theory of Halo, and I actually think there’s some value to that
like, look at these threads: you can make the argument these people have thought about halo way more than anyone should think about halo hah. halo CE stans are like the backpackers of Halo (halo itself being sort of like the ‘classic hip hop’ heads of popular music) but i think they have valuable things to say about the way game mechanics interact with each other to produce pleasurable frictions and choices.
do i agree every halo besides CE is Teh Suk? no. do i think there is a very strong trend away from parsimony and towards skill flattening in the name of accessibility, producing worse competitive multiplayer? yes
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like, I still think Halo CE’s weapon and powerup sandbox is the simplest and most coherent of the bunch for competitive multiplayer. pretty much every weapon is useful in a competitive 2v2, except maybe the needler - and there’s three items, all valuable.
| weapon | short | mid | long | spawn | role |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| pistol | x | x | x | default | utility weapon, but with some random spread and relatively low autoaim compared to others in the series. three shot kills are montage-worthy in themselves due to skill required |
| AR | x | default | backup weapon, does high damage to health, can really mow people down if they have no shields. fast melee for the double melee glitch (you can destroy somebody at close range with two whacks by throwing a grenade to cancel the animation). oh yeah the automatic weapons in this game have headshot capability, both AR and plasma rifle. I think they brought that back for reach haha. | ||
| sniper | x | x | power weapon | an incentive to go get it / nade it to yourself, low autoaim but high rate of fire incentivizes skill in aiming | |
| rockets | x | x | x | power weapon | the most valuable item on most maps that have it, an immediate field of conflict. slow projectile velocity, very visually ‘trackable’ in a way doom projectiles are, huge splash damage. like the sniper, a locus of conflict whenever it spawns |
| plasma rifle | x | x | on map | its freeze capability and high damage to shields makes it super unique in the series and valuable for use. freezing another player makes them a sitting duck in this game. they tried to bring it back in reach but it gets crowded out by many other weapons in the sandbox. | |
| plasma pistol | x | on map | like the AR, fast melee for BLB glitch. relatively strong tracking compared to later plasma pistols and it doesn’t drain the battery when you hold it charged. | ||
| needler | x | on map | slow projectiles, highly visible, but can be effective in close range / needle explosions. | ||
| frag grenade | x | x | x | default | many. use nade tricks to nade weapons to yourself. huge splash damage and 4x carrying capacity means it’s effective for area denial. grenades on ground cause chain reactions. grenade must settle before exploding, allowing creative uses of nades e.g. wall bouncing to manipulate the timer. |
| plasma grenade | x | x | x | on map | similar to frag nades except with a slightly longer fuse (iirc) and ability to stick to players |
| overshield | power weapon | locus of conflict, invincible while charging the shield. can be grenaded to yourself. | |||
| camo | power weapon | you can fire an AR bullet for ‘quick camo’ to cancel the cloaking animation. very effective in comparison to other camo in the series. can be naded to yourself. | |||
| health pack | on map | one thing to note is that there is significant ‘bleedthrough’ in halo 1 making health packs and health overall a very important game mechanic. |
this turned into a longer post than i expected but I think it’s a testament to the game that you can just start up a 2v2 with default settings and that is basically The Gametype for competitive gameplay going on 20 years now.
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the other thing they do in Halo 1, but don’t do as default in other halo games, is static timers for weapons/item spawns. in other words you can track that at 2 minutes of a match, this weapon will have spawned… at 3:30 sniper is spawning… etc. other halo games use ‘dynamic spawns’ in which weapons spawn based on the time that weapon was despawned off the map - i.e. if you’re holding the sniper rifle, a new sniper will not spawn until you drop it and it disappears. in halo 3 and after they allowed you to change this setting in forge. the predictability is useful for competitive play.
ah see I didn’t know whether that was in reach or not which explains a lot about my pathing through the maps lol