113 replies to this topic

[Frost]

So. Halo: Reach. Anybody else picked this up?

I'm about halfway through the campaign and I gotta say wow. FINALLY, after 9 years (if you're an Xboxer) or 7 years (if you're a PC/Mac gamer) we got Halo 2.

I consider what came before a couple of meh expansion packs with made-for-TV pablem story and gameplay, after which we got a short little Halo 1.5 in the form of ODST, and now with Reach we finally got the Halo 2 that was advertised but not delivered. Unlike 2 and 3, I'm REALLY enjoying Reach. Multiplayer's actually decently fun too, although not in the league of Halo 1's multi, it's a HELL of a lot more fun than Halo 3 which I played for a grand total of 2 days before becoming sick of it and never going back.

[Ranger_Joe]

My copy arrived yesterday.  Unfortunately, I've only managed to put an hour or so into the campaign.  I'm loving it.  I dipped my toe into multiplayer.  The one map I played was fantastic.  One game mode that I'm interested in is firefight. As the sole Xbox360 owner in my circle of friends, my friends list for organizing a game of firefight is rather small.  If anyone out there has picked up Halo Reach, and wants to try this out, feel free to add me.  Gamertag: RangerJoe79

[NAG]

While I haven't bought it yet, I agree that multi is closer to Halo 1 (but yeah not equal) from my experience on the public beta. I found Halo 2 and 3 multi to be incredibly annoying. I might pick up a copy when I have some free time.

[Tetsuya]

I agree with the sentiment that it is more "Halo 2" than the 'real' sequels were, however, i have a few major gripes:

*  The Campaign is brutally short.  I cleared the whole thing in one go at about.. 6 1/2 hours.  For sixty bucks ( had i paid for it personally instead of having acquired it for our business) thats a laughably short game.  

*  It violates previously established canon, both in the games (even Halo: CE) and in the novels.  It completely obliterates Halo: The Fall of Reach (a good novel, and written from Bungie's own notes), which thereby severeyl damages Halo: First Strike and Halo: The Ghosts of Onyx as well (as events in those novels are predicated upon the events of The Fall of Reach).  

*  The story itself just doesn't hold up to scrutiny:

Spoiler

1.  The game starts with Noble Team (5 Spartan IIIs, and one Spartan II) being dispatched to find out what happened to a com station that is apparently the only point of contact between Reach and the rest of humanity......  what?!  A planet with 700 million citizens, that is the UNSC's private military reserve and is the single most fortified planet short of Earth.. has only ONE com station capable of contacting earth/other colonies... AND IT"S IN THE FREAKING MOUNTAINS AND TOTALY UNDEFENDED?!  Dear god Bungie.... make some sense!

2.  It is revealed not long after that there has apparently BEEN A FREAKING COVENANT SUPERCARRIER floating above that area of Reach THE ENTIRE TIME.  And that apparently it had been there long enough to deploy a pair of 10-20 story jamming towers that projected a cloaking field to hide it..... this leads to three..

3.  Reach, (see above, most important human planet there is other than Earth, and the most important planet there is tot he military) apparently doesn't have satellite coverage of any kind.  On earth, now, in the 20th century, we have enough satellite coverage to  view any spot on the planet at any given time of day... but not on Reach!  The moment that com relay went offline, they should have had satellite imagery and up-to-date info on what was goin on on the ground.. and even if they dont have total satellite coverage, they should have at least had enough coverage via satellites and orbital platforms (more than 60 Orbital MAC cannons, and dozens of shipyards) to notice A FREAKING 10KM LONG SUPERCARRIER holding station above a portion of Reach for the hours to nearly a day it would have taken for them to build the cloaking towers (what amount to small skyscrapers!).  

4.  The best member of Noble Team gets killed for no reason with no buildup and no sense of anything other than "what?!"

that being said, i enjoyed the game as a standalone game - self contained, it is an excellent game (story shortcomings not withstanding) but if i had paid for it .. id be pretty pissed about the absurdly short length of the campaign.  

Gruntpocalypse (a Firefight variant), however, is hillariously funny and not nearly as easy as you'd think.

[Ichigo27]

When I look at halo reach as a whole, I'm thinking of a game that could grab my attention span for 2 hours and after that I go back to a older game in my collection. Unless it's that much better then halo 2 and 3. Still Halo 1 was something I enjoyed for a few days, and got tired of.

[Smoke_Tetsu]

Ichigo27, on 16 September 2010 - 11:10 PM, said:

When I look at halo reach as a whole, I'm thinking of a game that could grab my attention span for 2 hours and after that I go back to a older game in my collection. Unless it's that much better then halo 2 and 3. Still Halo 1 was something I enjoyed for a few days, and got tired of.

When I first started playing Halo I had very high expectations because of how people kept talking about it. But then I discovered for someone like me it's more of a run of the mill FPS. Nothing I hadn't experienced before including the limited arsenal system. About the only thing that was new to me was the shield system. I had a difficult time getting through the first part of the game because it was failing to grab my interest especially with the art direction, I didn't like driving the warthog around the island too much and it wasn't until I trudged through that and got to the second half of the game that it started getting interesting which at that point it sort of turned into a clone of a Valve game with enemies that sort of reminded me of the headcrabs in Half-Life and an AI that made me think of the AI's they have in Valve games... namely GladOS in Portal. That's when the plot thickened and got my attention but I still didn't think it was as groundbreaking as people made it out to be to be perfectly honest.

What also helped me enjoy the game more now is how I can run it at full settings at my native resoluton (2560x1440) at 6x antialiasing which makes it look mighty smooth.

I ended up beating that game but it's kind of a chore to go through those parts I disliked again.

[Sneaky Snake]

Smoke_Tetsu, on 17 September 2010 - 02:59 AM, said:

When I first started playing Halo I had very high expectations because of how people kept talking about it. But then I discovered for someone like me it's more of a run of the mill FPS. Nothing I hadn't experienced before including the limited arsenal system. About the only thing that was new to me was the shield system. I had a difficult time getting through the first part of the game because it was failing to grab my interest especially with the art direction, I didn't like driving the warthog around the island too much and it wasn't until I trudged through that and got to the second half of the game that it started getting interesting which at that point it sort of turned into a clone of a Valve game with enemies that sort of reminded me of the headcrabs in Half-Life and an AI that made me think of the AI's they have in Valve games... namely GladOS in Portal. That's when the plot thickened and got my attention but I still didn't think it was as groundbreaking as people made it out to be to be perfectly honest.

What also helped me enjoy the game more now is how I can run it at full settings at my native resoluton (2560x1440) at 6x antialiasing which makes it look mighty smooth.

I ended up beating that game but it's kind of a chore to go through those parts I disliked again.

Your coming to the game to late. Your right, now it doesn't seem revolutionary, but 9 years ago when it came out it was terribly revolutionary. It changed the whole fps genre. Halo is like lotr in the fact that it has an incredible background story and plotline. Pretty much zero games (or books) have that.

In 2001 when it was released it was frakking amazing

[teflon]

To be fair, that's a bit like playing Doom in 2004, after having played Half Life 2 and saying "eh, the graphics sucked, and there wasn't any story." Just taking it completely out of its context in time.

[jgwdoc]

Sneaky Snake, on 17 September 2010 - 05:31 AM, said:

Halo is like lotr in the fact that it has an incredible background story and plotline. Pretty much zero games (or books) have that.

Ok, I call blasphemy. That's like saying GOW3 is like the Iliad. Be serious.

[Smoke_Tetsu]

teflon, on 17 September 2010 - 08:35 AM, said:

To be fair, that's a bit like playing Doom in 2004, after having played Half Life 2 and saying "eh, the graphics sucked, and there wasn't any story." Just taking it completely out of its context in time.

You don't know who you are talking to. I'm someone who enjoys watching old films and playing games no matter how old they are and enjoying them for what they are and putting myself into the mindset of how revolutionary they where for the time. I was thinking even compared to what I've already played back then it wasn't THAT revolutionary. Like for example all the FPS on the PC that where around before Halo came out. To be honest it was mostly just revolutionary in my opinion to those who where introduced to the FPS genre on consoles just like Goldeneye is to them. I've played lots of old games after their time that I missed for one reason or another the first time around and got a lot out of them and really felt that they where more visionary when they made them.

I know I used some bad and more recent examples (Portal) except for Half-Life which I was thinking of the original which predates Halo for comparison but I wasn't totally basing it on recent games. I would give Half-Life more of the honor of the accolades that Halo is being given... but even it stood on the shoulders of games before it. Even just seeing the master chief for the first time when the Xbox first came out I was heavily reminded of characters like the Doom marine. Again by the time I got my hands on a controller even back then I had already been inundated by FPS being a PC gamer.

My post was a bit more contemporary because that's when I actually finally sat down to actually beat the game. For the past 9 years I had trouble getting into it. To be honest it has never hooked me in the way other games did.... again even back in 2001. It didn't make me want an Xbox and I used to try it out a lot.

But I've talked about Halo here before and I know my opinion on it isn't too popular.

By the way apart from the art direction which is subjective I thought the graphics where actually pretty amazing especially for the time. At least aboard the covenent ship... I didn't particularly ever care for the islandish levels.

Speaking of playing games after their time I missed out on playing Silent HIll 2 and I played it recently (PC version with the graphics pumped up as high as they can go) and I really enjoyed its plot and graphics and everything to be honest more than Halo. Not that I didn't have fun playing Halo which is evident in the fact that I actually beat it but I like other games of its time better.

[Tetsuya]

jgwdoc, on 17 September 2010 - 09:55 AM, said:

Ok, I call blasphemy. That's like saying GOW3 is like the Illiad. Be serious.

i dont think he meant quality of backstory, merely that like, Tolkien, the writers at Bungie developed bucketloads of backstory that you most never even see.  (like LOTR).

[Smoke_Tetsu]

jgwdoc, on 17 September 2010 - 09:55 AM, said:

Ok, I call blasphemy. That's like saying GOW3 is like the Illiad. Be serious.

I agree... his statement was a ludicrous exaggeration comparing Halo to all games and books. Even back in 2001.

[Tetsuya]

Smoke_Tetsu, on 17 September 2010 - 10:02 AM, said:

You don't know who you are talking to. I'm someone who enjoys watching old films and playing games no matter how old they are and enjoying them for what they are and putting myself into the mindset of how revolutionary they where for the time. I was thinking even compared to what I've already played back then it wasn't THAT revolutionary. Like for example all the FPS on the PC that where around before Halo came out. To be honest it was mostly just revolutionary in my opinion to those who where introduced to the FPS genre on consoles just like Goldeneye is to them. I've played lots of old games after their time that I missed for one reason or another the first time around and got a lot out of them and really felt that they where more visionary when they made them.

I know I used some bad and more recent examples except for Half-Life which I was thinking of the original which predates Halo for comparison but I wasn't totally basing it on recent games. I would give Half-Life more of the honor of the accolades that Halo is being given. Even just seeing the main character for the first time when the Xbox first came out I was heavily reminded of characters like the Doom marine. Again by the time I got my hands on a controller even back then I had already been inundated by FPS being a PC gamer.

uh... like what? THe only notable story-driven FPS on the PC side at or near when Halo came out was Half-life... and Half-life owes everything it is to Marathon.  You know, that *other* game Bungie made way back when, before Half-life was even a glimmer in Newell's eye and when the FPS to beat was Doom.  As glad as i was to have a great Mac centric publisher, if Bungie had had the sense to put Marathon on the PC  you wouldn't even know who Valve is.  

Halo was revolutionary for the time; vehicles, limited arsenal, the shield system.  The depth of storytelling, the varied environments, the graphics (for the time, were phenominal).  The slower pace of the game, the precision of the weapons (none of them were junk; all had their uses) the quality of the multiplayer maps.

and mind you, this praise is coming from a guy who knocks of 3 points on a 10 point scale to ANY shooter i have to play on a console controller.  

I'm part of a business that provides gaming room/hardware to conventions; mostly sci-fi/fantasy and anime, and we STILL get requests at every convention for Halo 1 tournaments.  In fact, at our upcoming gig, we had to schedule TWO because there was so much interest.  

How much interest in Half-life, The Orange Box/TF2/et al?  None.  

The only other shooter that people even wanted for tournaments is MWF2; and in another year, people wont even remember that game exists and we will STILL be running Halo tournaments.

Smoke_Tetsu, on 17 September 2010 - 10:10 AM, said:

I agree... his statement was a ludicrous exaggeration comparing Halo to all games and books. Even back in 2001.

only if you take it of context; see above.  

And again... in 2001 there were... what?  Rise of the Triad? Unreal Tournament (not a bad game, mind, but not Halo).... Half Life?  Ill give you Half Life; but Half Life wasnt revolutionary either - Marathon was.

[Smoke_Tetsu]

I did say Half-Life stood on the shoulders of other games. Other games had vehicles limited as they where like for example SiN... which came out in 1998. Even some Build games like Shadow warrior had vehicles you could drive in some parts. It's funny you mentioned ROTT because it had a limited arsenal and came out the same day as Marathon and had other things as well such as breakable glass, simulated dynamic lighting, room over room, and a bunch of other stuff. I'm a Mac gamer now and I love the Mac but not all FPS conventions where invented on the Mac or by Bungie.

The shield system is one thing I did attribute to halo though.

[Sneaky Snake]

jgwdoc, on 17 September 2010 - 09:55 AM, said:

Ok, I call blasphemy. That's like saying GOW3 is like the Illiad. Be serious.

Haha don't worry. I've read lotr and all tolkiens other books at least several times. I mean in the way that just like lotr is the king of backstory and stuff in the book world, halo is the king of backstory and stuff in the fps world. Obviously the two aren't nearly on par.

It's rare these days to even get an fps with a good story, let alone one that's backed up by extensive notes, novels, etc.

Your taking my comments completely out of context Smoke

And why are you comparing Halo to Silent Hill in terms of which you like better. They are totally different genres. Personally, I enjoy strategy games more then shooters, but that doesn't mean shooters suck

[Smoke_Tetsu]

King of Backstory.... Heavy Metal FAKK2 for example had the legacy of two movie anthologies as well as a long running comic book (I'm a fan of both the comic book and the movies) behind it but it still was a rudimentary story in the sense that it was a heroes journey. But then again all stories are based on something existing... and Halo is still a video game story even back then. To be fair I did enjoy the game and the story but I never thought it was ever the greatest thing since sliced bread.

Speaking of which I just remembered many many games had backstories which where mostly in their design documents that where made before the game was made for example Doom had a bible that Tom Hall wrote which much of it didn't make it into the game... but provided the framework for the game. Doom also has novels and an (admittedly BAD) movie. Having all that isn't unique to Halo. I just know Half-Life must have had something even more elaborate in its design documents at least.

[Smoke_Tetsu]

Sneaky Snake, on 17 September 2010 - 10:39 AM, said:

And why are you comparing Halo to Silent Hill in terms of which you like better. They are totally different genres. Personally, I enjoy strategy games more then shooters, but that doesn't mean shooters suck

OK think of it this way. I'm a FPS freak so if I like a game like that more than Halo or even some other game better from back then well... First Person Shooters is my favorite genre of games. I was just giving an example of a game just as old that I liked better. You would think that as a FPS freak that I would automatically like Halo better right? We where also talking about stories and I felt Silent Hill 2 had a better more mature back story than Halo.

Tell me what does this mean if I took it out of context.

Quote

Pretty much zero games (or books) have that.

[teflon]

Fair enough Smoke. Halo definitely has a ton of detractors.

BUT, even if you didn't enjoy it, you have to admit that it was a major turning point in the genre, for better or for worse.
I can't think of any FPS' that predated it that had the recharging health, the limit on weapons, that kind of squad based enemy AI, etc. etc.

Not to mention that it was a pivotal title with regards to Microsoft's entry into the console arena.

And for all the good that Goldeneye did on N64, bringing the FPS to consoles, Halo was the one that really cemented how it would happen from then till now.

So, you might not have enjoyed it, but it's influence is very far Reach-ing (ha!).

[Smoke_Tetsu]

Like I said I think Halo was more innovative for consoles than for FPS as a whole especially on the PC. I can see how for a console player it was absolutely amazing... I'll give it that.

I have to bring up ROTT again though as it had a very limited arsenal compared to all other games back then and it came out the same exact day as Marathon. In it you only carried a sidearm, an MP40 and one rocket launcher and you pressed a button to toggle between your bullet weapon and rocket launcher. If you ran over a different type of rocket launcher the one you have gets dropped and you take the new one. Each rocket launcher only had five shots.

Half-Life started the AI thing I remember them praising it for the AI of the soldiers and how they could if they wanted make creatures flock.... etc. Halo just evolved (hah) that.

That being said I may sound like I'm totally down on Halo but I did end up enjoying it particularly the second half of the game and I really liked the final levels especially the escape sequences. I'm just not all jazzed up about it as you all apparently are and never was. However I am playing it again and I am enjoying it more now than I did in the past. I actually do like it.

[Janichsan]

Smoke_Tetsu, on 17 September 2010 - 10:31 AM, said:

I did say Half-Life stood on the shoulders of other games. Other games had vehicles limited as they where like for example SiN... which came out in 1998. Even some Build games like Shadow warrior had vehicles you could drive in some parts. ...

Smoke_Tetsu, on 17 September 2010 - 11:14 AM, said:

Like I said I think Halo was more innovative for consoles than for FPS as a whole especially on the PC. I can see how for a console player it was absolutely amazing... I'll give it that.

I have to bring up ROTT again though as it had a very limited arsenal compared to all other games back then and it came out the same exact day as Marathon....

It's not rare that some things have been done before. There were first person shooters before Doom, there were MP3 players before the iPod, there were shooters with vehicles and limited arsenal before Halo. That still does not invalidate the point that all three were defining for their area. Halo certainly had a huge influence on first person shooters, so that many games in the genre took many elements from it. This does not only affect consoles, since games are more and more streamlined with consoles in mind, but also on PC and Mac. Just take the Call of Duty series (at least from CoD 2 on): weapons handling, regenerating health, vehicles – there are obvious parallels to Halo. And since many games copy CoD... well, you get my drift. Just like Doom was the prototype of virtually all first person shooter up to the late 1990s (in major parts even including Marathon and Half-Life), so is Halo the prototype for most first person shooters after 2001.

Besides: when it comes to story-driven shooters, I would say that System Shock had more influence than Marathon.

Smoke_Tetsu, on 17 September 2010 - 10:44 AM, said:

King of Backstory.... Heavy Metal FAKK2 for example had the legacy of two movie anthologies as well as a long running comic book (I'm a fan of both the comic book and the movies)...

That's a pretty bad example in my eyes, since the Heavy Metal comics and movies neither tell a stringent story nor form an actual background universe. It's a collection of unrelated stories that only share the adult target audience, but definitely does not would count as a "backstory" of any kind.