-
Hey, guest user. Hope you're enjoying NeoGAF! Have you considered registering for an account? Come join us and add your take to the daily discourse.
Halo: Reach |OT6| There Are Those Who Said This Day Would Never Come
- Thread starter GhaleonEB
- Start date
Deadly Cyclone
Pride of Iowa State
xxjuicesxx said:
Thing is, I felt it was balanced very well. At long range to mid the DMR demolishes the pistol, but at close range the pistol wins due to quickness of fire.
I do agree that both the DMR and pistol should take maybe one more shot to kill though.
Also, I played Countdown in like 4 of my 8 games last night and all it turned into was someone owning with the sword. Not sure I like that. In Halo 3 it was fine because you couldn't sprint with the sword.
The Real Napsta
Member
Swordbase, bad forge maps, slow movement.PNut said:
squidhands
Member
One game of Firefight Doubles (and a quitting teammate) to get all of the day's challenges. Sweeeeeeeet.
I think this is the most important point. Infection is a game type, which can be worked up in Forge and dropped into any map. Griffball requires a flat space, hammers and a bomb.Dani said:
Invasion requires enormous maps built just for it, unique among all of Halo's game types, ever. And Reach clearly didn't have the resources to spare. It's apparent that Invasion's gain was BTB's loss, and we're still not recovered from that decision. For the benefit of one game type, we lost out on good CTF, Assault, 1-Flag, 1-Bomb and Slayer in a BTB setting.
I'm not against Invasion as a concept returning, but were it to do so, I hope it is in one of two ways. The first is properly resourced, with a development thought process that first asks whether including it would damage any of the other core game types or maps needed to support them. If the answer is yes, pitch it.
The other is to reimagine it as a free form game type that lets you string others together in phases, which is really what Invasion's contribution to things is. Add a game type that lets us have Phase 1, Phase 2, etc. with the ability to string game types together (Phase 2: CTF) and you basically have Invasion (which is just 1-bomb, 1-flag, and Territories strung together, after all). Build that out as a game type option. It would be neat, if the resources existed for it. But it's nothing that needs entire maps built just for it.
ncsuDuncan
Member
Turning the Grifball and Living Dead playlists into weekend-only is a bad idea.
If you remove a playlist like Team Slayer, most of those players will go into Squad Battle and improve that population because it's a similar setup. But if you remove Living Dead, where do those players go? They aren't all going to flock to a single playlist, so the benefit to population really isn't going to be significant.
Besides, there's a good chance that removing Grifball or Living Dead will just drive those players to another game entirely. Grifball could very well be the only reason some people still play Reach.
-------
I'm surprised we haven't seen a DLC map that caters to Living Dead players.
Call of Duty does this with entire map packs. Ours wouldn't have to be exclusive to the zombie gametype or even start that way:
1. Build a small 1-flag map like High Ground.
2. Give it a dark, spooky setting. The 343GS swamp would be a good theme.
3. ???
4. Profit
If you remove a playlist like Team Slayer, most of those players will go into Squad Battle and improve that population because it's a similar setup. But if you remove Living Dead, where do those players go? They aren't all going to flock to a single playlist, so the benefit to population really isn't going to be significant.
Besides, there's a good chance that removing Grifball or Living Dead will just drive those players to another game entirely. Grifball could very well be the only reason some people still play Reach.
-------
I'm surprised we haven't seen a DLC map that caters to Living Dead players.
Call of Duty does this with entire map packs. Ours wouldn't have to be exclusive to the zombie gametype or even start that way:
1. Build a small 1-flag map like High Ground.
2. Give it a dark, spooky setting. The 343GS swamp would be a good theme.
3. ???
4. Profit
xxjuicesxx said:
For me... I've loved zero bloom. Just as another view on some of the points above:
- I love the pistol in my hands. It brings back memories of CE. The game plays faster with it, which is a good thing IMO. The answer to the "doesn't make sense" is to have it a starting weapon or a pickup power weapon, then it makes sense.
- I think the options offered mess up the balance... the pistol as secondary being the chief issue. Needle rifles on maps as power weapons works...
- Bleed through is great IMO. Sure I forget about it sometimes, and die - but we've played vanilla Reach (and slower Halo in general) for years. People forget how fast you could die in HCE and H2 - and it was glorious. You actually get penalized for bad decisions. It simultaneously means team shot wrecks and you are more dangerous individually due to the kill time - assuming skill to headshot.
- 85% is functionally no different than full bloom - for me. Granted... I play on a high latency connection with a low upload... so that skews the experience for me. It does play marginally faster (as now everyone spams with fewer pacing moments). But it really doesn't offer the game play I crave, where ZB comes much much closer to the Halo I'd like to be playing.
- I think the biggest issue for me is inertia and slow movement speed... they are magnified when coupled with ZB.
In the end though - if it's ZB with slow movement and heavy inertia - I'll enjoy that much more than anything with bloom. Particularly if in the final playlist update things are looked at like: pistol primary, or pickups.
Not sure I even get where you're coming from, here.Blinding said:
99% of players (more?) would have missed that snipe - hell, YOU probably would have missed that snipe in 10 other tries. Evade didn't get you the kill, and Evade didn't necessarily even save your life - in fact, it nearly killed you by moving you that close to his grenade. You got that kill by making a really, really hard shot (moving that fast, sideways, and STILL no-scoping a guy is something very few people pull off). He had a DMR - had you not come that far out, the grenade blast wouldn't have stripped your shields, and his shots wouldn't have had a chance to kill you before you sniped him normally.
(Unless, of course, I'm missing something obvious.
)StalkerUKCG
Banned
I honestly think its time for halo to split into a 2 disc game, Campaign And Multiplayer. If you had both installed on the HDD 1 disc could launch everything but the extra dev cost and time to fill two the updated disc format would be more than worth it. Halo multiplayer can get all the attention it deserves and ship with a much larger map count and the Campaign can flourish as it needs to with expansion open environments and a +5 hour story.
Louis Wu said:
I figure that if I didn't have evade, I wouldn't have been able to move out from behind the rock fast enough to get into a position to even be able to pull that off, if that makes sense. I feel that if I didn't have evade and had attempted to still kill him, he would've gotten off the easy headshot no problem, and that because of evades fast movement it turned a situation where I probably should've been killed into one where I lived.
StalkerUKCG
Banned
Based Frankie, Hype Killer!OuterWorldVoice said:
ElRenoRaven
Member
OuterWorldVoice said:
No! Really? Everyone should have known it was. It comes up every damn year at this time. It never fails to.
While here remind David that he's doing some looking into the whole shotgun situation today. lol
LeonSKennedy90
Banned
Is there a one-stop place where I can find out everything Halo CEA does for Reach's multiplayer? I'm a big Halo fan, but couldn't stand Reach and dropped it alongside all my friends. Terrible maps, bloom, armor lock abuse, Invasion fucking up BtB; it was a sad state of affairs. I hear a lot of conflicting reports like 85% bloom or zero bloom or some old maps or new maps or whatever.
Can you help an old Halo player out?
Can you help an old Halo player out?
I'll write a longer post about this on HBO, but the gist of my opinion on the TU Beta playlist SO FAR, while I still plan to collect more games in it:
- Damage bleedthrough makes dying feel frustrating, because you just suddenly die. Out of nowhere.
- It replaces double melee with spray + melee. You only need to burst the AR quickly then melee for a kill. While it makes sense for Classic modes to emulate Halo 1 and Halo 2, in Reach gameplay it breaks the feedback loop. Please take it out of the TU Beta playlist in the next update. Especially when the combat sandbox for Reach was built around the shield's eating the damage and blowing away.
- The Needle Rifle was entirely designed around bloom, and it shows. Remove this weapon from the bloom changes.
- Crouching with the DMR effectively removes bloom in 85%. Normal firing feels like a change for the sake of a change, without really understanding the purpose of bloom in the first place. It makes sense now why they only dropped it by 15%, it's due to the fact that anything more past that point would definitely make crouch shots bloomless.
- If 343 didn't like bloom, what they should have done is lock the firing rate to the bloomless rate we could already do. In this way, the DMR and Pistol would retain their positions in the sandbox and wouldn't throw the Reach combat sandbox into the disarray that Zero Bloom currently does. ESPECIALLY with that Pistol. I warned against this and was called out by both Frankie and Ellis that I was assuming things, and then the gametypes come out and neither weapon is RoF locked which was the entire problem I had with the bloomless DMR shown in the initial video, in that a DMR was firing at the shipping RoF with no bloom, not the fact that it had no bloom itself.
The whole point of bloom in Reach was to let the players shoot faster than the normal optimal cadence at the cost of accuracy. If you want a spreadless weapon to work in a video game, you need to do one of two things:
1) Lock it's firing rate to be slow enough to not be a super weapon
2) Implement a bloom mechanic to have a balanced gun but then let the player shoot a bit faster
So instead of a bloomless DMR that would work in Reach's sandbox (ie one at the pre-existing nobloom RoF), we get what feels half hearted attempt at porting the Halo 2 sandbox into Reach. And then there's the Pistol, which I believe someone in this thread or on HBO said that the 3 shot kill on the Anniversary version feels like more of a formality than anything else.
The Active Camo and Armor Lock changes are so miniscule that I consider them non-factors. We tested the Active Camo from TU gametype to Vanilla and could get about the same distance across Asylum crouch walking, plus or minus a WU.
85% and Bleedthrough need to definitely stay off over in other playlists. Zero bloom is a specialty gametype but it should have been done with RoF locking. If you're going to change the Reach sandbox change the ENTIRE sandbox so that everything still works together. All the TU changes do is slow the game down (as monkey said, Turtle Slayer once people figure out crouching kills your bloom and get ahold of a Needle Rifle), and make it a silly idea to use anything other than the Pistol in the Zero Bloom gametypes, much less the DMR.
- Damage bleedthrough makes dying feel frustrating, because you just suddenly die. Out of nowhere.
- It replaces double melee with spray + melee. You only need to burst the AR quickly then melee for a kill. While it makes sense for Classic modes to emulate Halo 1 and Halo 2, in Reach gameplay it breaks the feedback loop. Please take it out of the TU Beta playlist in the next update. Especially when the combat sandbox for Reach was built around the shield's eating the damage and blowing away.
- The Needle Rifle was entirely designed around bloom, and it shows. Remove this weapon from the bloom changes.
- Crouching with the DMR effectively removes bloom in 85%. Normal firing feels like a change for the sake of a change, without really understanding the purpose of bloom in the first place. It makes sense now why they only dropped it by 15%, it's due to the fact that anything more past that point would definitely make crouch shots bloomless.
- If 343 didn't like bloom, what they should have done is lock the firing rate to the bloomless rate we could already do. In this way, the DMR and Pistol would retain their positions in the sandbox and wouldn't throw the Reach combat sandbox into the disarray that Zero Bloom currently does. ESPECIALLY with that Pistol. I warned against this and was called out by both Frankie and Ellis that I was assuming things, and then the gametypes come out and neither weapon is RoF locked which was the entire problem I had with the bloomless DMR shown in the initial video, in that a DMR was firing at the shipping RoF with no bloom, not the fact that it had no bloom itself.
The whole point of bloom in Reach was to let the players shoot faster than the normal optimal cadence at the cost of accuracy. If you want a spreadless weapon to work in a video game, you need to do one of two things:
1) Lock it's firing rate to be slow enough to not be a super weapon
2) Implement a bloom mechanic to have a balanced gun but then let the player shoot a bit faster
So instead of a bloomless DMR that would work in Reach's sandbox (ie one at the pre-existing nobloom RoF), we get what feels half hearted attempt at porting the Halo 2 sandbox into Reach. And then there's the Pistol, which I believe someone in this thread or on HBO said that the 3 shot kill on the Anniversary version feels like more of a formality than anything else.
The Active Camo and Armor Lock changes are so miniscule that I consider them non-factors. We tested the Active Camo from TU gametype to Vanilla and could get about the same distance across Asylum crouch walking, plus or minus a WU.
85% and Bleedthrough need to definitely stay off over in other playlists. Zero bloom is a specialty gametype but it should have been done with RoF locking. If you're going to change the Reach sandbox change the ENTIRE sandbox so that everything still works together. All the TU changes do is slow the game down (as monkey said, Turtle Slayer once people figure out crouching kills your bloom and get ahold of a Needle Rifle), and make it a silly idea to use anything other than the Pistol in the Zero Bloom gametypes, much less the DMR.
ncsuDuncan
Member
This.GhaleonEB said:
My biggest gripes with Invasion are:
1. Poor map design/versatility.
2. Invasion spawning (and bro spawning).
3. Maps not resetting between phases.
I'd much prefer an "Invasion" gametype that just strings together 3 objective rounds per team:
- Use BTB maps. Headlong looks like a good example. Big asymmetrical maps built for 1-flag. Different phases can still use smaller portions of the map.
- Keep the normal spawning rules from objective gametypes.
- Use discrete rounds that reset players when the map shifts, I don't like how easy it is for the attackers on Spire to get to the Round 3 objective before the defenders can.
Keep the Spartans vs. Elites theme if you want, but I wouldn't bother with the voiceovers and hovering Phantoms/Pelicans. Those seem unnecessary and just add to a map's file size and framerate problems. I hope Halo 4 doesn't have Loadouts at all, but having them in Invasion only would be tolerable (as long as it doesn't eat up dev time).
Whew, I was worried. Master Chief would have had a hard time battling the Covenant armed only with a walkie talkie.OuterWorldVoice said:
(To be fair, Spielberg has admitted his mistake. Unlike Lucas.)
Slightly Live
Dirty tag dodger
LeonSKennedy90 said:
TU just hit Reach preparing the way for CEA, it means CEA Reach playlists will feature "classic" gameplay, like 3 shot to kill pistol and no bloom but vanilla Reach gameplay will be there if you choose to play it. You can try out some of the new TU tweaks right now with the TU Beta hoppers online now for a sneak peak including Zero-Bloom Slayer.
CEA features six classic Halo maps- Headlong, Hang Em High, Prisnor, Beaver Creek, Dammnation and Timberland. Each map will have two versions, Original and Updated, giving you the chance to experience the original layouts and slightly tweaked and updated layouts.
CEA also features a new Firefight map - Installation 04, based on the second level from Halo (the marine rescue point with the huge cliff). It has a new feature - friendly AI that fight alongside you (ODST troops) unique to the new map.
Zeouterlimits
Member
France & Halo, it's a match made en enfer.OuterWorldVoice said:
The Real Napsta
Member
ZB is fine. It plays infinity better than normal Reach.
We just need faster movement (for strafe), high jump (to help with nades) and the pistol to be a pick-up and not a starting weapon.
NR is fine in ZB, but is really sick in 85% gametypes.
Bleed-through is great, it lets you win fights you should win and takes away the herp-a-derp.
AL is still annoying but not nearly as bad as before.
We just need faster movement (for strafe), high jump (to help with nades) and the pistol to be a pick-up and not a starting weapon.
NR is fine in ZB, but is really sick in 85% gametypes.
Bleed-through is great, it lets you win fights you should win and takes away the herp-a-derp.
AL is still annoying but not nearly as bad as before.
Or they could design maps for Invasion, but have them be separated for individual maps. Almost like a Forge World idea. Forge World has what, 7 unique zones? None of them can be strung together very well and have an Invasion experience. If you could string together 2-3 sections and have each section retain its ability to play as an MP map, then I think that would be a fine alternative as well. Note: These structures and such for the phases would be pre-designed not Forged.GhaleonEB said:
LeonSKennedy90
Banned
Dani said:
I think that brings the Reach total of good maps from 0 to 6(well, that Ivory Tower remake wasn't bad, just had crappy Reach gameplay on top of it)
The Real Napsta
Member
Zealot is a good map. But then again it is a lot like Derelict/Desolation
Zeouterlimits
Member
Doesn't work with AAs and has broken spawns, especially in CTF.The Real Napsta said:
LeonSKennedy90
Banned
The Real Napsta said:
It be good if the spawns weren't fucked up.
Watching some Zero Bloom video, wow that Pistol is...really good now. And its a starter weapon? LOL I bet the Needler Rifle is a beast now.
I'm gonna be so happy to play this game without those bland looking Forge variants
Deputy Moonman
Member
Agreed. The one thing the TU is not supposed to be is vanilla reach. These changes are awesomeThe Real Napsta said:
Thagomizer
Member
StalkerUKCG said:
I don't think the problem is disk space, mate.
Hypertrooper
Member
The new GameInformer will have a 343i Studio visit article:
http://www.gameinformer.com/b/news/...-revealed-transformers-fall-of-cybertron.aspx
You're right, Evade is OP, here is a play I pulled off a little while ago that shows how ridiculous it is. It was also an amazing snipe, but Evade made it possible.Blinding said:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RDb2wfii3dE
Thagomizer
Member
Blinding said:
We never asked for this.
LLTP, but I've been playing Deus Ex:HR lately. Love it. I wish they had Sarif Industries branded merc in the Eidos store. I'd buy the shit out of a Sarif baseball cap.
Ramirez said:
What's wrong with staying in someone's only spawn with a sword and flag that provides one hit beat downs?
http://www.bungie.net/Stats/Reach/GameStats.aspx?gameid=797403748&player=Risen%20GBG
So so broken. Like space on this map without a soft kill, I don't know how it makes it past testing.
LeonSKennedy90
Banned
Looking at my Bungie stats, wow I only played 378 games of Reach before I called it quit. That's sad in the face of thousands of Halo 3 games(and THOUSANDS of Halo 2). Goddamn you, Reach.
All I need is a Classic playlist for 4v4 Slayer/Objective, and a decent BTB playlist that isn't all crappy Invasion maps and ugly Forge Variants, and I'll be back in business.
All I need is a Classic playlist for 4v4 Slayer/Objective, and a decent BTB playlist that isn't all crappy Invasion maps and ugly Forge Variants, and I'll be back in business.
Photolysis
Banned
Havok said:
Didn't Shishka add that under his watch?
Though the state of objective games in Reach is especially weird since Jeremiah made the amazing Team Skirmish playlist in H2. Excuse me whilst I go off and reminisce about how much fun that was.