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Halo: Reach |OT6| There Are Those Who Said This Day Would Never Come

Retro

Member
Dani said:
That name is BS. Comes from the same "leak" on Bungie.net that Frankie shot down as fake.

I wasn't aware, that's just what they have the planet listed under on the Halo wiki I read yesterday.
 

feel

Member
squidhands said:
For all of Reach's faults, I don't think for a second that the game was phoned in. Overly ambitious, I can agree with that most definitely. Many things suffered because Bungie attempted to cram too much in the game. But saying it's not representative of a shitload of hard work is a total cheap shot to a company that I know you love.
I obviously meant at the creative/design/planning level.
 

Slightly Live

Dirty tag dodger
Willeth said:
Tom morello

Morello provided with our first pics of an early build of the Reach campaign when he did his leak including the dev kit running it and was fully legit. No official denials were offered.

Mr Sigma-7 was just another Bungie.net kid that spammed his story and offered not a shred of evidence and was shot down by 343.

=)
 

LAUGHTREY

Modesty becomes a woman
Dani said:
Morello provided with our first pics of an early build of the Reach campaign when he did his leak including the dev kit running it and was fully legit. No official denials were offered.

Mr Sigma-7 was just another Bungie.net kid that spammed his story and offered not a shred of evidence and was shot down by 343.

=)
I gotta wonder why it was at an MLG event though, it doesn't show in the final product.
 

Ken

Member
Willeth said:
Tom morello

0864d6d0.png
 

FyreWulff

Member
Dani said:
No doubt the folks that worked on Reach gave the project everything they could, but did Bungie devote the same resources to Reach as it did Halo 3? Some of the features in Reach aren't up to the standards of their previous Halo game (Theatre) and after playing the game for a long time you start to notice many small things about the game that should have had more polish applied, where you'd expect more polish to have been applied, like in past games but wasn't or weren't.

Reach is a great accomplishment for the Bungie folks that worked on it, but I have serious doubts Reach represents Bungie's full and entire focus as a development studio.

They've said repeatedly that it was a mistake to allow multi-person theater in Halo 3 as it was, and in hindsight would have removed the ability.

Reach was just disabling a feature that only worked 1% of the time over Live and about 50% of the time over LAN in Halo 3.
 
LAUGHTREY said:
I gotta wonder why it was at an MLG event though, it doesn't show in the final product.
I believe it was an on-MS campus event, in which some MLGers were invited to check out the game, offer early feedback.
 

Slightly Live

Dirty tag dodger
LAUGHTREY said:
I gotta wonder why it was at an MLG event though, it doesn't show in the final product.

What? The leak didn't come from an MLG event. It was a private behind closed-doors showing internally at Microsoft.

The dude originally posted his pictures on the Bungie.net forums (without his infamous watermark) and he got quickly banned.

After that, he went to the MLG forums and re-posted them (with the watermark) but some of the folks there didn't believe him because they assumed he just put his name on the pics found on Bungie.net.

He provided more details on MLG forums though to back up his claims and when the story broke most folks sourced him on MLG with the watermarked pictures and the massive list of details.

If you can find the original topic here on GAF, I managed to get in contact with him and he provided me with an additional picture without the watermark that he hadn't posted and he confirmed some of those details with me.

He quickly went quiet though and would no longer talk about it.
 

Karl2177

Member
FyreWulff said:
They've said repeatedly that it was a mistake to allow multi-person theater in Halo 3 as it was, and in hindsight would have removed the ability.

Reach was just disabling a feature that only worked 1% of the time over Live and about 50% of the time over LAN in Halo 3.
Split screen? It's a pain to sign out 3 controllers to re-watch a LAN film.
 

FyreWulff

Member
Karl2177 said:
Split screen? It's a pain to sign out 3 controllers to re-watch a LAN film.

Don't know what happened with that side of it - might have just been easier to limit it to one person globally than add more code to allow it in a local lobby.

Or their telemetry indicated that barely anybody actually did splitscreen theater since you can't take screenshots or clip in it, so it wasn't worth going back and tweaking for Reach.

I find the idea that Bungie phoned in Reach laughable, though.
 

GhaleonEB

Member
Dani said:
No doubt the folks that worked on Reach gave the project everything they could, but did Bungie devote the same resources to Reach as it did Halo 3? Some of the features in Reach aren't up to the standards of their previous Halo game (Theatre) and after playing the game for a long time you start to notice many small things about the game that should have had more polish applied, where you'd expect more polish to have been applied, like in past games but wasn't or weren't.

Reach is a great accomplishment for the Bungie folks that worked on it, but I have serious doubts Reach represents Bungie's full and entire focus as a development studio.
Worth noting that about 1/2 of Bungie made Reach. I don't know how that team sizes up to the Halo 3 team, but the overall studio resources were split in ways they haven't been before. I attribute some of Reach's faults to that split, and to the fact that much of the team was new to Halo titles (Sage).
FyreWulff said:
They've said repeatedly that it was a mistake to allow multi-person theater in Halo 3 as it was, and in hindsight would have removed the ability.

Reach was just disabling a feature that only worked 1% of the time over Live and about 50% of the time over LAN in Halo 3.
Party viewing in theater worked just fine. It could take a few minutes to sync the video between all the party members, and it was those few minutes of down time that Bungie deemed were sub-optimal, and so they cut the feature entirely. I think that was a mistake.
 

FyreWulff

Member
GhaleonEB said:
Worth noting that about 1/2 of Bungie made Reach. I don't know how that team sizes up to the Halo 3 team, but the overall studio resources were split in ways they haven't been before. I attribute some of Reach's faults to that split, and to the fact that much of the team was new to Halo titles (Sage).

Party viewing in theater worked just fine. It could take a few minutes to sync the video between all the party members, and it was those few minutes of down time that Bungie deemed were sub-optimal, and so they cut the feature entirely. I think that was a mistake.

You had more luck than we did then. The only way a film worked is if we had all been in the game and it was still in our temp histories and we watched it as a complete film. Viewing a clip never worked, and rewinding tended to drop the other film watchers.
 
Hypertrooper said:

Awesome! That is a really, really nice move by him.

By the way, anyone see the pic of a Elite from that fan film Halo Faith?

304418_267889456568005_181345861889032_953485_1562771194_n.jpg


Honestly, Im surprised, it looks pretty decent.. Not bad at all. That said, I want a real, live action Halo movie though.

If all goes according to plan, I may or may not direct a Halo fan project in about a year. That said, I may put it off for other projects of my own creation.
 
FyreWulff said:
The only way a film worked is if we had all been in the game and it was still in our temp histories and we watched it as a complete film.
And it was incredibly useful to have just that working well. They should have just drawn the feature back to its working parts instead of cutting it altogether. :(
 

Havok

Member
Finally get an Arena teammate that looks like he might be okay.


He idles the first five minutes then drops out.


These are the things that make me want to stop playing.
 
Dani said:
No doubt the folks that worked on Reach gave the project everything they could, but did Bungie devote the same resources to Reach as it did Halo 3? Some of the features in Reach aren't up to the standards of their previous Halo game (Theatre) and after playing the game for a long time you start to notice many small things about the game that should have had more polish applied, where you'd expect more polish to have been applied, like in past games but wasn't or weren't.

Reach is a great accomplishment for the Bungie folks that worked on it, but I have serious doubts Reach represents Bungie's full and entire focus as a development studio.

Reach's campaign had its production value hold steady throughout the game, unlike Halo 3 (cutscenes in the last act with concept art backgrounds). Reach feels like it lacks a bit of polish on the multiplayer side to me, but on the campaign side I feel the opposite.

Theater was apparently a conscious decision to not make work for more than one person because apparently that took an enormous amount of time and resources for a feature that an extremely low amount of players used.
 
FyreWulff said:
They've said repeatedly that it was a mistake to allow multi-person theater in Halo 3 as it was, and in hindsight would have removed the ability.

Reach was just disabling a feature that only worked 1% of the time over Live and about 50% of the time over LAN in Halo 3.

Wait thats not true at all. That was the case for video clips not full films. (If I remember correctly?)


SOOOO basically because a aspect of the feature didnt work, rather than just disable that one aspect they went and shuit down shop on the entire feature. :( Theatre mode is about 10x less awesome without the ability to watch stuff with people.
 

Risen

Member
FyreWulff said:
They've said repeatedly that it was a mistake to allow multi-person theater in Halo 3 as it was, and in hindsight would have removed the ability.

Reach was just disabling a feature that only worked 1% of the time over Live and about 50% of the time over LAN in Halo 3.


If it was viewed as a mistake then that is an indictment on their viewpoint as a developer. 4 player theater was incredible.

As a guy who churned away countless hours in theater with teams reviewing our own game play and that of other teams, I can say emphatically your numbers are not even close. It worked well for the most part. Sure it had bugs - but no more so than regular matchmaking for me.

I want a return of the 4 player theater badly. One of the few things Black Ops got right was that very thing, and they added the ability to switch to the first person perspective of every player in the game.

So good...

bobs99 ... said:
:( Theatre mode is about worthless without the ability to watch stuff with people.

fixed
 
Risen said:
If it was viewed as a mistake then that is an indictment on their viewpoint as a developer. 4 player theater was incredible.

As a guy who churned away countless hours in theater with teams reviewing our own game play and that of other teams, I can say emphatically your numbers are not even close. It worked well for the most part. Sure it had bugs - but no more so than regular matchmaking for me.

I want a return of the 4 player theater badly. One of the few things Black Ops got right was that very thing, and they added the ability to switch to the first person perspective of every player in the game.

So good...



fixed

Pretty sure you can take about 7 people into theatre with Black Ops lol. Never tried that though!

I have to say, Black Ops theatre mode is incredible though, on the timer you get markings for each kill and death, which makes it all that more easier to find the spot where you got a multikill or whatever. I would love it if 343 remade the Halo 3 theatre mode and stole ideas from Black Ops.


I dont agree with your fix, theatre mode is still great single player, but the amount of times I have said "let me show you this" to a friend or heard a friend say that to me, and then gone ':(' as ive realised its impossible without a insane amount of mucking about is insane.
 

Slightly Live

Dirty tag dodger
Seems a lot of my thoughts on here about Reach are negative. They are what they are but Reach does have many positive qualities - it's usually easier to talk about the things that go wrong than the things that go right.

bobs99 ... said:
Pretty sure you can take about 7 people into theatre with Black Ops lol. Never tried that though!

I have to say, Black Ops theatre mode is incredible though, on the timer you get markings for each kill and death, which makes it all that more easier to find the spot where you got a multikill or whatever. I would love it if 343 remade the Halo 3 theatre mode and stole ideas from Black Ops.


I dont agree with your fix, theatre mode is still great single player, but the amount of times I have said "let me show you this" to a friend or heard a friend say that to me, and then gone ':(' as ive realised its impossible without a insane amount of mucking about is insane.

Theatre in Halo 3 was ahead of the curve. Not many games had such a feature and it pushed boundaries. Bungie adding Pro and video rendering post release was also really amazing in terms of expanding the feature beyond it's own natural limits.

I was expecting Reach to take Theatre one step further. Like how Reach took Forge and gave us Forge 2.0 and Firefight with FF 2.0. I wasn't expecting a revolution but a clear refinement that would keep Halo on the cutting edge.

Instead we got the exact same Theatre mode as in Halo 3 but with a significant missing feature. Disappointing. It sticks out compared to every other game mode.

Other games like COD have taken the concept and run wild with it at this point. Reach is years behind other games in the genre now when it comes to player videos.

Forge and Reach both appeared at the same time - the next Halo game should give us the third version of Forge and we'll still waiting for the second versionn of Theatre.
 
Dani said:
Theatre in Halo 3 was ahead of the curve. Not many games had such a feature and it pushed boundaries. Bungie adding Pro and video rendering post release was also really amazing in terms of expanding the feature beyond it's own natural limits.

I was expecting Reach to take Theatre one step further. Like how Reach took Forge and gave us Forge 2.0 and Firefight with FF 2.0. I wasn't expecting a revolution but a clear refinement that would keep Halo on the cutting edge.

Instead we got the exact same Theatre mode as in Halo 3 but with a significant missing feature. Disappointing.

Other games like COD have taken the concept and run wild with it at this point. Reach is years behind other games in the genre now when it comes to player videos.

In a way I agree, but I think the trade off was that games like Black Ops have presumably easier to deal with game engines as each object doesnt have its own physics etc. Halo pushes the bounds in its gameplay making the theatre mode that much more complicated to build up.

All I want is the ability to view films with friends again, any other refinments would be awesome, but I suppose I would prefer the focus to be on the gameplay, I wouldnt want any of that sacrificed for a fancier theatre mode.

Even if Halo 3 theatre mode was the pinnacle, I would be happy, the only thing I do want is free render to video but I doubt that will ever be likely. :p

If they can steal the black ops stuff that would be great :p I do agree that we are still waiting for the second iteration of theatre, but I hope they dont priorotise that over gameplay.

Seems a lot of my thoughts on here about Reach are negative. They are what they are but Reach does have many positive qualities - it's usually easier to talk about the things that go wrong than the things that go right.

Im going to sound seriously negative, but right now im stuggling to see the many positive qualities. :p Reach has just bored me the last few times I played it, once the TU hits im sure things will be much better though!
 

Booshka

Member
bobs99 ... said:
Im going to sound seriously negative, but right now im stuggling to see the many positive qualities. :p Reach has just bored me the last few times I played it, once the TU hits im sure things will be much better though!
DAT Netcode

Edit: UI is pretty slick too.
 
FyreWulff said:
They've said repeatedly that it was a mistake to allow multi-person theater in Halo 3 as it was, and in hindsight would have removed the ability.

Reach was just disabling a feature that only worked 1% of the time over Live and about 50% of the time over LAN in Halo 3.

WTF are you talking about? It worked 100% of the time in Halo 3 for me on XBL. (unless you tried to play a clip instead of a film)
 

FyreWulff

Member
The Real Napsta said:
WTF are you talking about? It worked 100% of the time in Halo 3 for me on XBL. (unless you tried to play a clip instead of a film)

Like I said, it only worked reliably if everyone in the lobby had just played the game and it was in their recent films. Otherwise I mostly got a nice WAITING FOR OTHER PLAYERS and just said "fuck it" and clipped + rendered out the key points of the film.
 
Risen said:
As a guy who churned away countless hours in theater with teams reviewing our own game play and that of other teams, I can say emphatically your numbers are not even close. It worked well for the most part. Sure it had bugs - but no more so than regular matchmaking for me.
Whoah bro are you doubting fyrewullfs crazy made up stats? How dare you. Do you know that 5 percent of 15 percent of his percentages are correct 60 percent of the time?

PS we haven't played reach together in a while. I miss hearing your kid asking you to pick a map solely based on the fact that it has rockets. Lol
 
So after about 5 hours of troubleshooting I have come to the conclusion that Blackmagic's drivers for their Intensity Pro capture card are complete shit. Apparently it's a crapshoot as to whether or not your motherboard is supported. I'm ready to rip the card from my PC and throw it out the window.

Hell, going into matchmaking alone would be relaxing compared to this. Getting online.
 
FyreWulff said:
Like I said, it only worked reliably if everyone in the lobby had just played the game and it was in their recent films. Otherwise I mostly got a nice WAITING FOR OTHER PLAYERS and just said "fuck it" and clipped + rendered out the key points of the film.

I never had that problem, we watched films all time time. Old ones for shits and giggles, they always worked.
 

FyreWulff

Member
Devin Olsen said:
Whoah bro are you doubting fyrewullfs crazy made up stats? How dare you. Do you know that 5 percent of 15 percent of his percentages are correct 60 percent of the time?

PS we haven't played reach together in a while. I miss hearing your kid asking you to pick a map solely based on the fact that it has rockets. Lol

I'm sorry guys, I'm just making it up. Halo 3 LlVE theater viewing was a perfect experience, and never had any problems at all. Film viewing worked perfectly. They just disabled it in Reach to sell the unlock key to enable 4-person viewing later for 800msp, after rushing through making the game in the 11 months after the entire studio finished ODST and shipped Reach.

Oh wait, it's a Devin Olsen post.

I'm just sharing my experiences with the film functionality of Halo 3. Don't get so worked up about it, son.


The Real Napsta said:
I never had that problem, we watched films all time time. Old ones for shits and giggles, they always worked.

Anecdotal experience. Didn't work for everyone. Inconsistent and unreliable feature is inconsistent and unreliable feature.


Booshka said:
FyreWulff's anecdotal evidence becomes the majority experience.

Nowhere did I say this. I just repeated the posts that various Bungie employees made (including Luke Smith on this very forum) that the LIVE film functionality being flaky was something that would have been cut in hindsight as an explanation for why they disabled it. If films worked for you in Halo 3.. great. Feel free to ask Achronos the details about Halo 3 films over LIVE.

Booshka said:
This is what we are bitching about FyreWulff. Numbers out of your ass.

Next time I'll go ask Bungie for the literal exact statistical numbers when I remark on one of the most broken features in Halo 3. It's almost like I was applying my and other person's experience and just typed some numbers for dramatic effect, since I only ever got the feature to actually watch a clip over LIVE once. Ever. In many many tries to get it to work. Nevermind that though, I'm just making shit up to trash Halo 3 for whatever reason!
 

Karl2177

Member
I've never seen a bigger case of failure than 90% of Fyrewulff's posts. Or was that 75%. Nah it was 195%. I know these numbers are accurate based on my experiences.
 

Booshka

Member
FyreWulff said:
They've said repeatedly that it was a mistake to allow multi-person theater in Halo 3 as it was, and in hindsight would have removed the ability.

Reach was just disabling a feature that only worked 1% of the time over Live and about 50% of the time over LAN in Halo 3.
This is what we are bitching about FyreWulff. Numbers out of your ass.
 

Oozer3993

Member
For what it's worth, my friends and I could never get 4 player Theater to work. The only time we actually got into a film we had to have the host describe it to us, because it froze on the first frame for the rest of us.

Dani said:
What? The leak didn't come from an MLG event. It was a private behind closed-doors showing internally at Microsoft.

The dude originally posted his pictures on the Bungie.net forums (without his infamous watermark) and he got quickly banned.

After that, he went to the MLG forums and re-posted them (with the watermark) but some of the folks there didn't believe him because they assumed he just put his name on the pics found on Bungie.net.

He provided more details on MLG forums though to back up his claims and when the story broke most folks sourced him on MLG with the watermarked pictures and the massive list of details.

If you can find the original topic here on GAF, I managed to get in contact with him and he provided me with an additional picture without the watermark that he hadn't posted and he confirmed some of those details with me.

He quickly went quiet though and would no longer talk about it.

The Bungie Ninjas (TM) got to him. I can neither confirm nor deny that those ninjas were wrapped in bacon and on fire.
 

FyreWulff

Member
Oozer3993 said:
For what it's worth, my friends and I could never get 4 player Theater to work. The only time we actually got into a film we had to have the host describe it to us, because it froze on the first frame for the rest of us.

What we usually ended up doing was just everyone heading into their own lobby, and trying to start the film at about the same time and telling people when to stop to look at something. Worked pretty well.
 
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