I absolutely think that Reach's population issues are down to gameplay. In game itself fun is subjective, but generally if a game doesnt keep players interested the population will drop. If players arent retained they wont recommend the game to friends.
I know your of the opinion that the population issues are down to a more diverse market, so I guess we can agree to disagree.
The only people that seem to have a problem with Reach's gameplay are the ones that would rather every single Halo game play like Halo 1 or 2. And since Halo 4 seems to be trending towards being a Halo 2 clone with the TU settings 343 feels that Reach "needed", I guess they'll get their wish.
I really want to see someone explain to me what they don't like about Reach without going 'well, it doesn't feel like PREVIOUS_HALO_GAME'. I'll tell you what I don't like about Reach without referencing the other games:
1) Evade is overpowered and only an idiot would choose Armor Lock or Sprint over it. It's faster than Sprint for getting you across a map, can be used for launches, and is better at getting you out of a bad situation than Armor Lock. It should have never been on Spartans, or the spartan variant should have had smaller impulse and travel distance.
1b) Then making a zombies gametype where previously Evade was all you had because somebody decided that spawning the humans with a bloomless-on-the-first shot pistol was a great idea, and then took away your Evade for Sprint, so that you're basically feeding humans kills until they run out of ammo.
2) Bungie's decision to lock spawns on maps just because people whined loudly until they got them, sharply dropping the amount of safe locations to spawn in for Slayer gametypes (why do I want to spawn in the base? I'm not defending an objective inside of it) and increasing spawncamping. They have a great spawn engine in Reach and they undersell it big time.
3) Bungie's decision to make Team Objective 99% DMR start. I swear nobody at Bungie plays Objective gametypes.
4) Oversight on allowing the Gauss Warthog to fire through Forge World objects, which means no community made variants can use it.
5) Re-using Crater's geometry for campaign but not making it a Firefight mission.
6) Giving the Spartans everything and Elites about nothing in Invasion gametypes. Spartans always spawn with and near headshot capable weapons for the first phase, Elites do not.
7) Removing the banshee's angle limiter that it had in Halo 3 and not having the tricks use meter, making it a scorpion of the skies. It seems obvious that all their attention was on the Falcon.
8) Failing to give us an actual geometry editor, then unlearning all their tricks from the Halo 3 DLC and shipping maps with extremely limited Forge palettes
8a) Speaking of editing, shipping the Juggernaut gametype in it's condition and then doing nothing to give it better features or choices before they handed it off to 343.
9) Making the grav lift on Sword Base unForgeable then removing the disabled grav lift and the 1 flag setup from the beta. It was unique and now it's derivative.
9b) Making the flag cap and spawn the same object.
10) 343 for completely failing to fix Evade, the gauss hog glitch, or any other of the known bugs in Reach in their title update.
11) The fact that 343 lied about elements of the update. Claiming they had done something to counter the bloomless DMR's Rate of Fire (nope), claiming vanilla Reach would stay vanilla Reach, then pushing the unpopular TU playlist's settings into existing playlists, and playlists where it doesn't even make sense why (Multi Team? really?)
12) The fact that they've attempted to implement bleed through without re-implementing the feedback system to account for this addition, and seem to not care that they've broken a fundamental game design component. When bleed through was touted as for allowing a further simulation of the Halo 1 experience for Anniversary modes and nothing more.
13) 343's acknowledgement that the banshee is overpowered, oh no it was out of scope of the TU to be changed, then allowing the banshee to remain in matchmaking and in fact allowing it to be put on NEW DLC maps. Every match on Breakneck devolves into Catch The Banshee.
Movement speed? Fine. If you made it faster, the designers of the maps would have just stretched them out horizontally to counter it so there'd be the same travel times. Jump height? Same thing again - maps would have had vertical scaling to counter it, just like Tombstone was. Bloom? I understand it completely, have no problem with it, and have never gotten a lucky kill from spamming. Before the 343 TU, I never got angry at a bullshit kill because I knew my shields had popped a few seconds before and I was 1-shot. Now depending on whatever gametype I'm in, I can have shields and then just suddenly die.
Maybe they should contract out Bungie for Reach 1.2 so they can show 343 how a title update is supposed to work. Not like Microsoft is going to put the money behind a 1.2 anyway, so now we're stuck with Reach with broken fundamentals and half-assed stupid decisions or Reach with solid fundamentals and stupid decisions. They spend all their time contracting out all their work on Anniversary, it shouldn't be too far a stretch to contract out further Reach support to Bungie, who seemed more enthusiastic about supporting their game post-launch even though they didn't own the IP anymore and was going to no longer make any more titles in the franchise than the developer that permanently has the reigns to it.
So now that I've put my cards on the table,
please for the love of god tell me why you think Reach has gameplay bad enought that it would be driving away people while ignoring the fact that Halo no longer exists in an online vacuum. IMO, people got spoiled by Halo being #1 for so long while ignoring the fact that Halo 2 held the charts for so long because it was the only game worth playing on the original Xbox live. If Halo 2 came out this generation, it would have been dead within a couple of months from all the exploits, cheats and glitches it had.
