GDJustin said:
One thing I'm noticing about Reach is that the entire experience is less "solid" than other Halo games. Lots of little errors show up at the seams. There are tons of little bugs and tiny issues that on their own are fine, but they add up. And Reach has far more of them than H3 (although maybe less than H2), and it threatens the integrity of the Sandbox.
We've all seen videos of a ghost hitting a warthog or tank and flying off at 700 MPH, or a Revenant freaking out on Ghaleon's map, or people jumping off spire and surviving, etc etc.
Every time I see one of those videos I laugh. But in truth it isn't funny - every single one of these errors is the sandbox betraying the player. Halo games live & die by the integrity of the sandbox. Everything has physics. I'm reminded of the H3 video of the guy suiciding via a traffic cone dong to the head on The Pit. So when objects don't react the proper way, it's a major problem.
Other shooters don't have this problem, because they're scripted. Bungie is doing it the "hard" way - the REAL way. By making things like rockets actually exist in the play space and giving them physical properties. I respect them for that. But only if they can consistently get it right.
Halo games are always released so early in the holiday season. I can't help but think that an additional ~6 weeks of QA (releasing Oct 26 maybe) would have been good for the game. That still puts Halo two weeks in front of CoD.
There's definitely a wider array of little issues than Halo 3 had. I think, given the scope of the feature set in Reach, that each one didn't have
quite enough polish time. There's a host of very small issues in Forge that annoy, but don't break, the mode (objects still shift after saving, for instance); one of my maps was over-written by a map by a different name. There's the slowdown in campaign, some cinematics and on the Glacier Firefight map. Stuff isn't transferring to bungie.net, which is frustrating but in the case of Score Attack, literally undermines the entire purpose of the mode (imagine if CTF flag caps stopped registering).
And beyond that, the state of the multiplayer playlists were poor at release. I think Bungie clearly recognizes that and the first two playlist updates have both been very large, and very swift given their scope. It's good to see Bungie reacting to veto data, which is why I think so many of the updates have to do with stuff being removed (half of the last update was bad game types coming out, rather than going in). Game types continue to get refined so they play better.
But there's still nothing in the two MP modes that are of primary interest me - BTB and Invasion - that make me want to play. (I'll do a longer post on this later this week.) And my few excursions into the other playlists have been unpleasant due to how the maps and game types were configured, though some of those issues are getting ironed out.
For a different perspective, I imagine multiplayer hasn't been a good experience for new players. I'm starting to play every once in a while with someone I know from my wife's church. He played a bit of Halo 3, and picked up Reach planning to get into the multiplayer as he'd heard good things about it. And when we play together, the experience keeps being sub par. We did Firefight, and the games are often laggy or result in disconnects. We tried Team Slayer and got Snipers on Reflection. We did Team Objective and got CTF on the Sanctuary remake, with epic flag return times and flag at home to win (cue epic standoff). We did Invasion and have team mates quit out early so we get stomped in a most unpleasant manner. I showed him how to link his GT to Bungie.net, and now I'm imagining him wondering why many of his games don't show up in his Service Record. His first impression of multiplayer has been a steady string of "well that wasn't very good..." and it's mostly due to how the maps and game types are set up.
Some of those problems were fixed in the last playlist update, and hopefully more get ironed out soon. The last overhaul did much. But I'm still doing Campaign, Forge, Customs and Score Attack while I wait for the playlists and maps to get into a shape that I think I'll enjoy. And that wasn't the case with Halo 2 and Halo 3. Some aspects of the game just needed to cook a bit longer.