Halo: Reach Discussion

[ejburke]

Speaking of Hunters, I'm calling BS on the earlier advice of using a needle rifle against them. On Heroic, it took 5 supercombines in the back to bring one down. Inefficient!

[Timo]

One supercombine to the face on legendary killed one when I was playing through. Not sure if it has already down on health though.

[annihilation]

The green things on the Hunters gun look like roasted marshmallows.

I find it easier to spam every grenade I can find then jump over them and shoot them.

[TeeKup]

The sniper rifle is an ANTI-MATERIEL rifle. It's SUPPOSED to blast through armour, just like the PTRD did with the same caliber bullet in the Second World War. Hell, I should even be able to take out a Wraith with it in a few shots to the back side. If there could be more than two enemy snipers on the map at a given time, I can see the problem. Since the sniper doesn't respawn when some imbecile has it, just bomb the shit out of that faggot.

Now, I don't think Halo 1 was at all balanced, but it had a happy medium between cheap tactics and competitiveness. Sure, the pistol was the end-all, be-all gun of the game and tanks camping the bases was a dick move, but they were all counterable. With practise, you can engage a pistoleer with the MA5B and a well-timed grenade. With more practise, you can take out a tank with three shots from a pistol or a well-placed grenade and MA5B spray to the cockpit. Alternatively, you can use the Plasma Pistol to take down his shields and then either pop him in the face, toss a grenade, or blast him out using the AR again. And then we have the melees. Bungie invented this "tripod" of power for Halo 2. They say that it wasn't balanced in the first game. I call bullshit on that. It didn't even exist before because they hadn't thought of it that way until AFTER the first game. Melee, from the way Halo 1 plays, was designed to be your fall-back weapon when you ran out of ammunition, a finisher so you could take out your opponent in a close-quarters fight if he made the mistake of reloading, or a way to humiliate your opponent by taking him down with a backstab (AKA, using the weakest "weapon" in the game to kill him in one shot). This "tripod" shit is what started all of the crap. By making the game what they did, they turned it into a series of preset engagement types: grenade-rifle, rifle-grenade, grenade-grenade, grenade-melee, rifle-melee, and the ever ellusive rifle-rifle. I see no tripod of power in here, only many bipods. Halo: CE was by comparison unpredictable, and that's what made it fun.

In Reach, if you don't have Bungie's predetermined counter to a situation, you're fucked. Guy has a sniper, sucks to be you. Guy has a DMR, grab a sniper. Guy has a tank, grab a rocket. Guy has a rocket, you're fucked. Guy has a shotgun, grab a sniper again (Close quarters you say? You're fucked). In all scenarios, the universal counter is "land the first hit."

tl;dr-the game is too regimented and over-engineered. What they SHOULD have done is just added new features instead of fixing something that wasn't broken.

On the side, I still love the game. The audio is fantastic, the graphics are pretty damn good for console, and it's relatively fun compared against its predecessor. I bought it for its campaign, and compared to the last three titles, it certainly did not disappoint. One of the better expenditures of $70. I'm just bummed that the multiplayer still lacks the "magic" that made the original so entertaining.

I love you warsaw.

[Pooky]

Now, I don't think Halo 1 was at all balanced, but it had a happy medium between cheap tactics and competitiveness. Sure, the pistol was the end-all, be-all gun of the game and tanks camping the bases was a dick move, but they were all counterable.

Pretty much this. What really made Halo 1's MP great is that you were almost never completely helpless. Everything was counterable, and a sufficiently clever player with good aim could survive just about anything. Reach MP has far too many situations you can get into where there is no counter and no defense, and all the changes I've proposed have been made with that in mind.

And then we have the melees. Bungie invented this "tripod" of power for Halo 2. They say that it wasn't balanced in the first game. I call bullshit on that. It didn't even exist before because they hadn't thought of it that way until AFTER the first game.

If you look back at Halo 1, the melee attacks were still quite powerful. The main thing that made them balanced related to other attacks was the lack of autoaim, and more importantly the lack of lunge. I can't stress just how much I hate melee lunge. Melee attacks no longer require any sort of aiming, and the lunge function itself seems wildly inconsistent. Sometimes it won't lunge a guy 2 inches in front of me, sometimes I get lunges so far and fast it seems like there's a rocket up my ass.

I don't know what all the complaining's about.

Reach is basically a good game. With a few small improvements, it could be a dramatically better game. If no one complains, nothing gets changed. Hell, game testers are basically paid to complain. Some of us are a little more harsh in our complaining (I make no excuses), but that doesn't mean the complaints aren't valid.

I always try to give well thought out reasons for my bitching, and as someone who's been taking Halo too seriously from the very beginning I think it's safe to say I know the series' gameplay at least as well as the developers.

[Arteen]

You know what's awesome? Infection on Sword Base. Some human will hide at the end of that long hallway on the ground floor leading to the air vent. After three failed attempts to kill to him, I finally close the gap and sword lunge him, only for him to melee block my sword lunge and shoot me in the face. That was pretty awesome.

[L0d3x]

Wow, Hunters are full of BS:

That melee is a one-hit kill on me, despite completely missing by a wide margin.

Must've knocked up quite a bit of wind.

[PlasbianX]

Bungie just announced on their twitter that all credits earned once you hit the cap still count towards your next rank when they lift the cap, assuming you hit the cap legitimately.

[ejburke]

Thanks for posting that. I knew that had to be the case, but they should know by fricking now that everything they say needs to be spelled out and clarified.

[DarkHalo003]

I officially sympathize with the melee people now. I just played a game of Team Slayer on Pinnacle and half of my deaths could have been avoided if the melee wsn't so unbalanced between two spartans. I play Invasion a lot, so usually I just back away as an Elite or can shoot enough bullets to get the melee kill first. But in Team Slayer, I literally hit myself because of all of the times I died from double melees that I probably shouldn't have. Nothing is worse when you get that melee and start blasting away at your enemy at point blank, but still die from that second fast melee attack. It's just quirky and generally stupid in Team Slayer games.