Halo: Reach Discussion

[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.