Halo: Reach Discussion

[Rob Oplawar]

I know why it sounds like y'all are whining. Because some of you are saying the game requires too much skill and others are saying it doesn't require enough.

What they have done is made the golden tripod easier to use- more autoaim, melee lunges, more powerful grenades. The game is no longer dominated by your opponent's superior ability to have ungodly aim or horrendous accuracy with grenades or uncanny ability to lead melees. Those things still have an effect on the game, but much less so nowadays.

In my opinion, it has been replaced with more depth and strategy (in an FPS? pshaw!). You complain that there are some situations you can get in that are simply a no-win for you? Well now whose fault is that? OK, to be fair, every once in a while it's the luck of the draw. But when I play Reach the vast majority of the time when I die I can directly see, "well, I was too meek here, should have taken the initiative." "I let them grab the power weapon and then didn't use the right strategy to counter it." "I really need to stop charging them on my own while they're on the defensive as a team."

It still happens once every few games that there's some guy who has robot-like timing and aim that gets him to the top of the ranking without competition. But far more often than I did in Halo 2 or 3 I see rounds where the dominating factor is an opponent's foresight and teamwork.

Unfortunately, it's not perfect, because sometimes this equates to knowing exactly when the rocket launcher is going to respawn or knowing exactly when your teammate is going to go into armor lock...

[=sw=warlord]

Seriously, I don't even know why full auto weapons are in the game. Those commendations for using them are basically Bungie encouraging you to play the game wrong. Ugh.

That is pretty closed thinking to be honest.
there is practically no way to play a game "wrong".
You may not like automatic weapons but some people who are from the ages of doom and wolfenstein actually prefer automatics.

[MXC]

Seriously, I don't even know why full auto weapons are in the game. Those commendations for using them are basically Bungie encouraging you to play the game wrong. Ugh.

Don't be dissing the assault rifle, yo.

[p0lar_bear]

That is pretty closed thinking to be honest.
there is practically no way to play a game "wrong".
You may not like automatic weapons but some people who are from the ages of doom and wolfenstein actually prefer automatics.

And I guarantee that most of the time, those types are getting dominated by people with mid-range headshot weapons.

[=sw=warlord]

And I guarantee that most of the time, those types are getting dominated by people with mid-range headshot weapons.

Not always, short controlled bursts reduce the problems of the bloom.

[Pooky]

What they have done is made the golden tripod easier to use- more autoaim, melee lunges, more powerful grenades. The game is no longer dominated by your opponent's superior ability to have ungodly aim or horrendous accuracy with grenades or uncanny ability to lead melees. Those things still have an effect on the game, but much less so nowadays.

I understand what you're saying here, but I disagree. Keep in mind that most of the complaints coming in here are directed specifically at small team games on infantry only maps. In these games, the only strategy is camping with power weapons. If the other team is camping with power weapons, then the only hope you have is for one of them to do something stupid and get killed, otherwise this strategy is unbreakable.

That's the main focus of my complaints. Reach has significantly less depth than any of its predecessors. The strategy is shallow, player skill is pretty much a non factor. It's a free for all where my grandma has as much chance of winning as the MLG pro champion as long as she knows to camp with heavy weapons and double melee, and there's something wrong with that. That's why I've suggested several sandbox changes that would increase the depth by giving players more choices and returning aiming skill as a primary factor in engagements.

For the sake of argument, I'm restating the list from before.

- The melee attack needs a damage nerf. It is far too powerful for something that requires no aiming whatsoever. My suggestion would be to nerf the melee attack to take off only 2/3 of a player's shield in a single hit.

-Get rid of the fucking sword/melee parry. It was a good idea to make the sword loadouts in Invasion more balanced, but it's bullshit anywhere else. My suggestion was to have two versions of the sword, one for Invasion, and one for everything else.

-Either tone down, or remove the reticule bloom (on the DMR and needle rifle). I really don't understand what the point of this was supposed to be, all I see is that retards can occasionally spam their DMRs at point blank range and get lucky headshots. Randomness is the bane of any game intending to be played competitively, and it certainly doesn't have any place affecting the primary competitive weapons of Reach.

-Give the plasma grenades a tiny 'arming time' of about 1/3 of a second after you throw it. During this time, the grenade will not stick to anything, but will just bounce off. This is to prevent that annoying and skill-less point blank sticking crap. To clarify, skilled sticks from a decent range will still work, it's only complete point blank auto aim sticks that will not.

-Either make the hitboxes smaller, or tone down the bullet magnetism, because the sniper is fucking ridiculous right now. It takes virtually no effort to use, and basically dominates everything.

-Like Warsaw said, can we please go back to purely timer based weapon spawns? I'd prefer games to be decided by who is the best power weapon user, not who is the only power weapon user.

- I'm not a huge fan of the new vehicle health system, but I can see where it's useful in gameplay terms. That said, there's nothing more gay for a new player than to get into what seems to be a heavily armored tank, only to die from 2 assault rifle bullets. First off, if we're going to have vehicle health, we need to have a vehicle health bar (passenger health bars would be nice, too). No one can argue that the health of your vehicle is vital gameplay information, and there's no reason to hide vital information from players unless you're fucking retarded or something. Second, the vehicle health should regenerate up to certain thresholds, the same as player health. That way you can have a damaged tank, or a heavily damaged tank, but not one that dies in 2 bullets.

Now, tell me how anything suggested there would not improve the depth of gameplay and give players more choices in every encounter.

That is pretty closed thinking to be honest.a
there is practically no way to play a game "wrong".
You may not like automatic weapons but some people who are from the ages of doom and wolfenstein actually prefer automatics.

I'm from the era of DOOM, I like automatic weapons just fine. That said, I would never use an automatic weapon in Reach unless I had no other choice. Headshots always win.

[=sw=warlord]

That's the main focus of my complaints. Reach has significantly less depth than any of its predecessors. The strategy is shallow, player skill is pretty much a non factor.

I'm going to have to disagree with that.
In Halo 3 the game play was alot more shallow, it was more or less focused on the battle rifle and grenades, got a sniper rifle? no worries that guy with a battle rifle can out sniper you, got a shotgun? no worries that guy with a battle rifle can just shoot you twice and then melee you.

[Pooky]

I'm going to have to disagree with that.
In Halo 3 the game play was alot more shallow, it was more or less focused on the battle rifle and grenades, got a sniper rifle? no worries that guy with a battle rifle can out sniper you, got a shotgun? no worries that guy with a battle rifle can just shoot you twice and then melee you.

I don't deny that Halo 3 focused on the BR to the exclusion of most other weapons, however I don't care for the examples you used. Assuming you're at the optimum range for a sniper rifle or a shotgun in these situations, if you die from a BR, you're kind of bad.

Gameplay focusing primarily on a single mid range, all purpose weapon is not exactly unusual. Every Halo game has done this. The other weapons on the map are specialist tools, giving you an edge over the guy with the all purpose weapon when used in appropriate situations.

I feel like Reach suffers from a heavy handed attempt to fix something that wasn't broken. They've made the all purpose weapons kind of shitty, and put back the terrible weapon spawning system from Halo 2, which leads to a focus on camping and double melee (like Halo 2). If the melee got nerfed and we had the old spawning system back, Reach MP would be a lot more interesting, other changes notwithstanding.

[Limited]

Hit the level cap, and completed legendary today.

[ejburke]

That is pretty closed thinking to be honest.
there is practically no way to play a game "wrong".
You may not like automatic weapons but some people who are from the ages of doom and wolfenstein actually prefer automatics.

Full auto weapons are all the same. They can't do headshots, because that would be too easy. They error like a motherfucker over medium to long range. They are the most boring, vanilla, brand of DPS imaginable. And in Halo, they are little more than vestigial relics. The series has evolved past any need for them in their current form.

Anybody notice that whenever Bungie demo's their games, they almost always use a full-auto weapon and it makes the combat look boring as Hell?

If I were making a Halo game, I would convert the AR to a 5-round burst weapon, with a "Center mass" version of the headshot -- if all five bullets hit the chest of an unshielded enemy, they die. There would still be full auto weapons, but they'd be treated like the PR and Spiker in Reach as intended for AI and not players.