An Early Look At Halo: Reach

KatanAlpha writes "Based on all the information coming out about Halo: Reach, it seems that Bungie's basic philosophy has been: 'The sequels to the first Halo sucked. Let's fix that.' We've already seen a little bit of this with Halo: ODST, wherein Bungie returned to some of the core elements of Halo gameplay and ditched many of the changes introduced in Halo 2 and 3. Reach seems to continue this idea while trying to invigorate the franchise by introducing greatly improved graphics and additional gameplay mechanics."

The sequels sucked?

[Toonol]

I don't think they really did. They just didn't do anything vastly different than the first game. Slight bump in graphics, tweaking mechanics a bit... disappointing, I suppose, if you are expecting massive improvements between games. Maybe more disappointing if multiplayer is your focus, instead of the story and campaign.

Sometimes I think the industry is to quick to rebuild a game from scratch for the sequel, when the players really would be happy with just more story, more levels, more characters. We didn't need the special effects in the Empire Strikes Back to be better than Star Wars; we just wanted to see what would happen next.

Slashdot as a sucky games site

[Aceticon]

<RANT type="no-more-pre-release-marketting" class="big">

Bungie is supposedly going to do yet another Halo, only this time it's supposedly going to be much better than the previous ones and here's an article with what the producer's PR/Marketoids think should be said on what it's supposedly going to be like.

Reminds me of all the articles we used to have a couple of years ago about the latest and greatest new software that was coming out: it usually turned out to be neither that greatest, as ground/breaking or the seamingly flawless experience the software house's Marketing people had described it to be for the preview.

Now we have the same type of bull as game previews in Slashdot, kinda like the almost-paid-for, page filling pap which is the standard fare of the "Previews" section of the large (and mainstream gaming industry fanboy) game sites.

Until we actually have a post by someone with hands-on gaming experience on the game, maybe we should save the space for more interesting news, like say, new developments in the area of waste treatment - more substance and less perfumed s*it.

</RANT>

Re:The original Halo also sucked

[BeardsmoreA]

IMO, as someone who moved from Doom through Quake to Half Life and then Halo, the only people who make a big deal about the tedium of Halo are those who've never sat down IN THE SAME ROOM, at the same screen, as a bunch of friends, and had an enjoyable couple of hours blasting things together. Halo stood out for its built in co-op for me. Sadly 2 and 3 didn't really add anything to the promising start.

Re:"Story" People vs. Game-Playing People

[delinear]

For me it's about enhancing the feeling of immersion. The story doesn't have to be revolutionary (and that's just as well, because they're almost always not), it just has to be enough to encourage suspension of disbelief and give some level of empathy with the character(s). You're never going to get a story that comes close to the best of the written word because the two media are playing to their own strengths. In a game, you have to have the "game" parts which obviously detract from the story parts - Hamlet wouldn't be so good if five out of every six pages was just dedicated to Hamlet beating waves of enemies in sword combat, or exploring locations for health/ammo pickups.

Bioshock did this really well, IMHO - sure the main plot was nothing we've not seen before, but that's not where the feeling of immersion came from. It was more from the information you discover and piece together on your own, exploring and finding journals, tracking the journeys of characters you never actually meet in the game, discovering the origins of the characters you do fight/help in the game, it made the game world feel more real (dispite the slightly silly delivery mechanism of tape recordings dotted everywhere, which made if feel like these people experimenting with prototype tweeting). I know people who played through the game as a straight FPS without exploring this rich back story, without even realising it was there, and that's fine if the FPS experience is all you're after, but for people who want to feel a bit more involved with the game there was a much deeper experience to be had.

Re:"Story" People vs. Game-Playing People

[Anonymous Coward]

The point of looking for a good story in a video game as opposed to a movie or a book is that the game is interactive. For some games that just means more immersion -- you don't just follow the main character, you *are* the main character -- but in other cases the story itself is interactive. Picture reading Hamlet and getting to the part where he's yelling at the queen and Polonius cries out from behind the curtain -- and you get to choose whether to take the "renegade" route and stab whoever's behind the curtain or take the "paragon" route and just demand the guy identify himself. Imagine how different the story would be from that point on. You would want to go back and read the story again and make different choices just to see how events unfold differently. There are games like Dragon Age and Mass Effect that really do put that much power over the storyline in your hands.