An Early Look At Halo: Reach 107
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 original Halo also sucked (Score:5, Informative)
Some parts were fun, I admit, but mostly the levels were extremely repetitive. I especially remember the Library level - where you had to do the same thing over and over - move through hall after hall which looks exactly the same and enemies which behave the same - I have never felt so bored by an FPS.
Re:The original Halo also sucked (Score:5, Informative)
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Yep. I remember being really excited when I first read about Halo (way back when it was still being made for Macs), but when I eventually tried the real thing, it was crap. Same level of boringness as the original Unreal. IMO the only people who would make such a big deal about games like Halo and Resistance: Fall of Man etc are people who haven't played decent FPSes like Half-Life.
Re:The original Halo also sucked (Score:5, Insightful)
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I'd say the main feature was that it made it a lot cheaper and easier to sit 16 people in a basement and play an FPS. Rather than 15 people lugging their desktop, CRT, keyboard, and mouse to your place and setting up a bunch of tables to play CS, you could have 3 friends bring their XBox with 4 controllers, a different 3 friends bring their TV, and another 9 people just need to show up ready to get sniped by someone with a pistol. It took the LAN party from a large undertaking for everyone involved to som
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I'd say the main feature was that it made it a lot cheaper and easier to sit 16 people in a basement and play an FPS.
This is still what I do with a bunch of friends. I think we're all ready to move on from Halo, but there is a distinct lack of 4-player per console shooters out there for us to migrate to. I understand that there is one or two, and we've started putting more effort into figureing out what is available...
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I have played Halo co-op before, it didn't strike me as anything special. I've had much more enjoyable local multiplayer elsewhere, both co-op and vs.. as far back as the late 80s or at the least the early 90s on SEGAs, Amigas etc. Playing with friends always makes a game more fun. The only reason Halo was such a success is that it was the only console based FPS of the time to even offer local multiplayer and co-op.. there were a few years where games developers just seemed to stop doing that for whatever r
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the only console based FPS of the time to even offer local multiplayer and co-op.. there were a few years where games developers just seemed to stop doing that for whatever reason.
I'm not really sure what years you are talking about. Timesplitters and Perfect Dark were both released in 2000 for the PS2 and N64. Gamecube and xbox were released at the end of 2001. Halo I guess would have been the first one released for the xbox, since it was released with the launch. Timesplitters 2 was released in 2002 for the xbox, gamecube, and PS2, had a ton of multiplayer modes, weapons, character stats, bots, and a mapmaker. Tribes Aerial Assault was also released in 2002. I also seem to recall
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Well, I was more into my PC FPSes back then and used my PS1&2 for other types of game so I didn't hear about anything but the 'big' games (and I didn't even know Tribes was available for consoles) - but it seemed to me that during the 00s it was increasingly prevalent to have games with online multiplayer but no local multiplayer. Thankfully things seem to be getting better again. Maybe I was just looking at the wrong games.
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Tribes Aerial Assault was also released in 2002.
I played Tribes since Starsiege:Tribes and it was the only good one. Everyone after that was a shell of its former self
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I've had many enjoyable hours sitting down with friends blasting things on the same screen. Only it was Perfect Dark. Halo didn't exactly suck, it just wasn't anything awesome. Perfect Dark was awesome.
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Yep you nailed it. All three games, I played through the campaign with a buddy (split screen) and we had a blast. The pacing was great, every few minutes there was a tense moment where we had to think together to pull through, and it rarely got boring. I even felt Halo 3 was too short, seems like we plowed through it in no time at all.
When I played them again on my own, I found each game a bit tedious overall. The levels tend to feel too large and I'm not a fan of massive fights where they drop four doz
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Microsoft seems to have a history of taking promising games and then ruining them. My group of friends were the exact same way with Perfect Dark on the N64.
I hear about the next Perfect Dark on the Xbox and I am understandably excited - but like most modern gamers I've been burned by previous purchases and so I wait it out.
If they hadn't fucked that game up so horribly I would have been an early adopter.
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I had a friend with four TV's, four Xboxes, four copies of Halo and sixteen controllers in his apartment who would regularly have Halo/Halo 2 throwdowns (he was a manager of a GameStop).
Countless hours playing Halo at his place later and I'm still not wowed. We all pretty well agreed, the only reason we played Halo all the time was because there wasn't anything resembling an apt suitor on Xbox. Nobody denied that PC FPS's had WAY more to offer (there's nothing Halo did except for the recharging armor that
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That's rather hilarious. What is it that you think they stole from Half-Life? You are aware aren't you that Bungie has made quite a few games before Ha
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Yes, co-op is a great feature, that I would love to see coming back. Especially to PCs, where everybody has his own monitor.
But come on. After Quake 3 (especially pro mode), how can anything else, be it halo, unreal or half life, ever offer enough fast-paced action again? (Although there still is absolutely nothing that beats a round of CPMA as a target and run practice/warm-up.)
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I've been back playing Half-Life 2 recently, in fact. While there are many wonderful things about it, the actual combat doesn't grab me anything like as much as Halo, in single-player at least. The rechargeable shield innovation of Halo is far, far preferable to playing the tedious games of health and ammo management that the Half-Life games use to implement difficulty, because the latter encourages rote learning through quicksave too much for me.
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I've always felt that the basic combat in the Half-Life games sucks badly -- it just doesn't feel compelling. It's the characters, overall story and other gameplay elements that make the HL series great.
Games like Call of Duty 4 and Modern Warfare 2 on the other hand have great, satisfying combat systems, but awful storylines.
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Well I guess its a good thing that casual gamers far far outnumber the fps nerds. Bungie seems to know its market no wonder the game has done so well..its actually accessable to the masses.
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If you define "boring" as "I have to actually engage my brain", then I agree with you.
I would much prefer to replay Half-Life or any of the expansion packs than sit through the boring-ass MW2 single player again (MW2 multi-player isn't bad, but I hate how you can't disable the auto-aim.. then again since I tend to get most of my kills with the knife, it doesn't matter so much).
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The "original Halo" was just an updated Tribes. Man, what a good game. Pity that MS bought Bungie and Halo became famous...it's a watered-down Tribes.
Tribes was great - I did love the flying about and the choice of style quick and no armour, heavy and slow or in between :)
Halo is about multiplayer mainly and it helps to have played the singleplayer game through so you know what its all about and how the weapons work.
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Was it reallyor was that just your imagination soaring from the few bits of information? I've seen people get excited about a "new Tribes" quite often whenever a team xPS with jetpacks appears, even if the final result has little in common with Tribes. Examples I can think of where people complained afterwards that the game was not like Tribes are Section 8 and Global Agenda and those are just the recent ones.
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Do the Myth II and "original Halo" share the same engine? I remember playing around with the Myth II map editor and couldn't help but notice that Halo looked shockingly like the Myth II maps I used to make.
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This isn't really fair, the original Halo is the first FPS I can think of that had vehicles that the player could use. It is also the first time I can remember computer controlled players being useful (well manning the turret in the Warthog is what I'm really thinking about). There was also a plot, with a couple of surprises. I also particularly enjoyed the "mad dash" Warthog ride at the end - the best ending of any of the Halo games.
Now it's true that a theme of all the Halo games has been fight across a l
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To be fair Bz '90-something had vehicles that you spent the majority of your time in, only rarely did you leave the vehicle. Same goes for G-Nome. I hear a game called Codename Eagle (predecessor of the Battlefield series) had the modern balance of infantry combat with a few vehicles mixed in.
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Tribes had vehicles in 1998
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Shadow Warrior was made in 1997, and it had vehicles you could use. You had to find repair kits scattered throughout the game, and you could use them to repair a tank, and one other vehicle.
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You forgot about the part where you had to go through a whole level a second time, just backwards...
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Well, I played it on the PC. And because I was used to fast, nasty aliens that would not wait a second... not the “standing around for a couple of seconds until you adjusted your thumbstick” kind, I found the enemies mind-numbingly dumb. As was most of the game.
Well, there are different people on this planet. I can tolerate their views. (But we’ll see of they can tolerate mine. Went pretty bad every time I mentioned Apple.)
The sequels sucked? (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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Slight bump in graphics? .. have you actually looked at screenshots of Halo 1, 2, 3, and Reach side by side?
Halo 1 didn't even support bump maps on bipeds, only scenery!
3 is leagues ahead of 2, obviously because it's on much better hardware.
Reach has more polygons in the Assault Rifle first person model than an entire Marine had in Halo 3 due to improvements to their engine.
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Reach has more polygons in the Assault Rifle first person model than an entire Marine had in Halo 3 due to improvements to their engine.
Despite that, the gameplay will likely not have improved by that much. It'll likely be the same, only maybe we can dual wield swords or something like that now.
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Reach has more polygons in the Assault Rifle first person model than an entire Marine had in Halo 3 due to improvements to their engine.
That isn't very surprising, the first person models often have the most details of any asset in the game because they're going to be right in your face all the time. It wouldn't even be surprising to find that a game actually put more polygons into its first person view weapons than its characters.
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I watched the first Halo: Reach ViDoc the other day, and they had a side-by-side of the marine model from Halo 3 and the marine model from Halo Reach and it was pretty damn impressive. Of course, anybody can whip up a video, but I'm looking forward to it.
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when the players really would be happy with just more story, more levels, more characters
As long as the price is scaled accordingly. I doubt anyone wants to pay full game price when it should be in the expansion section.
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I think this all depends. There are some games that are so good, that you're going to buy them no matter what. Also what if the game is far longer than the original (in a good way) does it matter that it doesn't fundamentally change things? The cost of producing a game is at least as much tied to the "digital assets" as the "engine". When you think about it, most modern games use the same underlying technology anyway, I'm not sure I'm persuaded by your argument.
All sounds a bit "new Coke" to me...
"Story" People vs. Game-Playing People (Score:1)
I admit to being amused -- in the nicest, gentlest, least-condescending way possible -- by the "video game story people." I'm just not fathoming that folks are playing games like "Halo" or "Bioshock" or whatever for their stories. I know that they *are*, because I read about it here on slashdot, and somebody always hauls out "Planescape: Torment" as if it were "Hamlet," and it all leaves me in head-shaking mode. Comic books have better written stories than these games -- and I mean no slight against comi
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there are a series of books about halo
There are a series of books about "Barbie" and the "Disney Fairies," too. Doesn't mean they're any good, just means there is a targeted audience for the follow-on merchandise.
And I read the first "Halo" book, about a year and a half ago, just to see if there had been a sea change in video game book tie-ins. There was not a single idea or character or plot line in the book that has not been done better -- and done to death -- in legit science fiction. Thirty years ago
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True. There have actually been a few _good_ books about video game worlds. The "X-Com: UFO Defense" book by Diane Duane was actually fun to read, both consistent with the gameplay and lending color to the characters. Of course, Diane is also the woman who wrote "Spock's World" and "The Romulan Way", which also preserved the structure of someone else's fictional world but actually explored the people in it. I highly recommend her books to fans of worlds she's written books for.
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Isn't she the one who wrote "So you want to be a wizard" way back when?
Don't feed the troll. (Score:3, Informative)
All my friends who got into the game didn't bother with the halo books... they read what arguably inspired halo. Even an elitist snob might enjoy it.
"Ringworld is a Hugo, Nebula, and Locus award-winning 1970 science fiction novel by Larry Niven, set in his Known Space universe and considered a classic of science fiction literature. It is followed by three sequels, and ties into numerous other books set in Known Space. Ringworld won the Hugo Award in 1970,[1] as well as both the Nebula and Locus Awards in 19
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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 - Haml
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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 th
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I admit to being amused -- in the nicest, gentlest, least-condescending way possible -- by the "video game story people."
Most game stories are pretty formulaic, but some games have extremely engrossing plots to them. Admittedly, these are far and few between. Halo was not one of them, but the original Marathon from Bungie was. The exchanges between the on-board AI's as well as the archives you could access at random terminals made for a very deep storyline. The other game that had an excellent story was Deus Ex. It successfully married almost every conspiracy out there from the Illuminati, to the Knights Templar, Majestic 12
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Halo 2 is one of my favorite games ever.
True, I didn't care much for Halo 3... but I think it's a long stretch to say Halo 2 sucked.
Halo: ODST (Score:5, Informative)
No it didn't change anything, it was pretty much a Halo 3 expansion which cost more. It didn't really play much differently (For a non augumented human, an ODST is still strong enough to beat a brute to death with his rifle).
Halo 2 was worse than 3, but they were good games, not great. After the first time round theres not much else to it (unless you hunt easter eggs etc.). The only reason we still play Halo 3 is because its one of the few games that support 4 player spilt screen and LAN at the same time, so with a couple large TVs and 2 consoles we can quickly play 3v3/4v4, or have 2 per screen for co-op. Its odd such games (Im looking at you Call Of Duty) allow 4 player split screen, but as soon as you try a lan game your limited to 1 per console.
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I actually really liked ODST, in fact, it's my favourite Halo game so far (played 1, 2, 3, and Halo Wars).
Halo has always been cool because of it's coop/multiplayer support, and yet I found ODST's campaign so good when played alone, because it added so much to the 'lone marine' storyline. In fact, it was one of my favourite games of last year- I preferred it to MW2's messy, rushed, disjointed single player storyline for example. I'll admit when I played through it a second time with a friend in coop it wasn
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One of the things I think is key to the enjoyment of the single player in ODST is something it forces on the player - you get different weapons as you "step into the boots" of the others in your squad. It's a little thing, but you're forced to use different weapons, and often different tactics. Once you've played it, you CAN blast through it pretty quickly (the sequence with Dutch in the wildlife park CAN be amazingly quick - and seeing how fast you can do that is fun in itself) but there is a lot to see an
Well that's a lot of leaps of logic (Score:4, Interesting)
Bungie has never said the sequels suck. However they are very open about what they did wrong and right in their previous games.
As it stands, Halo 3 is still the best multiplayer experience. Halo 1's multiplayer is a glitchfest with maps that were made by a two man team with a guy that just learned how the extrude tool worked the day before. It is unbalanced and only two of it's maps supported vehicles (so of course, everyone just played those two maps). The maximum amount of Xboxes that can join a LAN is 4 so if you want more than 4 people playing, somebody is gonna have to splitscreen.
Halo 2 was leagues better but it suffered from animation glitches and the ability to escape from maps.
Halo 3 refined the balance of 2 and also fixed all the animation glitches and map escapes. After playing it, there is no reason to ever go back and play Halo 1 multiplayer beyond for a laugh. Single player I play once in a while, but the multiplayer is so bad now it's not even funny.
The removal of dual wielding doesn't even change things that much since people hardly do it in Halo 3 anyway. All it really means is that dual-able weapons will now get a damage buff, like they already did to the Needler (went from dual-capable in 2 to a single weapon in 3)
Reach so far appears to be continuing to build upon Halo 3's multiplayer design and balance. Heck, a Bungie employee is already quoted as saying that the weapons aren't going to be drastically tweaked or anything from their Halo 3 versions.
But then again, I'm probably one of the few people that started with Halo 1 in 2002 and don't worship the broke as hell pistol from 1 (which again, was actually a bug that couldn't be fixed in time for ship).
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Someone at Bungie (Score:2)
If you sell out and have to make creative cuts as your running at 640p due to MS hardware 'cost' cutting...what do people expect
Now the 'brand' name wants to tart things up with violence, plot, bestial alien languages and unique battles?
Note the total lack of words pointing to 'world size' or 'more monsters' just more tinkering efforts.
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According to other accounts I've read, the engine has been upped to support much larger distances between co-op partners (i.e. less of the annoying teleport effect) and to support up to 40 full enemy AIs, which is something like double the Halo 3 engine. So don't write off the world size and monster count just yet ...
Actually (Score:2)
Actually, the video linked in the article did address both world size and more monsters directly. They're going for sand box style battles, with more of the feeling of vastness of stepping out of the ship in Halo 1, with more monsters and allies.
Slashdot as a sucky games site (Score:4, Insightful)
<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>
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Actually one of the most interesting news about REACH that I read is bungie can FINALLY FINALLY do another game that isn't halo. I have loved almost everyone of their games, especially myth, the fallen lords, and I have always felt they had ideas outside the norm and executed them perfectly. I can't wait to see what they can cook up when finally unsaddled from generic halo FPS games.
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Maybe I misread your comment but the new game is to be called Halo: REACH and so you shall keep waiting for that non-Halo game from Bungie.
Sorry Charlie.
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What I read was after halo reach is released, is that they will next be doing an original IP game that is not in the halo universe.
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Well bully then. Here's to hoping it's not the utter tripe Halo was then.
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I think they should have charged less for ODST. That said, I bought it new as I didn't want to wait. I think I've had / am having my moneys worth with Firefight mode alone so I'm not upset, even though I think the decent thing to do would have been to sell at a reduced price.
It was a printing error (Score:2)
...it seems that Bungie's basic philosophy has been: 'The sequels to the first Halo sucked. Let's fix that.'
That's because the L lost a fleck of ink and came out I.
Actually, I really enjoyed the first Halo. I felt extremely ripped off at the end of Halo 2, though, since it felt like I'd only gotten to play half the story. I skipped Halo 3 altogether as a result.
Meh! (Score:2)
Since I gave up my xbox live gold account I haven't looked back. As a result I don't think I will be bothering with Reach. I played the Halo 3 campaign and that sucked. Move to next room, shoot some bad guys , get some ammo. Rince and repeat. The story didn't make much sense and Master Chief is a fairly unlikable hero.
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Do not even get me started on the "back-story" ... a fascist government that kidnaps kids (replacing them with clones who are sabotaged to die young - and painfully - so that parents do not catch on to the scheme) and puts them through a decade of torturous experiments, maims and kills most of them -- and somehow those kids through some kind of twisted "Stockholm syndrome" become great champions of the fascists, aka the "Good guys
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Do not even get me started on the "back-story" ... a fascist government that kidnaps kids (replacing them with clones who are sabotaged to die young - and painfully - so that parents do not catch on to the scheme) and puts them through a decade of torturous experiments, maims and kills most of them -- and somehow those kids through some kind of twisted "Stockholm syndrome" become great champions of the fascists, aka the "Good guys", against a bunch of fanatical religious nuts, aka the "Bad guys".
Wait, so the Govt. could clone the kids, but they went through extra steps to steal the *real* kids, and make the clones die quickly? Did they make a video game that Uwe Boll can't ruin the script of when he makes the movie?
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It's not that they made the clones imperfectly, it's that the clones they made were unviable, due to the technology not being there. They could clone, but the clones would not survive. So, that was worked into the plan.
Any of the Halo books written by Eric Nylund are actually pretty good reads. The novelization of the original game is crap.
And to your parent poster, I doubt that Microsoft had anything to do with the story. And lest we forget, Halo was originally to be a Mac game....
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The books were commissioned by Microsoft as part as their "brand tie-in" campaign for Halo. As far as I know Bungie had no book deals for Marathon and had no plans to do so for Halo before Microsoft bought them. Also the game itself had rather ambiguous references to the SPARTAN program, never defining its nature. All the attempts at glorification of the truly rep
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Bungie is known for having written a rich and detailed backstory, and having a very detailed 'bible [wikia.com]' for Halo. Eric Nylund was not coming up with things at the behest of Microsoft. I'm sure he gets to invent minor stuff what needs inventing, but somehow I doubt 'the origin of the Spartans' would fall into that.
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Much of which, if not all, happened after they were assimilated by Microsoft. The game was originally quite different in design and scope and underwent a considerable evolution under Microsoft's direction (and also due to limitations of Xbox). It is no coincidence that all the dolts at "Central Command" Nylund mentions in his books are long-time Microsoft employees in charge of various aspects of M
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To be accurate its not "Microsoft" which is an abstract entity, although it is convenient to speak of it that way, but the whole corporate culture of which Microsoft is an example and which attracts such individuals and enables them to rise in power by rewarding their sociopathic attitudes. The end result is that these people end up thinking of themselves as superior (after all their traits made them "successful" at the expense of all around them who are not as twisted as they are) and so they proudly promo
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Am always serious when I see high-level corporate stooges (many of whom these day have power and resources exceeding those of whole small nations) start to fancy themselves as military commanders... even if it is supposedly in the name of "entertainment".
I am not quite sure if you have been following news lately but corporate power is these days ever more unbalanced versus that of citizens to the point that whole corporations are now para-military entities with an explicit license to kill pretty much anyon
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You know, it's interesting you say that. About ten years ago, I went on a business trip to South Korea (from Canada.)
Up here in Canada, Daewoo makes televisions. In South Korea, they're a fricken Megacorp, straight out of Gibson or Shadowrun. Daewoo toothpaste even.
The other day, I was having a conversation with a co-worker that Google is rapidly approaching that status, with their new fibre plans. I likened it to L. Bob Rife's monolog in Snow Crash about how he bought a bunch of regional telcoms, and n
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Wait, so the Govt. could clone the kids, but they went through extra steps to steal the *real* kids, and make the clones die quickly? Did they make a video game that Uwe Boll can't ruin the script of when he makes the movie?
It's been a while since I read the books, but my recollection is that the cloning process was not very good and resulted in the early death, which is why they couldn't use the cloned kids in the program (otherwise they could just find the best and make an army of clones).
Re:Meh! (Score:5, Funny)
Would you have felt more comfortable playing as a pacifist running like hell from the aliens the whole game, trying not to crap yourself?
Actually, that might make for an interesting game.
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There is a loooong way from the SPARTAN program to any "pacifism". A regular military force defending their homes from an invader is not "pacifism" by any means. SPARTAN program, as described in the books, crossed every line to the point that it essentially gave up any reason for its opposition to Covenant to exist as both sides became just a different faces of the same u
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Don't forget the Spartan raison d'etre was to smash the rebellious colonies, years prior to the Covenant threat. The horrific Spartan backstory along with the internal Covenant politics makes for an overall more interesting story.
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I haven't forgotten. It is precisely why I called the UNSC fascists ... well ... "fascists".
SPARTAN program would have certainly back-fired under those conditions in ways that I already described. Without the Covenant the SPARTANs would have certainly turned on UNSC and likely sid
What do you mean by "sucked" ? (Score:1)
...and KatanAlpha speaks for whom? (Score:1)
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Well he spent most of his adult life using coward tactics to confront pirates and crackers (I remember him harrassing the C=64 scene in the 80's). Only fitting he choose the cowards way out when confronted with his own crimes.