Okay, here's my more complete post. It's long but that's because I wanted to insert some positive stuff. It's therefore more broken and senseless, but not a long list of only complaints.:
I thought the campaign was actually quite good. I didn't fall in love with any of the characters, but I appreciated them. I liked how they presented the story in a way that made your actions meaningful but also preserved the inevitable fate of Reach. Allied A.I. was garbage, often a hindrance, and could have easily been much better.
When people are complaining about reticule bloom they're actually complaining about weapon recoil. The bloom is just telling you what the weapon is doing. I would have preferred that they implemented bloom as an indicator upgrade, not a downgrade to weapon recoil compensation. It's not gradual enough, meaning you can barely finish one fight in five shots let alone be ready for a second one if you did well in the first.
There has always been recoil in Halo, but no indicator for it. They should have added the indicator without increasing the recoil. Instead they dramatically increased recoil to make the indicator upgrade more prominent and relevant. I feel they went too far.I like AAs. I think most people who complain about them are taking the completely wrong line:
-Armor Lock is fine. It's actually quite balanced, but I think the people who hate it would've hated it no matter what. The only REAL "problem" with armor lock is that since people online are effectively impaired, it really does slow the game down. I'd take the time to explain this, but the trick to not getting mad at my statement is realizing that I'm talking about most people online, not you specifically. There is no "fix" for armor lock because it's not broken, but if you don't like it that's understandable; it's also personal, and not because the AA is inadequately crafted. I WILL say that I think outright DESTROYING vehicles that hit you when you lock is a bit excessive, but good operators know that splatters are a serious risk anyhow. I just think it makes the already-irrelevant ghost a bit more irrelevant.
-Jet pack: If you complain about jet pack, you're never complaining about the right thing. It's just not a problem. Think instead of your complaint and try to figure out the REAL problem. Attack that instead. If you just dislike jet pack, see armor lock.
-Sprint and Evade: I like these, but I sincerely believe you should have to completely exit the animation before the game will accept a fire or melee command.
-Camo: Not seeing people is a pain in the ass. People will complain about it. Duh. If there's a balance problem with camo it's that people use camo with the intent to snipe, and the real problem is that effing sniper rifle is crazy easy to use.
When EVERYONE uses the same AA, then the game becomes silly. Everyone lifting off at the start of a match in Cliffhanger feels goofy. Everyone armor locking is just slow. Everyone firing holograms would actually be awesome. Everyone dropping bubbles is actually much worse than armor lock. Everyone sprinting is a hear-panting-then-turn-around-and-get-double-melee'd fest. Everyone Evading is just kinda dumb, especially with Dinos, since they always "Huh!" when they evade.
I like a lot of the new medals, although I find many of the new ones easy to ignore. Headshots were already counted, I didn't require a medal. "Revenge", "Avenger", and several others strike me as mostly irrelevant. I like "Protector", "Assist" Sprees, and others that encourage superior play rather than the eventuality of chance. An assist spree in FFA is like a taunt. Contrary to Sarge and Twistedgrave's assertions, I think "Spawn Spree" is still OK.
I like credits, commendations, challenges, and the armory. Even if I don't focus on them, I like that every now and then the game tells me "good job!" I didn't need the encouragement, but that doesn't mean I don't enjoy it.
There are lots of stupid little bugs. For example you don't need to win to get a Perfection, you just need to get 15 kills without dying in Slayer. It says "Win" in the medal's description, and it WAS the most important part of getting a perfection. You had to get 15 kills without dying in a gametype where people were trying to kill you, but then you had to WIN as well. Now you just get 15 kills and hide and no one will know that you abandoned your team, hording the sniper rifle the whole time, ruining their shot at victory. This may have been fixed by now, but Bungie has released cleaner games, and there's no real excuse for not doing so this time.
I love the DMR. I also really love the Needle Rifle, but will not use it as much because it's not as satisfying to fire.
I like the pistol even though I suck with it. I wish they'd give all weapons a zoom. They didn't put a scope on the pistol, so it's not like they're explaining the lack of zoom on all weapons as "Not all weapons have scopes." You zoom because your spartan's armor computers can do that, not because the weapon is special. The scoped weapons have better zooms. Voila.
I just did a good job. +100 credits.
Reflection and Pinnacle suck. They're trash maps that sucked in Halo 2 as well. Remaking them was a damaging move.
Remaking Hemorrhage was... silly. There was plenty of good reason to do it since people wanted it so much, but why did they not catch that it LOST balance?
I dislike Zealot. That doesn't mean it's a bad map. I just never liked ANY of the purple alien circle maps. Not a one. It actually seems quite balanced.
I actually like the sniper rifle... when I'm the one using it. It didn't need the upgrade to power or the reduced learning curve. It's too easy to use, plain and simple. I could see upgrading its power to anti-material status if you didn't also drop the difficulty to use it. Once again they did two things when they should have done one.
I finally got to use the Fuel Rod Gun in Matchmaking, and I LOVED it!
They should drop its clip by 1 in every place it appears though, with the minimum obviously being 1. It's great.
Explosive things are overpowered. <<<<<FACT!
The no-bleed through coding on melee was pointless and damaging. Combined with the utterly unnecessary upgrade to all things explosive this has made Reach's arsenal balance look like this: Guns = Melee = Explosives. You may be fine with this, but when I introduced my girlfriend to Halo 3 she was getting good with grenades in her very first and only game ever. If she was passable with grenades in Halo 3, it shows me that they simply aren't that hard to use.
Supercombine explosions are cool. They are the exception to my above statements about explosives.
Halo 2 wasn't that good. All of the Halos have been exceptional games by all the standards that a game reviewer uses to judge games. The melee lunge has never been a good thing for multiplayer, it was introduced in Halo 2 and has been haunting the series ever since. The amount of damage this feature has done is surprising but incredible, since most of it is indirect.
The Assault Rifle in Reach sucks. This sucks for people like me who used to love "Going Loud" with a full-auto weapon. In fact pretty much all full-auto weapons in Reach received unnecessary nerfs. Why? You may try to answer, but I would bet money that most people who would try to answer that question would not deliver the answer I am thinking of (Which is of course the correct answer), even after I drop the hint that I've said it once already. If people actually took me up on that bet and we had a bookie system for it, I would have plenty of money for Christmas presents.
The Spiker still sucks. Why bring it back if you aren't going to make it relevant? I didn't dislike the weapon before, but why haven't they given anyone a good reason to like it? The only people who like it... just like it. They were going to like it no matter what, just like I've liked the Needler since Halo: CE despite it not being a practical weapon until Halo 3.
Why can you parry the sword and not the hammer?
Weapon placement on almost every map in Reach sucks.
Spawns on almost every map in Reach sucks.
Team Snipers is fun as soon as someone votes for something other than the Cage or Pinnacle.
Team SWAT is fun, but see Team Snipers.
Speaking of the Cage, the map sucks.
I like Boardwalk, Powerhouse, Spire, Countdown, Boneyard, Asylum, and maybe another that I'm forgetting. That doesn't mean they're perfect, but I believe they could be.
Jeremiah, the current playlist overlord, needs to quit making it so you have fewer than three options to vote for in a playlist, assuming that there are three different gametype/combinations in that playlist (It would be fine if Grifball had only one map/gametype to vote for).
Default spartan settings have them running too slow. Jump height and stuff has varied every game, but if my suggestions for Evade and Sprint were taken I see no flaw in my logic.
Invasion Slayer sucks. It's a stitched monster of a gametype that could have been amazing but absolutely missed the mark.
A lot of things received upgrades in Reach, most of them were explosive, and most of them were unnecessary. The things that were weak are still weak, and that is a failure.
I like the game overall, but I find a lot of the problems are NOT small and they make my experience frustrating and the ends of games leave me unfulfilled, even when I've done OK. I understand now that my hopes were too high, but what I don't understand is how a person like me, a veteran pessimist and disbeliever in "hope", was wrong in his most cautious anticipations. I am not a starry-eyed dreamer. I could not have done many of the jobs that made this game come into existence, but I could have done a few of them better.
I still love playing with friends, and find most of my complaints washed away by the pleasure of their company. The Invasion Crew from Friday may remember me saying multiple times - after being blown apart by a grenade AFTER I jumped away from it - "the grenades in this game are too strong." However I don't remember complaining about the game the WHOLE time. In fact I remember focusing on the win, laughing in the lobby, and having a wonderful evening of Halo with friends. I also made brownies.
Sarge wrote:Bloody Initiate wrote:That's 5 minutes I spent looking at Sarge's ass while I waited to respawn.
If it makes you feel better, I didn't get a spawn spree off of you.
I still say what people need to do is find something their comfortable with in Reach and stick with that. I chose Invasion because I don't have 11,000 games of Halo 3 Matchmaking to influence my opinions on it. Every one of us bases our opinions on Reach off of Halo 3. I now understand how the people who played a lot of Halo 2 felt whenever they complained about Halo 3.
So yeah, I'm not happy with the current MM settings for most playlists, but I found something I am happy with, so I stick to that.
I never meant to imply you didn't have a nice ass
. At the time I wrote that I was trying to avoid cluttering my sentences with addenda like: "(Not that Sarge doesn't have a nice ass)"
I also certainly didn't mean to imply that I didn't enjoy the game while we were playing it. I just looked at it afterward and realized that I basically did terrible, and there was nothing to say otherwise, so even if I actually had done well and contributed there was no evidence of it.
Also you picked well when you chose Invasion as your "something you like". Invasion is great.
It's an objective gametype that rewards you for playing the objective (If you play the objective, you get to keep playing. If you fail, the game is over). It incorporates almost the entire default BTB arsenal (BTB Arsenal = Halo Arsenal). It continues only if people play it the way it was meant to be played, it ends if they don't (So if your whole team quits, the game's time limit just got smaller and/or you have two of the largest Halo maps ever to hide in).
I think they should have pulled heavily from the developments they made in the Invasion playlist in order to design their other playlists.
OboeCrazy wrote:Bloody Initiate wrote:There is no reward, literally no reward for winning a game.
...a fun game and the satisfaction of knowing you won?
You desire more?
"Crush your enemies! See them driven before you, and to hear the lamentation of their women!"Actually no, I get along fine without additional incentives. As far as I'm aware, I'm not the problem.
Ever since I first started playing Halo I've played for the win, because I felt that if you won almost everything else was trivial. I was actually not very good at CE, so at LAN parties I'd never be on top of the list of slayers or first pick for anyone's team, so I felt that if I could make the victory happen then I would have outdone all the killers in my own way.
Of course I adore slaying, and I will happily murder the other team for the entire game if that's what I've chosen to do, but that's just because - as I have stated in other threads and mentioned in this one - if you are killing more than you are dying that means you are spending most of your time ALIVE and PLAYING rather than staring at a respawn screen. The reward for survival is survival. The penalty for death is a time out, as well as a forfeiture of any power you'd gained (weapons, position, etc.).
After that I want to eat my cake too. Once I've won the game and won at slayer, I'd like to get all that other stuff: Impressive stats, awesome multi-kills and sprees, enemies who have thrown their controllers because of what I've done to them, being an example of sportsmanship, all that stuff.
So my priorities have always been ordered thusly:
1. Win
2. Win at slayer
3. Win my way
Not everyone works the same way I do though, and so I'd like it if they were rewarded for my same priorities, because obviously I will believe my priorities are superior to everyone else's.
Even if people MOSTLY still play the right way, why offer nothing when you can offer something? Credits are meaningless to me, but someone cares about them. My visible Trueskill was mostly irrelevant to me after I peaked in Halo 3, but a lot of people cared a LOT about it. My Arena Rating is COMPLETELY meaningless to me, but some people play for it and it really blows their hair back to get a good rating.
For all those people who play for reasons other than mine, I fail to see why the only rewards in non-Invasion Reach come from playing Slayer no matter whether you're ACTUALLY playing slayer or not.
The funny thing is that I spent all this time explaining myself to you, and after writing it all I remembered it was actually one of my LESSER complaints with Reach. Most people seem to still play for the win, because I think most people think of it like I do. So even though there's no reward for winning, people still play for it, which is why it's one of my lesser complaints.
P.S. Don't be surprised if you see this damn thing copied and pasted in Optimatch somewhere.