If anything, the derpy AI endears me more than it turns me away
I have some great memories from every game related to messing with the Marines, ODSTs and other Spartans
Besides, nothing can top the entirely useless Halo 5 friendly AI
Except when they revive you and don't just stand in the background like indestructible columns. Granted, two of them died in the process, but that's still better than the alternative. Halo 5: AI actually do something.
I've been walking a ex-roommate of mine through the games, one by one, and we just got to 5 last week--playing on normal to ease him in, letting the two AI squad members handle reviving is oddly convenient. Training wheels mode, in effect.
That aside, watching Jorge's pathfinding steer him into the wall in the Village Bunkers (which sounds strange in retrospect) while he's giving serious-time exposition...is way cuter than it has any right to be.
Fuck your birds. This is the only bird in Reach that matters.
(If I was going to replay any level of Reach, right now, over my lunch break, I think that would be it. Honestly Sabres look...kind of dumb, when you can see them in their entirety but damn was that a fun level.)
Most of the people that whined to get TU Reach just moved on to Halo 4, and the vanilla playlists had 90% of the population afterwards. Of course leave the option in there to enable it, but, fuck TU Reach.
Also, I never had more of an issue with the driving AI in Reach more than any previous Halo. They even talked about how AI didn't even "know" the Warthog can steer with all four of it's wheels until Reach. They just tried to drive everything like it had front wheel steering until that point.
They're just not great at picking priority of where they aim and go. See also: Buck in the last level of ODST.
Most of the people that whined to get TU Reach just moved on to Halo 4, and the vanilla playlists had 90% of the population afterwards. Of course leave the option in there to enable it, but, fuck TU Reach.
Also, I never had more of an issue with the driving AI in Reach more than any previous Halo. They even talked about how AI didn't even "know" the Warthog can steer with all four of it's wheels until Reach. They just tried to drive everything like it had front wheel steering until that point.
They're just not great at picking priority of where they aim and go. See also: Buck in the last level of ODST.
Indeed. Reach made the mistake of making more events dependent on not bad AI driving beyond "Well then, you died." That was the issue.
Hopefully it's TU Reach to spare the innocent PC community the horror of pre-nerf armor lock.
I admire how this is still mildly divisive, when I was never good enough at Reach multiplayer to actually use this as a tactic. "Oh, here comes a vehicle, I'll just *SQUISH*."
Synthesis on
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joshgotroDeviled EggThe Land of REAL CHILIRegistered Userregular
One of my co-workers is getting the new release. Can't wait to be backpacked through Legendary campaign again.
Reminder that the Reach TU literally killed off the Halo community here for years on PA Forums. Everyone was so disappointed by it that we went from having a continually posted in thread since 2004 until a couple weeks after the TU, in which everyone stopped signing on.
Reminder that the Reach TU literally killed off the Halo community here for years on PA Forums. Everyone was so disappointed by it that we went from having a continually posted in thread since 2004 until a couple weeks after the TU, in which everyone stopped signing on.
Yeah, I feel like the solution to "I don't like playing Reach!" was to play 3 instead. Not to completely change Reach to a completely different (and less interesting) game.
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Ninja Snarl PMy helmet is my burden.Ninja Snarl: Gone, but not forgotten.Registered Userregular
I had a blast with Reach before the TU update, and then the TU basically ended me playing Halo. Gutting things that made Reach fun and unique compared to the other Halo titles was a horrible, horrible idea.
I know the original Armor Lock was contentious for pros but as somebody looking to play the game for a good time, it gave me some of the most entertaining moments I had in Reach. Being able to shrug off a Scorpion blast or walk out of a Banshee suicide smash thanks to good timing was infinitely more important to me than any amount of what happened in MLG games.
I loved Armor Lock and the whining about it at the time was way overblown. People couldn't handle that Ghosts couldn't just smush teams into oblivion like they could in Halo 3, and cried about it nonstop. The Armor Lock led to some of my favorite moments in the game: https://youtu.be/750d-cFqp5c
Took what should have been a violent death and turned into a badass double kill :surprised:
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Ninja Snarl PMy helmet is my burden.Ninja Snarl: Gone, but not forgotten.Registered Userregular
I have fond memories of Halo Reach, but not of them involve armor lock.
See, I look at that clip and think it's pretty hilarious. Really, my only problem with how that turned out is that the melee system allows for a mutual kill, which is dumb. And even with only looking at Armor Lock as the problem, all such situations could've been prevented by just giving the Armor Lock an activation cooldown, as opposed to just wringing the fun out of it.
Probably would've been good to turn down the lock duration on it as well but, again, there was plenty of room to balance it to not make people mad while also not just tossing out the whole point of the ability in granting brief invincibility as a tradeoff for being an easy target.
For some reason I didn't play reach multi as much as the others. I don't remember any of the title update controversy, what I remember being a turn off was that in matchmaking I only ever saw versions of the forge map. I literally don't remember what any of the vanilla maps looked like. I got so sick of never being able to learn the map that I stopped playing.
I enjoyed Reach multi a lot but I didn't play it for very long compared to H2/3. TL;DR on what the TU changed?
1 . Reduced the bloom of the DMR, Pistol, and Needle Rifle to 85% of the vanilla game, but (literally) did not touch any of the rest of the sandbox, so a lot of the sandbox died overnight because it was not viable against spamming the DMR and especially the pistol, the pistol could beat the shotgun at shotgun ranges.
It also broke the NR as something in how it worked gave it massive bullet magnetism in the reduced bloom settings, as it'd give you headshots for pointing at someone's chest. Even worse in zero bloom (but ZB was mostly an MLG thing and wasn't in general MM), so now the game was just the DMR, NR, and Pistol Show.
Also, Reach reduced your bloom for crouching, so crouching in the TU effectively gave you damn near zero bloom.
What they should have done was lock the Rate of Fire for the DMR/NR/Pistol instead. This would have gotten rid of bloom (functionally) while leaving the rest of the sandbox intact.
2. 343 made changes to Armor Lock to make it lose energy while being hit and not save you from stickies. Okay. But then they wanted to show off these changes or something, so they started introducing AL to every playlist they updated. Bungie was actually removing AL from Reach via playlist updates before they got cut off, it was only going to be in BTB and one other playlist that I forget now. So Bungie actually heard and was listening to the AL complaints, 343 actually retconned more AL into Reach than the original game had.
3. They implemented bleedthrough from 1/2/3 back into Reach. Bleedthrough is where damage that goes past depleting the shields goes into your health. Except Reach's feedback was not set up for bleedthrough, so you'd just feel like you randomly died. There's nothing inherently wrong with BT, but the way Reach was designed was for it to be not be there, because it had a system where your shields would absorb all damage and "pop", then you were shieldless and one headshot would do you in, and the weapon balance was configured around this. Some people were annoyed about this, because if you had one pixel of shield , it could take a whole shot from a lot of guns. But it was simple: wait for the pop then shoot them in the head. Previous (and following) Haloes have their feedback built around BT.
Thankfully this one was reversed out because it had a bug in it: picking up healthpacks only restored the health to one part of your body instead of the entire player model (because.. reasons?) so picking up a healthpack, being full health, you could still be killed in one shot to the chest.
4. Full game radar. As this was the start of the second screen craze, 343's update added a mode where you could have a full view of the map on your phone with the positions of everyone in the game. Including enemies. Anywhere on the map. Yeaaaaaaaaaaaaah. (Amusingly enough, this was later shut down when 343 EOL'd the Waypoint app, so they put all that effort into the TU component and then just turned it off)
5. Poor execution of the deployments. First, they promised they would test the TU in a beta playlist first, and then introduce elements into the rest of matchmaking once they were tested, and promised more updates.
They ran a TU Beta playlist for just a couple of weeks and then pushed out ALL the settings into the rest of matchmaking. (Later leading to the reversal of bleedthrough,etc). They also never updated them again.
6. They promised in various ways that they would leave all existing playlists as Vanilla Reach and all new playlists would be TU Reach. Except any playlist they updated was converted over to full TU, so Vanilla Reach players actually kept losing playlists, to the point people started begging for playlists to be left unupdated so they would remain Vanilla.
6b. They actually AT FIRST made it so you could vote for TU or Vanilla in every playlist, but the gametypes were poorly named so you had no idea what pistol or DMR you had when loading into a match (and one of them also had the Anniversary pistol in it, so you could randomly have a 5 (vanilla), 4 (because bleedthrough), or 3 shot kill (Halo 1 mode) pistol). People were like "uh, can you fix the names so we know what we're voting for?"
343: sure
343: also we made the entire playlist TU even though we renamed the gametypes to TU Slayer, etc, making that effort entirely redundant
7. Released the Anniversary maps as a weird standalone disc instead of just having them as a code. Alright, so when you play Halo Anniversary on the 360, it's multiplayer is just a slimmed down Halo Reach that ONLY has the Halo Anniversary Map Pack on it. Okay, interesting way to have multiplayer on the disc instead of just porting the PC version's multiplayer. The catch was that playlists that supported this disc could ONLY have the maps from this disc. If you had a party that was playing from the original Reach disc, the playlist could not optionally select the other classic Halo maps available. (Regular playlists could optionally select maps in case everyone owned them).
"Alright" you say, "but that's pretty nice that they get to play the maps.....?"
Well, they included a code with CEA. So you could have the maps for your base Reach. Rendering the entire point of the MP side of the disc pointless and only leading to splitting Reach's playerbase. The CEA disc couldn't even load DLC maps, which is REALLY weird because there's DLC achievements for the Defiant Map Pack that require owning the Anniversary maps, so you had to have Base Reach and Anniversary Maps on the regular version to even unlock them.. so I still don't know what the point of the CEA disc was. It couldn't sell anyone on more DLC packs. It didn't unify the playerbase on all DLC, like the MP-only Halo 3 disc that came with ODST did. And best of all, this meant that Blood Gulch, which was on the goddamn Reach disc as a default map, was not available to play in Halo 1 playlists. The most iconic map from Halo 1 was not available in Halo 1 mode matchmaking anywhere. Ever. To this day. Meaning the whole point of re-using Reach's magnum as the Halo 1 Pistol, which let it function as a Halo 1 Pistol on all maps in Reach, was never used outside of the Anniversary maps in matchmaking. They literally could have just actually put the actual Halo 1 pistol in the Anni maps, which would have made it only show up there, but nobody in matchmaking would have ever noticed the difference.
8. Everything about having two Reaches
So besides all of the above, never really in general has a game ever had two versions of itself running concurrently next to each other in the same game. It was honestly pretty weird, and felt like 343 was trying to make their mark with also leaving what Bungie left behind intact (until they started erasing that). So even their half measure drove people away. And the numbers proved it out - not only did Reach have more population than Halo 4 after Halo 4's release, the Vanilla playlists had more population than 343's TU copies of them (did I mention 343's solution was to also make copies of playlists into Vanilla and TU versions, and slotted them under "Vanilla" and "Evolved" in the matchmaking directory? Yeah, they did that, which forced playlists like Action Sack to be deleted because Reach only supported 20 something playlists). So we had two Team Slayers, only difference being Vanilla and the other being TU. Vanilla had 6,000 players in it. "Super Slayer", their name for TU Slayer under the Evolved category, had.. 200 players. It wasn't even close. The entire Evolved category was a ghost town.
They really should have just ripped off the bandaid and made the changes global, like Bungie did with Halo 2's big update, it was hard to miss or do anything with vanilla H2 because you couldn't fucking play it after the update. Being able to play it but with whatever 343 decided not to take away from you just made it worse, because you could see the game you really enjoyed playing while an unfinished patch was slowly taking your options away.
But in total honesty, the whole handoff of Reach was pointless. 343 already had Halo 4 in the works, and Bungie would have gladly supported Reach until Destiny came out. Reach got caught in an ugly divorce with ugly results. Either via hubris or indifference, the community's rejection of the TU was ignored and they moved on to Halo 4 and fucking goddamnit it's 9 years later and I'm posting about the goddamn Reach TU again.
I'm pretty sure most of what I played of reach was after the title update and I never felt like the whole sandbox was redundant compared to the precision weapons.
i feel like a weird halo fan in that i adore halo but i basically never played multiplayer much outside of coop
I played a fair amount of Halo PC online but that's pretty much it. I'm all about the campaigns.
I have a mild interest in playing some Halo MP again but in all honesty, the big thing for me also is getting all the coop stuff on PC. The MP was great when I had a crowd of people to play with that I personally knew, but getting somebody to play coop with was a lot easier than getting enough people for a team for MP. Coop campaign was generally so much better for setting up zany shenanigans than with super-serious people in MP.
And the campaigns actually had loads of writing to go with them, which is an aspect that is desperately lacking in modern AAA game development. The Halo games were fun, but it was the details of the setting that kept bringing me back until Halo 4 went sideways with it all (and even that still had a pretty nice coop-designed campaign).
Decided to try to find some old Halo clips and found this montage of Halo 3 stuff with a lot of old TBK clips in there. I forgot we had a community feature on the Fileshare in Halo 3, and we had Minotaur with a map for it up there. Our clips most have been pulled when we were featured on Bungie Favorites. https://youtu.be/pI-J48w3Uiw
My close friend Fatalslayer is in there along with a ton of other TBK alums like Fyrewulff and Willeth
I'm finding it quite hard to find multiplayer matches in Halo 5 besides firefight? It took a good few minutes for it to find a big team battle game.
Is the Halo 5 multiplayer population that low?
No, not at all--probably the opposite. Just look at the huge population of occupied custom games, which are always a minority in online multiplayer.
Now, if Slayer matchmaking has problems--that wouldn't surprise me. I regularly get matched into a game, only to get dropped immediately before launch and put back into the pool. The process can repeat itself multiple times.
If anything, Halo 5 MM population is larger than I'd personally expect for a game of that age.
My issue is that modes like Warzone and Big team battle take ages to find a game if at all.
Heroic firefight? Now that loads really quickly
I need to check again. BTB was a longterm favorite of mine since 3, but I'm bad enough at Slayer that I tend to gravitate towards Firefight now, where my incompetency is generally private.
The different Slayer/related modes matchmake very quickly. Too quickly if you have my anxieties. BTB is more exclusive, so some delay is probably to be expected.
And everyone Warzone Firefight mode loads up in a snap. Heroic, Legend, and Mythic (albeit only on the weekends). People are playing that shit. For me, it's the only way to get to use rare (or even just uncommon) vehicles.
Halo 2 has new custom gametype options after 15 years!
MP skulls:
Grunt Birthday Party - Headshots trigger a grunt party
Blind - No HUD or weapon on screen
Black Eye - Shields only recharge on a melee
Sputnik - Mass of objects is decreased
BOOM - explosion radius x2
Eye Patch - Auto Aim disabled
Foreign - No covie weapon pickups
Grunt Funeral - Players die in a "blaze of glory"
Recession - Every shot is worth twice the amount
Malfunction - A random element of you Hud is disabled on respawn
Streaking - Shields constantly decay but recharge on a enemy kill
Feather - Player and melee are more effective on physics objects
General Options
Player Gravity option
Infinite Ammo
Bottomless Clip
Grenade Regeneration
Indestructible vehicles
Vehicle Gravity
World Gravity
Halo 2, 3, 4, and 2A all run at a 60hz tickrate now for multiplayer
Cortana has managed to cure her rampancy but still manages to go batshit and try to take over the galaxy?
Sure she's cured?
Nah.
The Cortana we knew and loved from 1-4 died in 4. A copy of her made during the events of either 2 or 4 (I forget) came into contact with Forerunner AI and was basically radicalized, ISIS style. She is now radicalizing every human-made AI she can contact, save a few who refuse for personal reasons, depending on how they were treated (notably, Roland from Infinity stayed loyal).
Cortana has managed to cure her rampancy but still manages to go batshit and try to take over the galaxy?
Sure she's cured?
No.
"Rampancy" is, as she explained, thinking yourself to death. Cortana as a human-created AI isn't inherently more perfect or infallible than a normal AI. The Forerunner intelligence at Genesis provided a cure for Rampancy, but that doesn't actually affect her inherently reckless nature, tendency to gamble, and other disturbing (and lovable) characteristics. It also doesn't do anything about the years of building resentment felt by her (or other AIs, for that matter)--except possibly making them worse, since death is a cure for resentment.
Cortana saw a chance to address her grievances--the Forerunner Mantle of Control--and took it, with some degree of belief in her own benevolence. She makes a big point of explaining it in the final two chapters, and we have no reason to think she's lying or otherwise doesn't believe herself. Rampancy would've caused her to go frothing-at-the-mouth insane, but it wasn't the specific cause of her anger and frustrations. Now she has a form of immortality (or at least, no clearly defined expiration date--consider the Installation monitors, who are similarly "immortal" and were frankly better programmed at their creation) she's decided to implement the long plan.
It sounds like Cortana managed to access the Domain, which it the Forerunner internet which is actually the Precursor internet (the Precursors are the Forerunners of the Forerunners) and the Precursors are also the Flood, so I think she might've gotten logic plague'd like Mendicant Bias.
Posts
Except when they revive you and don't just stand in the background like indestructible columns. Granted, two of them died in the process, but that's still better than the alternative. Halo 5: AI actually do something.
I've been walking a ex-roommate of mine through the games, one by one, and we just got to 5 last week--playing on normal to ease him in, letting the two AI squad members handle reviving is oddly convenient. Training wheels mode, in effect.
That aside, watching Jorge's pathfinding steer him into the wall in the Village Bunkers (which sounds strange in retrospect) while he's giving serious-time exposition...is way cuter than it has any right to be.
Yeah, I don't care what anyone says--343i chose the the second best feature to copy from Gears of War.
(First being: rock and roll rift at checkpoints.)
But what about the birds
(If I was going to replay any level of Reach, right now, over my lunch break, I think that would be it. Honestly Sabres look...kind of dumb, when you can see them in their entirety but damn was that a fun level.)
Most of the people that whined to get TU Reach just moved on to Halo 4, and the vanilla playlists had 90% of the population afterwards. Of course leave the option in there to enable it, but, fuck TU Reach.
Also, I never had more of an issue with the driving AI in Reach more than any previous Halo. They even talked about how AI didn't even "know" the Warthog can steer with all four of it's wheels until Reach. They just tried to drive everything like it had front wheel steering until that point.
They're just not great at picking priority of where they aim and go. See also: Buck in the last level of ODST.
Indeed. Reach made the mistake of making more events dependent on not bad AI driving beyond "Well then, you died." That was the issue.
I admire how this is still mildly divisive, when I was never good enough at Reach multiplayer to actually use this as a tactic. "Oh, here comes a vehicle, I'll just *SQUISH*."
Bungie was deleting it entirely from matchmaking before MS cut them off. It only came back because 343 wanted to show off their changes to it.
Them's fightin' words.
Yeah, I feel like the solution to "I don't like playing Reach!" was to play 3 instead. Not to completely change Reach to a completely different (and less interesting) game.
I know the original Armor Lock was contentious for pros but as somebody looking to play the game for a good time, it gave me some of the most entertaining moments I had in Reach. Being able to shrug off a Scorpion blast or walk out of a Banshee suicide smash thanks to good timing was infinitely more important to me than any amount of what happened in MLG games.
I have fond memories of Halo Reach, but not of them involve armor lock.
Took what should have been a violent death and turned into a badass double kill :surprised:
See, I look at that clip and think it's pretty hilarious. Really, my only problem with how that turned out is that the melee system allows for a mutual kill, which is dumb. And even with only looking at Armor Lock as the problem, all such situations could've been prevented by just giving the Armor Lock an activation cooldown, as opposed to just wringing the fun out of it.
Probably would've been good to turn down the lock duration on it as well but, again, there was plenty of room to balance it to not make people mad while also not just tossing out the whole point of the ability in granting brief invincibility as a tradeoff for being an easy target.
You can't give someone a pirate ship in one game, and then take it back in the next game. It's rude.
1 . Reduced the bloom of the DMR, Pistol, and Needle Rifle to 85% of the vanilla game, but (literally) did not touch any of the rest of the sandbox, so a lot of the sandbox died overnight because it was not viable against spamming the DMR and especially the pistol, the pistol could beat the shotgun at shotgun ranges.
It also broke the NR as something in how it worked gave it massive bullet magnetism in the reduced bloom settings, as it'd give you headshots for pointing at someone's chest. Even worse in zero bloom (but ZB was mostly an MLG thing and wasn't in general MM), so now the game was just the DMR, NR, and Pistol Show.
Also, Reach reduced your bloom for crouching, so crouching in the TU effectively gave you damn near zero bloom.
What they should have done was lock the Rate of Fire for the DMR/NR/Pistol instead. This would have gotten rid of bloom (functionally) while leaving the rest of the sandbox intact.
2. 343 made changes to Armor Lock to make it lose energy while being hit and not save you from stickies. Okay. But then they wanted to show off these changes or something, so they started introducing AL to every playlist they updated. Bungie was actually removing AL from Reach via playlist updates before they got cut off, it was only going to be in BTB and one other playlist that I forget now. So Bungie actually heard and was listening to the AL complaints, 343 actually retconned more AL into Reach than the original game had.
3. They implemented bleedthrough from 1/2/3 back into Reach. Bleedthrough is where damage that goes past depleting the shields goes into your health. Except Reach's feedback was not set up for bleedthrough, so you'd just feel like you randomly died. There's nothing inherently wrong with BT, but the way Reach was designed was for it to be not be there, because it had a system where your shields would absorb all damage and "pop", then you were shieldless and one headshot would do you in, and the weapon balance was configured around this. Some people were annoyed about this, because if you had one pixel of shield , it could take a whole shot from a lot of guns. But it was simple: wait for the pop then shoot them in the head. Previous (and following) Haloes have their feedback built around BT.
Thankfully this one was reversed out because it had a bug in it: picking up healthpacks only restored the health to one part of your body instead of the entire player model (because.. reasons?) so picking up a healthpack, being full health, you could still be killed in one shot to the chest.
4. Full game radar. As this was the start of the second screen craze, 343's update added a mode where you could have a full view of the map on your phone with the positions of everyone in the game. Including enemies. Anywhere on the map. Yeaaaaaaaaaaaaah. (Amusingly enough, this was later shut down when 343 EOL'd the Waypoint app, so they put all that effort into the TU component and then just turned it off)
5. Poor execution of the deployments. First, they promised they would test the TU in a beta playlist first, and then introduce elements into the rest of matchmaking once they were tested, and promised more updates.
They ran a TU Beta playlist for just a couple of weeks and then pushed out ALL the settings into the rest of matchmaking. (Later leading to the reversal of bleedthrough,etc). They also never updated them again.
6. They promised in various ways that they would leave all existing playlists as Vanilla Reach and all new playlists would be TU Reach. Except any playlist they updated was converted over to full TU, so Vanilla Reach players actually kept losing playlists, to the point people started begging for playlists to be left unupdated so they would remain Vanilla.
6b. They actually AT FIRST made it so you could vote for TU or Vanilla in every playlist, but the gametypes were poorly named so you had no idea what pistol or DMR you had when loading into a match (and one of them also had the Anniversary pistol in it, so you could randomly have a 5 (vanilla), 4 (because bleedthrough), or 3 shot kill (Halo 1 mode) pistol). People were like "uh, can you fix the names so we know what we're voting for?"
343: sure
343: also we made the entire playlist TU even though we renamed the gametypes to TU Slayer, etc, making that effort entirely redundant
7. Released the Anniversary maps as a weird standalone disc instead of just having them as a code. Alright, so when you play Halo Anniversary on the 360, it's multiplayer is just a slimmed down Halo Reach that ONLY has the Halo Anniversary Map Pack on it. Okay, interesting way to have multiplayer on the disc instead of just porting the PC version's multiplayer. The catch was that playlists that supported this disc could ONLY have the maps from this disc. If you had a party that was playing from the original Reach disc, the playlist could not optionally select the other classic Halo maps available. (Regular playlists could optionally select maps in case everyone owned them).
"Alright" you say, "but that's pretty nice that they get to play the maps.....?"
Well, they included a code with CEA. So you could have the maps for your base Reach. Rendering the entire point of the MP side of the disc pointless and only leading to splitting Reach's playerbase. The CEA disc couldn't even load DLC maps, which is REALLY weird because there's DLC achievements for the Defiant Map Pack that require owning the Anniversary maps, so you had to have Base Reach and Anniversary Maps on the regular version to even unlock them.. so I still don't know what the point of the CEA disc was. It couldn't sell anyone on more DLC packs. It didn't unify the playerbase on all DLC, like the MP-only Halo 3 disc that came with ODST did. And best of all, this meant that Blood Gulch, which was on the goddamn Reach disc as a default map, was not available to play in Halo 1 playlists. The most iconic map from Halo 1 was not available in Halo 1 mode matchmaking anywhere. Ever. To this day. Meaning the whole point of re-using Reach's magnum as the Halo 1 Pistol, which let it function as a Halo 1 Pistol on all maps in Reach, was never used outside of the Anniversary maps in matchmaking. They literally could have just actually put the actual Halo 1 pistol in the Anni maps, which would have made it only show up there, but nobody in matchmaking would have ever noticed the difference.
8. Everything about having two Reaches
So besides all of the above, never really in general has a game ever had two versions of itself running concurrently next to each other in the same game. It was honestly pretty weird, and felt like 343 was trying to make their mark with also leaving what Bungie left behind intact (until they started erasing that). So even their half measure drove people away. And the numbers proved it out - not only did Reach have more population than Halo 4 after Halo 4's release, the Vanilla playlists had more population than 343's TU copies of them (did I mention 343's solution was to also make copies of playlists into Vanilla and TU versions, and slotted them under "Vanilla" and "Evolved" in the matchmaking directory? Yeah, they did that, which forced playlists like Action Sack to be deleted because Reach only supported 20 something playlists). So we had two Team Slayers, only difference being Vanilla and the other being TU. Vanilla had 6,000 players in it. "Super Slayer", their name for TU Slayer under the Evolved category, had.. 200 players. It wasn't even close. The entire Evolved category was a ghost town.
They really should have just ripped off the bandaid and made the changes global, like Bungie did with Halo 2's big update, it was hard to miss or do anything with vanilla H2 because you couldn't fucking play it after the update. Being able to play it but with whatever 343 decided not to take away from you just made it worse, because you could see the game you really enjoyed playing while an unfinished patch was slowly taking your options away.
But in total honesty, the whole handoff of Reach was pointless. 343 already had Halo 4 in the works, and Bungie would have gladly supported Reach until Destiny came out. Reach got caught in an ugly divorce with ugly results. Either via hubris or indifference, the community's rejection of the TU was ignored and they moved on to Halo 4 and fucking goddamnit it's 9 years later and I'm posting about the goddamn Reach TU again.
This is not a drill! It looks like ranks and customization unlocks are carrying forward??
I played a fair amount of Halo PC online but that's pretty much it. I'm all about the campaigns.
You can't give someone a pirate ship in one game, and then take it back in the next game. It's rude.
All of my favorite gaming moments are TBK moments.
Assassination only Invasion.
Minotaur
Warthog shenanigans on Standoff
Minotaur
Kor yelling at me
Getting real good at SWAT early EST.
I have a mild interest in playing some Halo MP again but in all honesty, the big thing for me also is getting all the coop stuff on PC. The MP was great when I had a crowd of people to play with that I personally knew, but getting somebody to play coop with was a lot easier than getting enough people for a team for MP. Coop campaign was generally so much better for setting up zany shenanigans than with super-serious people in MP.
And the campaigns actually had loads of writing to go with them, which is an aspect that is desperately lacking in modern AAA game development. The Halo games were fun, but it was the details of the setting that kept bringing me back until Halo 4 went sideways with it all (and even that still had a pretty nice coop-designed campaign).
My close friend Fatalslayer is in there along with a ton of other TBK alums like Fyrewulff and Willeth
Is the Halo 5 multiplayer population that low?
No, not at all--probably the opposite. Just look at the huge population of occupied custom games, which are always a minority in online multiplayer.
Now, if Slayer matchmaking has problems--that wouldn't surprise me. I regularly get matched into a game, only to get dropped immediately before launch and put back into the pool. The process can repeat itself multiple times.
If anything, Halo 5 MM population is larger than I'd personally expect for a game of that age.
My issue is that modes like Warzone and Big team battle take ages to find a game if at all.
Heroic firefight? Now that loads really quickly
I need to check again. BTB was a longterm favorite of mine since 3, but I'm bad enough at Slayer that I tend to gravitate towards Firefight now, where my incompetency is generally private.
The different Slayer/related modes matchmake very quickly. Too quickly if you have my anxieties. BTB is more exclusive, so some delay is probably to be expected.
And everyone Warzone Firefight mode loads up in a snap. Heroic, Legend, and Mythic (albeit only on the weekends). People are playing that shit. For me, it's the only way to get to use rare (or even just uncommon) vehicles.
You guys have no idea, I have been waiting since Halo 3 released to finish the fight.
My hatred towards xbawks exclusivity was a dagger of spite against all Bungie products. Now... we can talk again.
Halo 2 has new custom gametype options after 15 years!
MP skulls:
Grunt Birthday Party - Headshots trigger a grunt party
Blind - No HUD or weapon on screen
Black Eye - Shields only recharge on a melee
Sputnik - Mass of objects is decreased
BOOM - explosion radius x2
Eye Patch - Auto Aim disabled
Foreign - No covie weapon pickups
Grunt Funeral - Players die in a "blaze of glory"
Recession - Every shot is worth twice the amount
Malfunction - A random element of you Hud is disabled on respawn
Streaking - Shields constantly decay but recharge on a enemy kill
Feather - Player and melee are more effective on physics objects
General Options
Player Gravity option
Infinite Ammo
Bottomless Clip
Grenade Regeneration
Indestructible vehicles
Vehicle Gravity
World Gravity
Halo 2, 3, 4, and 2A all run at a 60hz tickrate now for multiplayer
Other general fixes and spitshine
Dixonator is ready to ride (wtf was I smoking when I decided on that name...)
ps new banshee steal tech
So
Sure she's cured?
Nah.
No.
Cortana saw a chance to address her grievances--the Forerunner Mantle of Control--and took it, with some degree of belief in her own benevolence. She makes a big point of explaining it in the final two chapters, and we have no reason to think she's lying or otherwise doesn't believe herself. Rampancy would've caused her to go frothing-at-the-mouth insane, but it wasn't the specific cause of her anger and frustrations. Now she has a form of immortality (or at least, no clearly defined expiration date--consider the Installation monitors, who are similarly "immortal" and were frankly better programmed at their creation) she's decided to implement the long plan.
Or what Shoeboxjeddy said.
once you start going down the evil AIs monologuing route im almost always guaranteed to check out of your story
half the time I didnt even know why I was doing an objective during that campaign, and for the first half I really tried to pay attention