More on Halo: Reach

TornadoADV

Cobra King
Apr 10, 2009
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Captain Pirate said:
TornadoADV said:
She is already on a wetware chip, SPARTAN-IIIs do not have the necessary architecture in their suits to support an AI, nor a way to interface with said AI. Hence the reason why if you actually bother to play the first 3 HALO games or the Limited/Legendary HALO : Reach, you will know that SPARTAN-IIs just had their mjolnir suits upgraded to support warship class AI during the Reach engagment.

Hence Cortana gets to ride inside an armored capsule rather then inside Noble Six's noggin.
Well, see, thing is, I've played all the games but Halo 2, and I remember nothing about being told that Spartan II's armour gets upgraded to carry such an AI. I know they can, obviously, but there was certainly no explanation at all as to why.
And maybe I wanted the Limited Edition of Reach, but didn't have the money.
Don't make assumptions that I can't be fucked to play Halo just because I don't understand why Cortana is in a fat metal pipe.

I never asked why she can't plug into Six's helmet, just why she was stored in something so big.
But if it's an armoured capsule, that makes a lot of sense, thanks.
Yeah, if you look closely right as she jumps from the computer, to the container, you'll see the wetware chip inside. Since Bungie can't assume that the player has Noble Six equipped with a Hardcase or Softcase on their thigh, she has to ride in the tube.
 

Deg

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Nov 23, 2007
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Fronzel said:
How can you review multiplayer? Online games are only as good as the people you play them with, and you can't review that, nor should you; it's the game that's being examined here, not its players. In the absence of that, what can you do but just mention what kind of online game modes are available? That doesn't give you much to discuss.
I'm not sure I agree with this. There is plenty to discuss concerning multiplayer modes. After all, quite a bit of work has to go into designing and creating them beyond just "take single player and have more people shooting at one another". You could discuss things like:

- How well does the game and its multiplayer modes handle competitive play? How competitive do you think the game could get? (ex, Starcraft Broodwar is usually seen being better set up for competitive play than say Halo Wars)
- Are maps balanced? Are weapons balanced? How many maps/weapons are present in multiplayer compared with single player?
- How much control do players get over customizing each individual multiplayer match?
- What kind of player avatar customizations are available? Do these customizations count as upgrades or purely cosmetic?
- How does the game handle online play in general? A lobby system, auto matching, or perhaps both? How long does it take to find a game? Is it easy to just log on and play within 2 minutes?

See? Loads of stuff.
 

Krunkcity3000

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Mar 12, 2008
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I totally agree with Yahtzee about the huge contrast between what Bungie claims is this deep universe and what actually shows up in the game. Spartans are supposed to be super heavy, super strong and can be super fast. All of this without picking up modular armor augmentations. However, in Halo you wade around through levels like your stuck in oatmeal. Also, If it takes 1-2 punches from by fist to down an enemies shields and kill him, and it takes an entire clip from one gun to drop the shields then a few rounds from another to kill the enemy, why can't i just throw rocks with my super strength? Seems that it would be more effective than the shitty submachine gun piece of shit you always start out with. My final complaint is that after so much time Reach still had these graphical errors and shortcuts. Like the obviously painted backgrounds. They were a lot better than the shitty ones in Halo 3 but they are still noticeable. Seems like instead of being on some alien world fighting for humanity, I'm on the set of the original Star Trek with plastic boulders and painted landscapes.
 

AUSPAIN

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Jul 22, 2010
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You made a good point about the MMO having single player aspects and also in saying a game should be able to stand up to criticism the single player alone. However, a games multiplayer has just as much right to be a part of the criteria for a good game as the singleplayer. Not including multiplayer, in halo's case multiplayer and forge, in the critera is a bias way to judge a game as it does not cover everything, especially since games like cod4 and 6 rely on multiplayer for replay value.
 

Asuka Soryu

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Jun 11, 2010
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Sir John the Net Knight said:
Yahtzee is just so tired and predictable. I'm sick of hearing him blather on about how multiplayer doesn't matter. It sure as hell seems to matter to a lot of other people.

Yeah, but so does Justin Bieber, Twilight and 3D!~
 

AVATAR_RAGE

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May 28, 2009
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rollerfox88 said:
I'm not wearing a shirt...
or are you :p

But yeah I noticed some of the points made there while playing through. Though one point I would like to make is the the 3rd person scenes (well some of em) are from the point of view of the second player (at least it is in split screen)
 

CharlesA

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Nov 8, 2009
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I'm a big fan of coop campaings, and Reach's was probably the dullest I've played in a long while:

1. No direction. Most of the time we just stood there like dumbasses trying to figure out where to go untill something lit up somewhere and showed us what the hell the objective was.

2. Horrible, skippable, cutscenes mean that in order to prevent one's sanity we just skipped everything, and realized that without them, the game had absolutely no story on it's own. I mean, the gameplay failed on every level to tell the player anything but "stay with yellow dots, kill red dots, go to the blue floaty square with a number under it". I mean, in the first three halos, even if you skipped the cutscenes, you knew what was going on. The flood is there, get the fsck out, soldier.

3. No flood. I don't care about continuity, no flood means no third act, no turning point, just plain routine. It also means that when the credit started to roll, we just shouted "wait, that's it?"

4. No real use of the new features. Reach's multiplayer is indeed brilliant, however with all the new tools (freaking jetpacks!) you barely get to do anything that requires their use, what about a mission where you must use the armor lockup at intervals to pass some security system or something, I mean, you could go through the whole campaign without touching the LB button once, it would have added quite a lot of variety. There was one level that for something like ten seconds required you to use the jetpacks, and that's it.

5. No mood changes, whatever you do, whoever you meet, they're gonna be there for a few seconds, then you get away and kill some more stuff, you never feel like you are in an actual city, civilians are cattle and other military types are there to give you their battle riffle before getting blasted by a stick grenade.

6. Frustrating vehicles segments. Space war sucked (lock on target, shoot missile, drift aimlessly until you figure out where the enemy are in the bloom filled sky, lock on, shoot missile, etc.) and that goddamn level with the chopper in the city was complete shit, directionless, pointless and not even really challenging.

7. Skippable last level? When the credits finished rolling I saw the animation of the spartans picking up his gun, with the skip button lit. We didn't want to go through another horrible cutscene, so we skipped to get right into the fight, and it just ended the game. I mean, what the hell?

8. The covenant is not a menace. By this time, after five single player Halo campaigns, we all know how to deal with every single enemy they throw at us. Big badass with shields and rocket luncher? Just get behind him and press b three times. Evil hidden sword guy? Shoot the bastard, then stick him and he's done. I mean, can we at least get a few new bad guys, something unnexpected somewhere or were they too lazy to create some new models?

9. Yay! Grenade luncher! Hey! Where is the ammo? Hey? Come on! Oh well, back to needler.

10. Okay, the hologram was damn cool.
 

Harvey_Danger

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Dec 11, 2008
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To paraphrase his video and part of the article:

"I'm tired of realistic games."

"Halo ruins immersion because it's not realistic enough."

And:

"I don't review multiplayer because other players are annoying and the community always disappears."

(Everyone knows Halo fans are diehard; if he took the time to look around anywhere in the game, he'd know there's a function to mute everyone.)

"I don't see the point in playing competitive multiplayer. I play games by myself."

(Based off of past texts this is apparently because you're antisocial and your ego is too fragile to deal with sucking at a multiplayer game without practice.)

Don't critique major releases that have had significant resources put into multiplayer if you're just going to ignore it, because it's not FAIR to the rest of the game or anyone reading/watching your reviews. Obviously the singleplayer is going to be lackluster compared to a game designed for singleplayer only. That's like attending a class at a major public university and complaining that you're not getting enough individual attention when the school's goal is to educate as many people as possible. If you want individual attention then you go to a private school with a goal to provide as such.

Singleplayer in multiplayer-centric games exists to familiarize players with a game's mechanics and to briefly entertain them while doing so, to "give them their money's worth." It's a sad fact of modern gaming but it's a fact nonetheless. Do I think it should change? Of course, but in the meantime I'm not going to shred a game's singleplayer campaign when all anyone is really intending to play is multiplayer. You played WoW by yourself for the majority of the time? Well congratulations, you've actually managed to play the game wrong.a



Yahtzee, there's a reason you are only credible as a humorist and not as an actual game reviewer. You're not good at critiquing games in a serious context. I understand that gamers tend to get all defensive and their penises shrink whenever Roger Ebert is mentioned, but if you intend to make a legitimate career out of what you do instead of just being a nerd that got lucky, you may want to take notes on his articles and learn what critiquing is instead of what you do, which is use the same, tired points over and over in your reviews to rationalize what in reality is just poorly thought-out writing.
 

ReiverCorrupter

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Jun 4, 2010
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This single-player vs. multiplayer debate needs to end.

Yahtzee belongs to the 'artsy' school of game reviewers. He critiques a game's plot, gameplay (within the story mode), and the overall effect of the experience. He isn't concerned with multiplayer.

Is he right for doing this?

No. But he isn't wrong either.

Multiplayer is a huge selling point for a lot of gamers, including myself. I have no problem spending $60 on a game if I'm going to get hundreds or thousands of hours out of it online. But I don't watch Yahtzee's videos for multiplayer critique. I watch them for the sheer entertainment of Yahtzee bashing on nonsensical plots and flaws in the game design. (Since this is a polished Halo game he was restricted to the former.)

To once more counter the claims of aesthetic objectivity that some people make about games failing if their single player fails: False. There is a whole market of people who only care about multiplayer. You can try to enforce your values on them, but your arguments will fall on deaf ears because they look for completely different things in a game.

The difference is this. People like Yahtzee see games kind of like interactive movies. They are plot driven stories that the player takes part in.

People who play games for the multiplayer view games as sport. There isn't any real reason why you are trying to kill the other team, it's just the objective of the game.

Both people derive different kinds of entertainment out of games. Neither is objectively 'correct' in their interpretation of what games should be. It would be like arguing that we should get rid of sports so we could spend more money developing movies, or visa-versa. SO STOP ARGUING PAST EACH OTHER, YOU'RE NEVER GOING TO CONVINCE EACH OTHER OF ANYTHING.

Honestly, no one who is going to buy Halo Reach for its multiplayer is going to give a crap about what Yahtzee says anyway.

I enjoy both of the above aspects of games. I can tell you right now, I've played every Halo game, and if you are thinking about buying Reach for the story, SAVE YOUR MONEY. It was terrible. I understood what was going on because I've played the previous games, but even so the writing was so terrible, the characters so underdeveloped, and the plot so seemingly arbitrary that the whole experience was completely lackluster. I couldn't care in the slightest when the main characters died. By contrast I was very upset when Sgt. Johnson died at the end of Halo Three. It didn't suck because it was a Halo game. It sucked because they didn't even bother to write a decent story.

The campaign was fun, but not because of its story. Firefight is fun. The multiplayer is fun. But if you only care about story, DO NOT BUY THIS GAME.
 

Palademon

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Mar 20, 2010
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Madara XIII said:
Palademon said:
Yes, it is rather boring. There are new weapons and vehicles. (Or should I say old). I much prefered ODST's characterisation. I only starting liking Noble team (a little) after about half of them were dead.
WOW and to think that YOU of all people wouldn't like Halo:Reach


Allow me to Present a short summarization of the Multiplayer

I actually made that exact joke back in the thread about Reach hackers getting banned. When I saw it on vgcats I was like "Hell yeah".
 

Megamonmon

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Oct 15, 2010
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basically what ur saying is that
1)realise its a fan game no noobs allowed
2)he should read up everything on the games backstory
and 3)get rid of his biasedness
well i think ur pretty much described a fucking robot
i dont think a game should need excuses to be good plus the fact its his opinion of the game while also giving perpective from a casual gamer and if u need to buy 10 books,15 comic books and a grahpic novel just to understand what the fuck is going on with a bunch of canon fodder soldiers i dont think its worth the money
 

Madara XIII

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Sep 23, 2010
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Palademon said:
Madara XIII said:
Palademon said:
Yes, it is rather boring. There are new weapons and vehicles. (Or should I say old). I much prefered ODST's characterisation. I only starting liking Noble team (a little) after about half of them were dead.
WOW and to think that YOU of all people wouldn't like Halo:Reach


Allow me to Present a short summarization of the Multiplayer

I actually made that exact joke back in the thread about Reach hackers getting banned. When I saw it on vgcats I was like "Hell yeah".
Great minds think alike I guess
 

Spencer Petersen

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Apr 3, 2010
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I think the exclusion of multiplayer is entirely justified. Just think about it, how much of the actual game design factors into the quality of the multiplayer? A game can have the most mind blowing fun and creative multiplayer in the world but still be rubbish if the servers get shut down after 6 months or the community sucks a fat one. The quality of multiplayer is entirely dependent on the people present and maybe balance, probably the only real factor directly tied to game quality.

Example MW2: Now that the dust has settled we see what is really there, Imbalanced guns, broken tactics, no cheater regulation, abundant hackers, insufferable community, terrible servers, samey weapons, tiny map number, no updates, and game play which actively prohibits group tactics. But why was it so popular for the time, because everyone played it. Really, the number of people who are playing the multiplayer probably has more effect on the quality of the multiplayer than how balanced it is.

Not only that, but multiplayer has a lifespan, single player is timeless, and in the future the quality of any title released today is going to be entirely based on its single player. So in X months when Halo: Reach's servers get shut down like Halo 2's were, and maybe you are interested in picking this up as a retro title, Yahtzee's review is going to hold all of the value that it does now. But for multiplayer, you might as well leave it to the flip of a coin, as luck has more impact than game play.
 

Megamonmon

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Oct 15, 2010
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so what ur saying is "i hate yathzee because he has an opinion different to mine that annoys me but i love his videos because they are bright and shinny"
well as long as u have ur priorities straight