Halo: Reach

My favorite aspect of the new matchmaking is the Skill Division which is going to be fantastic..In my old account, I was a 5 star General and it was a pain in the butt to get paired up with 3 low ranked players who didn't play as team and understand their role.Instead, they all thought they were Superman and could take on the whole team solo but ended up getting thoroughly thrashed..

Reach is shaping up to be one heck of a game and I cannot wait to play the beta on May 3rd...
 
General huh? Pretty impressive. I think I peaked somewhere around 35 or so in Team Slayer. Of course, I always went in alone and got paired with randoms so it was tough at times. Hopefully for Reach we can get a more consistent team thing going.

Also, I hope they haven't totally killed the Social play lists because ranked play got frustrating after a while. Social was the place to chill out, screw around, and have some fun at other peoples' expense.
 
More on the Arena:

Shacknews

We want to take a new stab at the scoring system and come up with a 'pure scoring system'. We thought a lot about the different pros and cons of [our previous system. We didn't like that it penalized the best player on the losing team. What we came up with was the Arena. It has a different vibe. It is a hardcore, Slayer-only [area]. You are going to be given a rating compared to the rest of the population broken up into divisions.

It's a season-based model, which [helps prevent account smurfing]. If you played a bunch in Halo 3, you'd hit around 40 [skill] and all of a sudden you're number isn't going up. Players would say, 'I guess I'm done. Do I make a second account?' The season model does some really cool things. At the end of the season, it goes on the back of your 'baseball card' and the next season begins fresh.

Not surprising, but a September release slip?

Our seasons are probably going to line-up with calendar months. For the September 2010, you're going for the best division you can by the end of that season.
 
The vote for next map is a nice feature as is the new skill measurements.

General huh? Pretty impressive. I think I peaked somewhere around 35 or so in Team Slayer. Of course, I always went in alone and got paired with randoms so it was tough at times. Hopefully for Reach we can get a more consistent team thing going.

You don't have to play alone this time though. You can tag team up with Castaway and myself. I am a lot better at Halo now as well.
 
General huh? Pretty impressive. I think I peaked somewhere around 35 or so in Team Slayer. Of course, I always went in alone and got paired with randoms so it was tough at times. Hopefully for Reach we can get a more consistent team thing going.

Also, I hope they haven't totally killed the Social play lists because ranked play got frustrating after a while. Social was the place to chill out, screw around, and have some fun at other peoples' expense.

Yeah that was on my old GT account but somehow it got hacked and MS gave me a free year of xbox live gold membership.On my current GT, Im a Brigadier grade 2 but most of the time I get paired with randoms who are good or bad...I wish I had a dedicated group that I can play with..Im liking Bungie's new scoring system which is wonderful because if im doing fantastic and the rest of the team is sucking, im not going to get penalized like I would in Halo 3...

If possible, we should get a nice B3D Reach beta group to play together.If any of you guys are down, let me know..
 
You can add me to your group if you want as im a great team player...

Ok, but only if you are really, really good... OR if you are willing to teach us to play as a team. Castaway and I have this tendency to, well, chase down the enemy to crush them all on our lonesome ... I think the problem is I am good enough to pull my own but don't have a wingman and haven't played enough with someone like NRP to be his wigman.
 
Ok, but only if you are really, really good... OR if you are willing to teach us to play as a team. Castaway and I have this tendency to, well, chase down the enemy to crush them all on our lonesome ... I think the problem is I am good enough to pull my own but don't have a wingman and haven't played enough with someone like NRP to be his wigman.

I strongly feel that Im really, really good.In Team Doubles, I've won matches when it was just me against 2 people.Needless to say, in that situation, you must double up on your tactics and literally make no stupid mistakes or else your screwed.I've been down by 8 or more kills and came back.That's the equivalent of being down by 16 since your alone fighting against 2 people and must do twice the work.

Yeah, sometimes I tend to go Superman on my team but most of the team, my superhero tactics work.It only doesn't work for me when I get really cocky and think im extremely invincible.In team slayer or objective gametypes, I always tell my mates to not get cocky and fire in short bursts as its much more accurate that way.I also enjoy motivating my squad to bring out the best in them.

Im a pretty good teammate as I want everyone to have fun but also play good enough to win the match.By the way, I have excellent grenading skills..I need to show you guys some of the stickies I've done in matches along with my uncanny ability to pinpoint frag grenades..With Halo, being great isn't just about shooting but its a combination of things to compliment that like good grenading skills, well-timed melee's, taking cover etc..
 
Bunch of elitist... team... players... :|



:p

:LOL::LOL:

I can honestly say I've never had that mentality when playing against good players but against noobs I have....oh yeah, I HATE getting t-bagged for no reason and if it happens, I will t-bag that player everytime I kill him...Im like that revenge bot from Perfect Dark. :devilish:
 
I was never very good at Halo. My biggest problem, other than being stupid, is that I'm a charger, which is a bad idea when you do it alone. But it's still lots of fun.
 
I enjoy the Halo MP even though I'm horrible at it. The chaos keeps things entertaining. It's just not a game I can commit to regularly (like realistic shooters) to get good at it but that's ok, I still have a lot of fun feeding! The jumping all over is what owns me.
 
A lot more info:

Reach Multiplayer Arena Q&A Transcript

Reach's Matchmaking and Active Roster

Bungie Weekly Update

In the Beta, players will be able to create Saved Films and upload them to their File Shares and create screenshots that can be posted to their gallery on Bungie.net. In Halo 3, players were limited to a total of around 100 custom content items (maps, game types, films, screens, etc.), but in Reach, you’ll be able to have THOUSANDS of custom content items. Better yet, you’ll be able to upload, tag, and search for content right from the in game menus, utilizing the massive database previously found only through Bungie.net to tag and query our vast community collection for kick ass content.

Sounds awesome, eh? It is.
 
Interesting that Spartans and Elites not only have different character models but also different health characteristics, movement speeds/ jump height and probably unique combat abilities as well.
Will make MP that much more interesting.
 
http://ve3d.ign.com/articles/news/53851/X-Scorch-360-Cross-Platform-Controller-Released

C'mon Josh, you know you want it. ;)


Interesting that Spartans and Elites not only have different character models but also different health characteristics, movement speeds/ jump height and probably unique combat abilities as well.
Will make MP that much more interesting.

mm... would be interesting to see an Elite finishing move as a counterpart to the Spartan assassination. Something a little more hands-on than a knife. At least, I hope it can do more than roll around. :p
 

Not that I am an expert in these things, but I would expect that unit to have issues similar to the Smart Frag products.

e.g. Halo and CoD have different deadzone sizes and shapes. This is a big issue because PC doesn't need a deadzone but the gamepads do. Designers use different sizes and shapes. It looks like you can see it in the video--note no small movements and when he moves it tends to jerk. So with the Frag product you could adjust the zone size, but not shape which caused issues. So that would be big issue #1.

The next issue is most games aren't doing 1:1 X:Y translation for movement. iirc Halo 3 is more like 1.5:1. This will make for a wonky experience if you cannot adjust the X:Y ratio. The Frag stuff allows for that but it can get complicated as a lot of games also do non-linear acceleration along the axi (e.g. a 20% tilt to 40% may see a 25% increase in rotation while 40%-60% results in a 50%) as well as time based acceleration (e.g. hit 100% and after a couple seconds you go even faster). And when MC had that big ol' gun you are going to need to jack your sensativity up HIGH or you are going to be lifting your mouse a LOT. (Didn't see if the mouse had OTF sensitivity changes).

All this to say that unless it has some software on the mouse to do these things--and either a) it is programmable or b) they have profiles for games and can update them, the experience will be very hit and miss.

The best solution I "know" of is a software based feedback system with a robust velocity style map that "learns" the full range of movements and creates a software profile to translate mouse movements into the 360. The next best solution I "know" of is a programmable software solution where you can set you deadzone size, shape, X:Y rations, translation exponents, and the like to account for all the gamepad-hacks developers use to make gamepads enjoyable (no deadzone and 1:1 axi ratios and no time based acceleration with no auto-aim, adhesion, magnetism would really stink for most--it would be like the N64 all over again!)

That said nothing you can do on the consoles can overcome hard caps. If a game limits a 360 rotation to 1.5 seconds you cannot turn faster--period. There is no way to do it. Likewise any movement based momentum (usually avoided in PC games), slow turret style movements (work great on pads, horrible on mice), etc won't be easily solved. And you cannot get rid of all the hard hacks like autoaim and such which, surprisingly, are not very welcome when using a mouse.

I wouldn't mind testing that product out, for giggles, but after some extensive testing with other products I don't see it doing anything special. I do love the numchuck though! And maybe they do have some software for it? I didn't do any reading on it less what I saw at Toms.

I wonder what they are doing for security, though, because it looks like it is a devise MS could easily nail. Not that MS would want to. Frag users aren't any better, actually far worse in most cases, than gamepad users. Players on both sides have the same caps and limits. There are some other products that give a more authentic PC experience but they are expensive and, ultimately, the quality of gamepad users is now much higher than 5 years ago and with the hard caps and aids given to console gamers (MW2 kill cam really, really shows off the aids BIG time--Halo 3 also has some crazy autoaim AND adhesion... ok, all console shooters do) my experiments have shown that you can get a near PC experience and still suck :LOL:

Not that I am an expert in these things.
 
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KGqmlDoJmi0&feature=related

This video test notes diagonal deadzone issues at 2:30. He mentions a firmware to fix it, but I wouldn't hold you breath.

I see a bit of skipping in MW2--which is maybe the game closest to pure "PC" as you can get. Also, big mistake when he moves down the sensitivity to 3. If the product works well you should set it on 10 (Insane) and then use your mouse to adjust accordingly--thus you can be very fine and sensitive (which is why he moved it down in all likelihood as it probably was skippy) but do very fast 360s. With a low sensitivity you would cap at a lower top speed and rotate slowly requiring huge/long mouse movements. But this may be necessary to compensate for the low end sensitivity.

Maybe Bandai could send me one to test--I would love to be wrong!
 
Bungie Reveals Halo: Reach's All-Encompassing Player Investment System

"Whatever your preferred flavor of Halo is, we're gonna find a way to reward you," said Bungie player investment designer (and former games journalist) Luke Smith in a phone interview with me earlier this week. "Whatever you enjoy doing in multiplayer, we're gonna find a way to reward you. Through the Player Investment system, you're going to be building an identity for the first time in a Halo game."
 
Back
Top