- Shai Hulud
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- Exalted Mythic Member
With B.B. gone, the passion of Bungie.net has lessened.
Bungie has gotten better about the whole hype thing this time around. Halo 2 and 3 didn't live up to expectations because everyone's expectations were unrealistically high, whether it be expecting either game to turn out more like Halo 1, to be longer, less glitchy, whatever. Every game has its flaws, though, and that's what people need to keep in mind. Most assumed Halo 2 and 3 would be "perfect." They're not, and they were never going to be. And if you didn't expect them to be perfect, you expected them to be better than what they were, but "better" in who's opinion? Your own. "Better" is not, and never will be, an objective description.
These expectations were built on really awesome, tailored-for-hype trailers. The Halo 2 and Halo 3 announcements were epic, and both trailers looked absolutely gorgeous. But Bungie couldn't make a game the size and scale they wanted with the amount of graphical effects they showed in the trailer (even if it was the in-game engine).
And then with Halo 2, you had the infamous E3 2003 gameplay trailer, a "demo" that looked great, looked like it played great, and was just all-around awesome. Bungie spent too much time making an awesome-looking demo (that no one but them and a few others got to play) and not enough time working on the game itself, in the sense that what we see in the Demo was in no way a playable part of the game. This is something they've basically admitted to, and it really damaged Halo 2 as a final product in the end. But hey, Halo 2 was still great, wasn't it? I think it was, but I recognize that, even in my own opinion, it could have been better.
If you look at what they've done differently since that E3 demo, you'll notice that we don't have nearly as much in terms of pre-completion gameplay demonstrations for Halo 3, ODST, and now even with Reach. I think they've made a good decision to not let us see material that isn't completed and mostly polished. We didn't see any ODST gameplay footage until the game was already finished (but had yet to be released).
Building up expectations and false hope will damage the quality of Reach before it's even released (even if we don't realize it before then). Let's say we see a demo with flyable Pelicans, or with a single-shot BR; what if in the end, Bungie goes back on these decisions due to what they deem are valid gameplay reasons? That'll piss a lot of people off, and probably make many of them drop their controllers and refuse to play the game. Not good.
I'm going to try to not have expectations of specific things in the game. I expect the game to be great, and I'm pretty sure that it will be in the end (Bungie, imo, has consistently made great games).