- Debo37
- |
- Exalted Mythic Member
Destiny awaits. And it will be great.
Aside from Firefight, every other game mode in Reach screams that the game was rushed. It's pretty unreasonable to expect that Bungie would have been able to exceed Halo 3's quality with a more ambitious game in a shorter timeframe though, so any whining about these problems really isn't justifiable as far as I see it. But to say that I wasn't disappointed would be a lie.
Campaign:
-Frequent, noticeable framerate drops
-Very sub-par texturing in places - stretched textures, abrupt texture changes, z-fighting
-Multiplayer spaces don't feel as though they belong; they feel tacked on design-wise AND story-wise
Matchmaking:
-Armor Lock tends to overcentralize gameplay since there is no obvious counter; whether this is a balance issue or a psychological issue among the playerbase I cannot say for certain, though I'm inclined to think the former
-Introduction of Loadout-based gameplay ruined the symmetry that had served to differentiate Halo from the masses of class-based shooters that already flood the FPS market; it seems as though they were introduced only to make it seem as though Halo had been upgraded
-Game mechanics like spawn sequences do not function
Custom Games:
-Advanced scoring options for both Oddball and King of the Hill were removed, when they had existed in Halo 3 (in Reach, you cannot create custom Oddball gametypes that give points for Ball Kills and the like, and you can't set KotH to award points for contested control of a Hill); additionally, Infection Safe Havens cannot be set to move in sequence
Forge:
-Large items, even when aligned to the coordinate grid with snaps, tend to save in positions slightly altered than that set by the Forger
-Gray color palette of the "Forge items" fails to completely fix the other major problem with Halo 3's Forge - visual sameness of maps
-Lack of small "movable" objects
-Forge World-specific problems: abrupt texture changes/stretched textures (particularly with the section of cliff that was "tacked on" to Alaska); proliferation of hard-coded soft-kill zones in areas they shouldn't be; Quarry asymmetry; floating tree trunks (including one totally floating tree)