Halo 3: ODST Forum
This topic has moved here: Subject: ODST > Reach
  • Subject: ODST > Reach
Subject: ODST > Reach

By the power of truth, I, while living, have conquered the universe.

ODST, in my opinion, was a hundred times better than Reach.

The Story:

Sadie's Story was a fantastic little wild goose chase around New Mombasa. It gave the campaign real replayability value and encouraged us to search every last nook on the map. Everything from the artwork to the voice acting was top notch and I loved how it was inspired from Dante's Inferno.

ODST's main story was much more fulfilling than Reach's. Buck's Squad had more depth to them, reason being is that they're not Spartans, they can show emotion without being constricted to their genetically augmented counterparts' military and protocol indoctrination.

Noble Team stick to the generic kind of archetypal characters you'd expect from something like Gears of War. Sure, ODST had some of those stereotypes but it was a lot more subtle. The squad's banter is much more down-to-earth and human than Noble Team's was.

New Mombasa, being very open, was a great environment to get familiar with. The "Stonehenge" areas were beautifully made, the noir tunes playing in the background gave a great impression of loneliness in a huge destroyed city. The only drawback was the copy and pasted Crater areas that made the map confusing, but otherwise I found New Mombasa a joy to explore (and exploit).

Which brings me to another, slightly odd point - level exploration.

Halo CE, Halo 2 and Halo 3 were infamous for being able to get out of the playable areas and play about outside set boundaries. Stuff like getting on top of Cairo Station, jumping over the last Temple on Delta Halo and spending years debating the "Mystery of the Gate", escaping the Pillar of Autumn and skipping large sections of levels to put an ease to your Legendary playthroughs were all extremely fun.

Reach put an end to this fun with the 10 second soft kill boundaries. Now it's odd I'm complaining about Bungie fixing their game up, but it makes the campaign a hell of a lot more linear and one-dimensional now that they've done this. With ODST we had these big shield barriers that impeded our progress, but they were easy to get over and explore - definately most fun during Firefight.

Nathan Fillion, Adam Baldwin and Alan Tudyk were a very welcome addition to Halo. I am a massive Firefly fan and it was great to become more connected with the characters because I know who the people voicing them are, you can relate to them which makes their dialogue much more amusing and/or serious.

Also, Firefight. A new innovative feature based of Marathon's Survival Mode, made popular with things like the Endure achievement which encouraged players to come together and fight legions of Covenant with a single shared goal. I loved ODST's Firefight for what it was, it truly was a joy to play.

But I do not have the motivation to play it on Reach.

The new custom options are welcome, but so unnecessary. It doesn't feel like Firefight in ODST, sure I love a good game of Versus but now almost every game mode has unlimited lives which means you're free to run rampant without a whole lot of consequence. ODST encouraged you to pick your battles with care.

In my opinion, ODST should have been the 3 year project, not Reach.

[Edited on 02.13.2011 9:03 AM PST]

  • 02.13.2011 8:20 AM PDT

Vengeance only leads to an ongoing cycle of hatred.

I couldn't agree with you more. ODST was such a great game and it only had a small team working on it. It also only had a short amount of time to be produced. It was great, but it could have easily been amazing if they spent more time on it. Also, Reach was the biggest disappointment I've ever seen. ODST is the better game, by far.

  • 02.13.2011 11:40 AM PDT

Yep. Reach and ODST went for emotion. Reach just couldn't pull it off. ODST is one of the best games ever in my opinion.

  • 02.13.2011 12:10 PM PDT