[Taken634]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Danzaiver

Yep, the multiplayer is the fun par of Halo, the maps and the powers are awesome.

I'll admit, the power-ups are cool, but some of them are cheap. Overall, the Halo multiplayer formula has always worked, the community is solid (minus the six-year old trolls), and it always brings thrills.

Forge World is amazing, and brings a Garry's Mod-like fun to the game. Theater mode is great too, I love taking clips of gameplay and funny moments.

Overall, I'd give Halo Reach an 7/10.

[Explorer]

New weekly challenge is just too hard ( ONI:LASO = Oni: Legendary All Skulls ON = Mythic Difficulty ). I tried it 2 times but it's just too damn annoying.

[Not The Writer]

Have fun on the newest weekly challenge if you didn't like the last, Explorer. It's Nightfall: LASO. It's simple if you know the run-through, though.

[QuantumWake]

Bright Blue Balls of Fury

LOL! This is why I play Halo. I want to play that NOW!

[3APA3HO]

Reminds me of Q2/Q3 instagib deathmatches

[Not The Writer]

Well, Bungie did something really neat recently and gave members of the community a chance to dawn the blue flaming helmet! If you have an iPad, iPod Touch or iPhone, you can download their recently developed app, dawn the blue flame helmet and All-Star nameplate. What's better is that you can choose 7 of your friends (by entering their gamertag in the app) to give a Bungie All-Star nameplate to as well.

Fortunately I've got an iPhone and have been rocking the blue flames since last night! It's hilarious because anyone who doesn't go on the Bungie forums won't know about this chance and therefore automatically think you're a Bungie employee. I've received 2 party invites, 1 friend request and 3 messages asking how I got the blue flames.

Anyone else been playing Reach lately?

[QuantumWake]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Not The Writer

Well, Bungie did something really neat recently and gave members of the community a chance to dawn the blue flaming helmet! If you have an iPad, iPod Touch or iPhone, you can download their recently developed app, dawn the blue flame helmet and All-Star nameplate. What's better is that you can choose 7 of your friends (by entering their gamertag in the app) to give a Bungie All-Star nameplate to as well.

Fortunately I've got an iPhone and have been rocking the blue flames since last night! It's hilarious because anyone who doesn't go on the Bungie forums won't know about this chance and therefore automatically think you're a Bungie employee. I've received 2 party invites, 1 friend request and 3 messages asking how I got the blue flames.

Anyone else been playing Reach lately?

Damn.. My bro just walked out with my ipod touch! >.<

Well when he gets back, I'll be sure to download this and claim my blue flaming helmet . I've been playing a bit of Halo: Reach here and there. I'm currently at like 600,000 credits at a Colonel Grade 2. But since I started playing GRAW 2, I've held off Reach quite a bit.

Giggity.

[Zhinarkos]

I have recently been playing the single player campaign through, 'cause I never got to play it with all the other stuff I had going on.

Multiplayer is the highlight of the game, for sure, but single player doesn't fall much short either. Best single player campaign in Halo imo.

Just proves Bungie's skills once again. I find it inconceivable just how far Halo has pushed the gameplay dynamics. I still haven't managed to find a game that comes close to Halo's combat. It is so dynamic and doesn't feel staged or bound, every enemy is in a world of it's own schemes and skills.

Pure excellence.

[Not The Writer]

You're so right, Zhinarkos. Your note about the enemies being in their own world is especially true for Legendary difficulty. The enemy will stop at nothing to avoid being killed.

I suppose you're just very correct when you say it doesn't feel "staged". That's a good way to put it.

[Zhinarkos]

Of course, we all know that such thing as true random factor is not possible to code into a program, at least not yet. But the fact is that Halo Reach has unique way of making the barometers of AI and other gameplay factors flexible enough to create versatile situations without the feel of it all being before set.

I really have to try legendary firefight after I've finished my campaign

I'll see my ass kicked then...

[QuantumWake]

Halo: Reach on Legendary.... -__________- It was really a frustrating experience. lol

But yeah, I agree about Reach not being so "staged". Because what makes Reach stand out as an FPS is that is has a very open/sandbox type world to it. It doesn't feel like a linear FPS game. Not only that, but the AI is really challenging. AI is where Bungie really shines imo. And to help you get a sense of Bungie's amazing AI, here are some designers and engineers talking to Digital Foundry:

(Because of the great length of this post, I'll be putting this in a spoiler tag)

Spoiler:

show spoiler

Quote:

Digital Foundry: AI has been another defining feature of the Halo games. What would you say are the defining characteristics of Bungie's approach to AI?

Chris Opdahl: Two things make AI for Halo stand out, in my mind. One is their remarkable ability to react in many situations based on how the player is choosing to interact with the encounter. Two is how we give the Mission Designers the ability to oversee where the AI can move to. We don't expect the Mission Designers to think for the characters, but we do want them to think for the player. Meaning, we want the Mission Designer to think like a player in how any player will choose to interact with the encounter, and then give the Mission Designer tools to allow them to influence how the AI will react to what the player does. Things like: if the player moves to the left and fights around these pieces of cover the AI should move into these positions, and if the player chooses to hang back and snipe the AI should fall back to find cover behind these buildings and force the player to move in closer to deal with the Covenant.

By letting the Sandbox (the actual AI of the character) manage the moment-to-moment of the AI and letting the Mission Designer think about how the AI should move through the spaces we end up with a nice balance between a carefully crafted gameplay moment and the chaos of a true sandbox experience. It also allows the Mission Designers to script around any situations we were not able to craft into the AI of the characters.

Quote:

Max Dyckhoff: From an engineering standpoint, we are keen to create living entities that will fight and interact without any need for Mission Designers corralling them where they need to go. As Chris said, this means that the designers can just worry about directing the AI around the encounter from a very high level, and generally not have to worry about the second-to-second game play.

From a player's point of view, it means the AI responses are consistent across multiple levels. This means that the player can learn what to expect from an enemy type, and consequently learn how to beat them.

We are also careful to create as realistic representations as possible; we don't want the AI to be cheating when they are fighting you, because the player isn't stupid and will in fact feel cheated. Because of this we invest a good deal of time into a believable perception model, which has been around since Halo 2 but has received a good amount of love in the last couple of years. This principle stays true across all new systems we build for the AI, from movement to space flight, weapon use, etc.

AI is paramount to the core of Halo. If you're interested in learning more about our approach to AI, we've already published some of our examinations on the topic to Bungie.net.

Quote:

Digital Foundry: In Reach we see the return of the Elites who look to have received plenty of attention from an AI perspective. What did you want to achieve with them, and how does the behaviour change between different Elite types and between different difficulty levels?

Chris Opdahl: The main player experience goal for the Elites was to make them scary. We wanted the player to always feel a little tinge of pressure when they saw or heard an Elite. We planned to accomplish this by making the Elite quick and aggressive so that the player always knew they were just several moments away from the player's position and, potentially, the player's death. We also made them want to chase after a retreating player more aggressively. If the Mission Designer gave the Elite the ability to move into the player's space then the Elites would often chase after the player pretty quickly when the player fell back into cover.

That aggressiveness has a nice bonus side effect that we also wanted to achieve, that a smaller number of Covenant were dangerous to the player. We found that when the Covenant were not aggressive, we needed to keep adding more and more enemies into a space in order to achieve the difficulty desired, but if you made them more aggressive they could put pressure on a retreating player and make the encounter more difficult without having to simply add more enemies.

This also helped with the feeling of the encounter challenges feeling "fair" and less cheap. If a player is chased by an Elite into his cover location and killed, the player is able to make pretty simple changes to their plan and tackle the encounter again with (hopefully) more success. That "rethinking the plan and then executing" loop for the player is a very powerful tool to create a sense of fairness, even in the face of extreme challenge.

[Hey You]

Anybody who plays Team Objective,Invasion or Flagstravaganza regularly, send me a friend request : Heyy Youu