I just beat the game with my dad on co-op the other night, and, damn. This game was too f*cking short! What do you guys say? I could imagine the game being much, much longer. I didn't like the ending too much either, but the objective of the last part was epic imo. "Spartans never die..." will be remembered.

All in all, I thought it was a pretty good game and was fun co-oping. I might go through it again on solo if I ever get free time. Comments

All Halo campaigns have been relatively short. Especially so if you don't play it on legendary and skip all the cinematic/story.

I've always liked prequels as the finale for any series. It gives you that sense of "oh man... so this is how it all started... damn now I wanna play the first game again..." feeling.

Nowadays me and my roommates pwn (or get pwned by) people online in Team Slayer. Whenever it's Elite Slayer: Sword Base we sticky the hell out of all our opponents while armor locking whoring.

Short? Hmm... did you forget to set it on legendary? I thought it had a great length and I beta it with a friend in one sitting on normal. It was a couple of hours but we were playing on normal so we pretty much zoomed through a lot.

Is your body ready for Halo4

I didn't think it was short at all. It had the same amount of missions as Halo 3, and each mission was so long! Legendary is epic; it'll really test your skills as a Halo player. Of course, I beat it in about a week or so. I gotta say, the end of that campaign is pretty damn emotional. It's so sad what happens to all of them.

List of problems in Reach

• Armor Lock is ridiculously overpowered, and gives n00bs a reusable get-out-of-jail-free card.
  
• Melees don't bleed through shields, breaking close-quarters combat.
  
• Grenades are overpowered to the point of encouraging spam in any gametype where you spawn with two -- that is, every gametype except for SWAT, Infection, and MLG.
  
• The maps are absolutely horrible. Combat only happens in one part of Sword Base and Reflection, and Slayer matches play more like King of the Hill.
  
• Invasion is exploitable. The wonderful palette of glitches includes the ability to spawn an ally behind walls, allowing them to run to the next Phase and cap it the moment it starts.
  
• Damn near half of Halo 3's gametype settings were removed. Most of them were good, and all of them are irreplaceable.
  
• All of the maps are filled with Fort Knox camp spots that make Infection unplayable. Zombies get assfucked every time.
  
• The Banshee is less "air vehicle" and more "giant floating purple rape dildo". Its "secondary" weapon, the Banshee Bomb, fires fuel rods that deal MASSIVE DAMAGE, with a five-mile blast radius. Bungie's idea of "fun" is letting one team gangrape the other's spawns.
  
• The Warthog has been nerfed to the point of uselessness. Almost no one ever uses it, even in Big Team Battle.
  
• Active Camo wears off with movement. It is no longer an offensive tool; it only promotes camping and hiding in corners now.
  
• Spawnkilling is extremely prevalent, especially in already-terrible gametypes like Invasion Slayer. For Invasion and Invasion Slayer, this cannot be fixed by simply editing the maps, since those gametypes use different (worse) respawn systems.
  
• Bloom, though a good idea, is implemented poorly.
  
• Betrayal Booting is as broken as it gets. You can get teamkilled ten times in a row without the option to boot; retaliate, and you're instantly booted after one kill. This has been demonstrated and shown in saved and rendered Films countless times.
  
• The campaign is extremely short.
  
• The campaign is poorly-written. The characters are flat, static, and uninteresting. It evokes no sense of emotion, and the conflicts that you're engaged in don't even feel important -- not even at the end, when it all comes to one plot-finishing crescendo.
  
• Among the new forms of network manipulation are vote-canceling and host-booting, which allow a host to rig the vote in a Matchmaking lobby and boot anyone from that same lobby. Bungie has done absolutely nothing to counter this. There is nothing players can do to avoid this. It's especially common in the Invasion playlist, and from what I hear it's fairly easy to do. I've personally witnessed this new breed of fucktardation.
  
• Quitting is the only real way to counter the campers, host-booters, Invasion-spawn-cheaters, and everyone else that keeps exploiting the fuck out of this broken game. Oh, wait, that doesn't work either, thanks to the wonderful quit ban.
  

List of problems that you've acknowledged

• The campaign is extremely short.
  

List of problems that Bungie has acknowledged

• 
  

Yeah. A great game. I've given it more chances than I've given any other game, and every time, it's led to disappointment. The fact that Bungie isn't doing jack shit to maintain their fucking game, compared to Treyarch and other developers, makes things worse. I've already boycotted Matchmaking once, and I don't plan on playing it for the rest of this week, minimum. Why? Because if I come across one more retarded twat, I may well snap the fucking disc in half.

Love how Bungie thinks that DLC is more important than enforcing the rules and fixing the fucking bugs. Asshats.

Hell -- I just might avoid it until the next Title Update, if not forever.

Post has been edited 1 time(s), last time on Dec 21 2010, 1:17 am by DavidJCobb. Reason: Oh, wait, everyone whores nades in MLG,2

How the fuck is the campaign short? Like I said before, it's the same amount of missions as Halo 3, AND each mission is long as hell. I thought they did a great job with the campaign. I felt emotion with the characters; maybe you just have no heart. Yeah, of course the multiplayer isn't that great; it never is in Halo (except for Halo 2). Obviously CoD is going to be better; it's got every 16 year old boy blowing it and praising it, despite its successful efforts to just milk money out of people every year.

I liked the gameplay of the campaign, but the characters were flat. The characters themselves weren't expressive enough, and they didn't change at all.

Kat? Generic chick that comes up with ideas and otherwise almost never shows any evidence of having a soul.
Emile? Black dude with no visible emotions. The only time his personality shows vibrantly is moments before... on Pillar of Autumn.
Jun? Some random sniper. Though he provides quite a bit of tactical dialogue in Winter Contingency and Nightfall, he barely shows any trace of personality.
Carter? Most. Generic. Leader. Ever. Damn.
Jorge? He at least shows a little emotion at the end of Winter Contingency and Long Night of Solace.
Halsey? Goddamn -- she showed more emotion at the end of ONI: Sword Base than any Noble member showed the entire damn game!
Holland? Same deal, on Long Night of Solace, when things start to go awry.

Pathetic. Hell -- Johnson showed grief and Cortana showed pain in Halo 3, so at some point Bungie knew how to write characters that appeared to have souls. Apparently, they fired everyone that actually had that talent.

And the multiplayer? Fuck, Halo 3's multiplayer wasn't as broken as this! Bungie hasn't responded to any of the problems that have been talked about. At all. Not even the shit that's been reported in their "Optimatch" forum, which they supposedly read. I don't want CoD to be better. What I want is for them to fix the problems in Reach. "Swan song" to Halo? Bullshit.

David just seems to have the attitude that Halo 3 was perfect and that reach should never have changed everything. At least thats just what it seems like from this and when we had the beta thread.

Hahaha, no. Reach has made several improvements on 3. I just can't stand how fucking broken the game is, though.

List of improvements that are completely overshadowed by the game being broken

• Graphics, obviously
  
• Forge 2.0 and Forge World (!)
  
• Armor Abilities not named "Armor Lock"
  
• Safe Havens -- a concept that, though difficult to utilize effectively, can lead to very interesting gameplay when in the right hands -- which, btw, are not Bungie's.
  
• Space combat in the campaign (!)
  
• Campaign gameplay -- variety and the scale of the battles
  
• Invasion
  
• Custom Firefight
  
• Customizable armor (!)
  
• Active Roster (friends list in lobbies)
  
• Better netcode
  
• Bigger maps
  

EDIT: The only thing I truly hated in the beta was that the DMR had this weird-ass delay between pressing the trigger and actually having a bullet exit the barrel. They fixed that.

IMO, armor lock is only good against complete noobies. It's so easy to just stand back and wait for them to come out of it and then shoot them a couple times.

It just seems like a lot of your arguments come from a standpoint of someone who hasn't had a lot of experience with the game in slayer. Like your argument on banshees. To me, they are exactly the same as they were in 3. Extremely stupid. They're always easy to kill with even the slightest coordination, and as far as i've seen, they do exactly the same damage as they did in 3. I've never had issues with them, except when I miss my first rocket launcher shot and have to take another to kill it.

IMO, you don't seem to be able to read my posts.

When some BK enters Armor Lock, they have six seconds to call in their teammates to save their sorry ass.

So let's say two fairly even teams go into battle. A Red and a Blue are in a DMR duel, and both combatants end up one-shot. Right as Blue is about to fire the deciding bullet, the Red goes into Armor Lock, and calls in his teammates to carry his retarded ass. Now, Blue calls in his teammates as well. This was a team game to begin with, so odds are, the reinforcements aren't that far away for either player, and hence they arrive while the Red Locker is, well, Locking. So now we have three Reds and one invulnerable one-shot Red, versus three Blues and one vulnerable one-shot Blue.

Well, simple fact is, the moment the Reds arrive, that one-shot Blue is dead. By the time the Red Locker exits Armor Lock, he'll be in the middle of a three-on-four battle, with his enemies having already been weakened. The best-case scenario is that the more skilled player -- the one-shot Blue -- is denied a kill that he rightfully earned, and the player that he should've beaten is allowed to live longer. The worst-case scenario is that not only is a Blue cheated out of a kill and not only is a less-skilled Red's life prolonged, but that less-skilled Red is then able to get kills off of Blue's reinforcements, who, I say again, will be weakened by the time the less-skilled Red comes out of Armor Lock. Either way, a skilled player is cheated out of a kill and balance is thrown off. An engagement between two teams of relatively equal skill becomes one-sided thanks to the effortless and unskillful invocation of Armor Lock.

I don't have a problem with the concept of Armor Lock. I think that it was a wonderful way to give players a chance to prevent deaths that aren't the result of them lacking skill. If the enemy is splattering at your spawns with a Ghost, that's not your fault, so Lock. If a Scorpion appears out of thin air and fires on you, that's not your fault, so Lock. If, on the other hand, I out-DMR you, then that is your fault; you should die, rather than Locking. If I stick you, that is your fault, so you should die from it. However, Armor Lock allows players to avoid deaths that directly result from their own failures.

The ideal fix would be to limit Armor Lock to one full (or one half) second, disallow early deactivation, remove un-sticking, remove EMP, remove frosting (which is probably a result of a EMP-related workaround), remove plasma deflection, and make it so that time spent in Armor Lock doesn't contribute to shield recharging. Armor Lock would still have invincibility, immobility (preventing users from being shoved off of cliffs), and anti-vehicle power, so even if nerfed it could prevent deaths that aren't the player's fault; the nerfs would prevent n00bs from using it to avoid deaths that are their fault.

And as for Banshees being easy to kill? That depends heavily on the driver. The secret to Banshee-whoring is to use a specific evasive maneuver (trick) -- a backflip, I think -- that basically allows you to dodge shots without losing your aim. Banshees are already highly mobile; their evasive maneuvers, in addition to breaking weapon lock-ons and aim assist, make them even faster. It takes two full DMR clips -- thirty shots -- to down a Banshee. Every single one of those shots has to hit. If a Banshee is hit by shots from one person, it can turn around and Banshee Bomb that person before they do any more damage. If a Banshee is hit by shots from several people, it can simply boost away and hide out of sight. Either way: Banshee lives, other team dies. This isn't even considering the fact that while the one team is occupied with the Banshee, the Banshee's teammates are free to do whatever they want. The fact that nearly every Banshee map has most spawns out in the open -- Paradiso and, from what I hear, Breakpoint -- also helps a 'Shee spawnkill. Uncounterably.

When people are using a vehicle's "secondary" weapon more than its primary, you know something's wrong.

I tried Halo Reach with a friend who I would figure to be a rather pro at all Halo games. I must say I do pretty horrible without a melee weapon, primarily because Im used to machine guns actually -doing- damage. The campaign bored me as I watched my friends play the ending, primarily because everyone started dieing, and you knew it was going to happen, just dumber. We then popped in Black Ops and I was instantly relieved as I could snipe people from 50 yards away looking down the iron sight of a Mac 11 or Colt 1911.

It might just be me, but I perfect a small compact-ish weapon to get kills with, just for the faster reloading and the stability. Ill never be good at halo unless I play halo 1 now

Hey guise. Hey guise. Let's make armor lock useless.

Removing only one of those features is enough to balance it, in my opinion. I was talking to a bungie employee (friend of a friend) who was bitching about it. His proposed solution was to make you use it for the full duration without breaking and I think that's a fine adjustment. The problem currently is that there's no commitment to using it and using it and breaking it doesn't remove all of the energy for it. You just pop it when you're about to take damage and take it off when you're ready to move.

Personally, I've never had a problem with it but I don't play organized games so I'd imagine it'd be very bad in those where you actually can rely on your teammates to back you up.