quotin' dis

That seems to be more an issue for me in MW2 more by far than any other game though, not exactly sure why. Possibly because MW2 generally encourages you to go more apeshit with your weaponry/ammo than most other games.

Also updated the OP, it's unconfirmed but it appears that the Rocket Launcher has vehicle lock-on back, a la Halo 2.

Additional Spam:
OP updated, we got confirmation of the Playlist drop dates as well as exactly what Gametypes are going to be in each early. At this point barring some sort of shocker or typo on my part, I think the only addition will be whenever they announce the end date of the Beta, which as far as I know they still plan on announcing this week.

Two updates:

-The Beta ends May 19th (what the hell)
-You will get a Halo: Reach hoodie for your avatar by playing at least one game of the Beta, then checking your game stats on Halo Waypoint.

Also sometime this week we're still supposed to be getting the exact formula for how Arena rank is determined, I'll update with that if it's relevant, but that's basically about it for pre-beta stuff. The F&F beta starts tomorrow, so there will be a ton of livestreaming happening (it's being allowed), if there's a particularly good one or something I might post it. I know there's at least one GAFer who will be in F&F who is actually extremely good at the game who will be livestreaming his play, if anything I'll post and check that one out.

Haha, ah man I LOVE the DMR. Mo0 dies SO EASILY TO IT. REPEATEDLY.

Also it's ability to THYME PAIR-A-DUCKS and kill me and daravon at the same time is impressive.

Speaking of mo0 if I see him in our little circle throwing flags out one more time I will drive down to his house and launch him into space

also also team swat is the shit in this. voting for it no matter what happens ever.

How much better is this over Halo 3? So much. Everything, from weapons to actual movement feels so much better. The plasma launcher is probably the only thing off the top of my head I'd want changed. It's a lock on stick grenade weapon that is ridiculously quick to fire and fast at acquiring targets which equals to loads of bullshit on swordbase!

How did so many of you get into the beta early?

Microsoft Expertzone. It didn't check if you actually worked the job you said you did to normally take advantage of it's bonuses, and it handed out beta codes to anyone with an American Live ID.

They've ran out of codes though. They had several thousand but they are now all gone.

Also, if you have ODST there's access to the Beta right from the main menu. I downloaded last night but I crashed out after a SSFIV session and never got around to playing it. I'll be on tonight if you guys are down to bust some caps later.

No, the Beta download on ODST right now is a VIDEO, not the actual Beta itself. I've talked to several people who were fooled by it too, because it has you download it, but it's just a video which is pretty misleading (I haven't looked at it myself).

I've played it a fair bit yesterday and today, super tired right now so I'll post more detailed impressions and make updates to the OP tomorrow. Overall I think it's kind of a mixed bag, but our options are so limited right now you can't really make any overall judgments yet. Still mainly bummed that so many people are on right now and you can't have more than 4 on the same team, and the highest anything will go in the Beta is 6 (for Invasion). As someone who spends 90% of his time playing Big Team games with people, I will get no feel for how it plays out in the Beta, so even in 3 weeks I still will only have a loose idea of how it will go for me in September.

The video on ODST isn't that misleading, it says VIDEO on it in massive letters and the description tells you it's some bird talking about the beta. I downloaded it to have a look and it's basically shit, especially comparde to all the stuff on Waypoint at the moment.

Odd that the maximum number of players is so limited. In my opinion, Halo's bigger maps have always seemed too big for the max team size you're allowed. With no flagpoint system like you get in Battlefield keeping peoeple choked at certain points, there's more of a tendancy to spread out and you can go for ages never seeing more than two other players at once. I had hoped that Bungie would manage at least 16 a side for this game, seeing as how they're clearly going to have massive servers for it anyway and the Battlefield games can manage that many with Frontlines going up to 25 a side, although admittedly you can only talk to people in your four man squad or who you're sharing a vehicle with in that, it's the VOIP that use up the majority of bandwidth apparently. I'd be happy to play Halo in total silence if they could shoehorn 25 people a side into matches.

16...a side? Dedicated servers?

Are you in the wrong thread Shin?

I mean it's not exactly a surprise

Well why can't they manage 16 a side? It's not like there's that much more going on in a Halo match than in a game of Battlefield and given that the whole theme of Reach is bigger, epic battles rather than just one dude against whole armies, it would make sense to have bigger MP games, no? I've just personally never seen the point of having maps as big as Containment was or even Blood Gulch when there are so few people running around in them. When one fully loaded 'Hog represents half your team, the game just feels really empty.

I guess with the new game style choosing thingy I'll just be able to avoid the bigger maps from now on but I just don't see why they can't manage more than 16 players in total.

Am I wrong in thinking that there will be dedicated servers running all the Reach traffic then? It's pretty much guaranteed to be the most played game on Live so I would have thought someone somewhere would set something up, rather than running over the general Live ones.

Are you not discerning the difference between matchmaking and actual game hosting?

Yeah, EA runs deds for Battlefield (and THQ for Frontlines) but Halo is P2P like almost every other game on the service.

Maybe because it's late but I can't quite tell if you're asking "why not Battlefield: Reach?" or what, here. This too, is something they've gone over.

I always assumed Halo had it's own servers, my bad.

I'm not saying why not Battlefield:Reach, although there aren't many ideas left for them to steal from Battlefield except destructible scenery, I'm saying why keep making monstrously huge maps then putting hardly any people in is all. I'm expressing a personal preference to have busier maps. Even in games that are all about long range combat and sniping like Ghost Recon they don't use maps nearly as big as some of Halo's, plus they have ten a side (Or at least GR2 did back on the oldbox).

I've read nothing on the subject save for what Daravon has posted here so if there's a perfectly reasonable explanation why Bungie think big, empty maps is a good idea then that's fine, it's just not something I personally enjoy and I think upping the team size limit would be fun. I remember having a blast playing 32 a side Quake 1 back in the day although you did have to turn off all the textures and in fact most of the character models to get a reasonable ping but that was over dial-up.

Invasion mode has the objectives that funnel players to specific points on the map, but lacks the player count you're wanting. That's about the closest solution you'll get. Looks like fun but it won't show up in the beta playlist for several days. I'm sure people will post about it when it goes up, though.

The game design, gunplay, and map flow of Halo would fall apart and become god damn near ridiculous on a player count that high. Not to mention the laughable lag or one of several other issues, so. I can think of a multitude of reasons that that player count would simply be a bad idea as it stands.

Sometimes it's not just so simple as adding more bodies to the mix.

Well the lag wouldn't be an issue if they had their own servers but I digress, each to their own and all that. Some of the most fun I've ever had playing Halo has been 16 people in Midships in Halo 2, I enjoy there being more people packed in together, you obviously don't.

I guess when I heard that the new game was based on a big, epic battle, I expected the game to feature big, epic battles. I shall live in hope that the final game will feature a playlist that's big team games on smaller maps.

When did I say I didn't? BTB is the only real way I play it. And on top of all that I enjoy a battlefield game as much as the next asshole.

Just because a game has guns in it doesn't mean it would work better with infinity players, bro. Not even considering technical issues for a moment, but do you really think that the current style of power weapon pickups, vehicle spawns, gunplay elements, the fundamentals that make Halo Halo would really translate well into a 32 player environment?

You want your apple to be an orange bro. Still fruit, but one is a fair bit different and I suggest you stick to grapefruit instead of you want citrus that bad.

I think it would certainly translate ok to larger teams. Like I said, even Quake worked with 64 people in the match if the level was designed right and that was based around power weapon and map domination even more than Halo is. Certainly the game might play a bit different with more people but part of the longevity of Halo is the mix of ways you can play it, it's not just the same slayer games over and over. I love playing Griff Ball, I probably prefer Rocket Race to any other game type and a no shields, pistols only, 16 man King of the Hill match on a tiny map is great fun. A bit of variety in weapon placement would allow the game to still play like it does with smaller teams (Double the power weapons for example) and building maps designed for everyone tooling about in Warthogs would facilitate that as a gametype. Just because it doesn't play like "classic" Halo, doesn't mean it wouldn't be fun.

I just think that snatching a flag on Blood Gulch and making a run for it in a Warthog would be more fun if once you'd escaped the base defenders, there were still enough people around to make the rest of the drive back more tense, rather than the current, frequently unopposed jaunts across a needlessly empty and large stretch of countryside.

It is just my opinion but I think that Halo multiplayer works really well on tighter maps but is a bit dull on the bigger ones as it stands.

I did a long-ass impressions post on GAF that I won't copy/paste here because it's going to be long and boring as fuck if you haven't already been playing the Beta (it's mostly impressions on the really minor ins/outs), but if you're interested it's here.

Aside from that, I'll really try to get the OP updated tomorrow, and maybe get a good general impressions/gameplay post up in here for the people who didn't get in early and will be playing for the first time on Monday. Short version: After a long-ass up and down feeling curve, I'm really digging the game, but it is totally it's own thing, it barely feels like Halo at all. I think it started clicking more when I stopped expecting it to play a certain way.

OP needs more Murder Basement fo 'sho.

I get the impression, though, that Invasion is going to work like Battlefield BC2's Rush mode, where while it's technically one gigantic map it plays more like 3 to 5 small maps that overlap physically.

And I mean, while it is easy to get back to your base once you get out of theirs, it's pretty freaking hard to get out of the enemy base against a competent team. If there's enough people to cover the entire ap, in theory, then there's also enouugh people to camp the everloving christ out of the flag so that no one's ever getting in to the base to begin with.

Basically I think the point I'm trying to get to is that you overestimate the strategic ability of Halo players

Oh, what the fuck? I didn't even notice that. I thought it was a downloadable demo of the game!

So... then... why are they advertising Halo 3 ODST as being "your key to the Halo Reach BETA"?

Because it is. On Monday, as has been advertised for months. Everyone play now is doing so through early access codes.

Also Shimms posted this on the SC, I'm way too amused by this for some reason:

YouTube Video

What's this thread about?

Sup shake.

I feel terrible for you now, having to put up with our special brand of horrible.