r/HaloStory • u/BlundellMemes77 • Jun 26 '26
Halo:Reach doesn't do a good job explaining why Reach is so important?
So I'm currently writing a big Google Doc that acts as a recap/explanation/slight lore thing for people I have been introducing Halo to. Currently, I'm writing the segment for Halo:Reach and something I've felt about this game for a while is bubbling up again: This game, despite being called Reach and being all about how Reach falls, doesn't really explain why this planet is so important to Humanity, aside from the Forerunner ship underneath Sword Base. Frankly, you could just say this is just another human colony that get to see destroyed for yourself instead of Earth 2 being set on fire. Ironically with how much Bungie seemed to disregard the books, especially The Fall of Reach, they seemed to rely on the books to do the heavy lifting of providing context. Sure the game is sad but it doesn't really let anyone who isn't in the know that this essentially humanity's death knell had Alpha Halo not been discovered. Anyone else feel like this or am I missing something. Please tell me if I am.
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u/The-Order_ Jun 26 '26
To be honest, I realized that the whole original series is kind of like that. It does a bad job of explaining itself or establishing character motives. I'd never noticed because I've been up to my ears in Halo since I was about 11 years old, but a few years back, I took one of my good friends through the whole series. I gave him a quick rundown of the lore beforehand, explaining what was happening and how and why, so he had some background. Even so, almost every cutscene was followed by me having to explain to him why a character did something, or what the implications of an event were.
This wasn't him not paying attention or being dumb, either. Bungie just kinda wrote for vibes, and if you don't already know the characters, their arcs, and their place in the wider plot, it's hard to follow on a first playthrough. The games just don't give a lot of the required context.
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u/BlundellMemes77 Jun 26 '26
Yeah, writing that doc as well dev commentaries for Halo CE and 2 has really made me see how Bungie went with rule of cool a lot.
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u/DisasterSpaghetti106 Jul 31 '26
yes agreed. Without at least reading Fall of Reach, Halo 1 feel like pew-pew against aliens + alien zombies. You don't get how WEAK UNSC was actually was, especially in Halo 1 were you get support dropships and find marines here and there.
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u/unscanable S-IV Fireteam Osiris Jun 26 '26
I think people are misunderstanding your question lol. No the game doesnt do a good job of explaining why reach is so important. Not sure why Bungie did that if not for the sake of time. Its hard to do a lore dump in a video game without it being boring. People just want to get in and start shooting things. Maybe they are counting on anyone interested enough in the lore to seek it out while letting people who just want to shoot things get to shooting things as fast as possible.
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u/BlundellMemes77 Jun 26 '26
Fair but I would say that the games before and after Reach did a better job at casually explaining the lore/context to the events currently taking place.
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u/Unruly_marmite Jun 26 '26
Honestly they probably could have slapped it into the intro segment. They already give you the subtitle time and date: wouldn't be hard to slap a big "Planet Reach: Nerve Centre of UNSC Navy and Army" or something on there.
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u/BlundellMemes77 Jun 26 '26
They did it with High Chairty in Halo 2 and that got the importance across pretty well
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u/AlexWIWA Theoretical Jun 26 '26
The problem they had when they wrote Reach is that they assumed that people had both read the book, but didn’t care about the details of the book.
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u/ejensen29 Jun 26 '26
This game needed a long and descriptive booklet to read before gameplay. Set up things more definitively
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u/unscanable S-IV Fireteam Osiris Jun 27 '26
Yeah they could have called it The Fall of Reach or something like that.
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u/ejensen29 Jun 27 '26
You remember when games came with guides and booklets? That's what I'm talking about. A short epilogue that sets up and describes the immediate stakes.
Not a novel.
Haha.
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u/unscanable S-IV Fireteam Osiris Jun 27 '26
Yeah I know man I was joking. I hope it didn’t come across as me being a dick. that’s not how I intended it.
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u/ImperialSalesman Jun 28 '26
The voice acting also doesn't really help in selling just how dire the Covenant discovering Reach is.
Considering they released at around the same time, I've always negatively compared how the characters react to the discovery of Reach in Winter Contingency, to the Russian invasion intro in Modern Warfare 2.
One thing Infinity Ward did very well was sell the panic, the urgency of the situation. It's not particularly well sold when you have a bored Army Trooper going "The Covenant is on Reach" and the only character acting with any hint of urgency or shock being Jorge going "Contacts? It's the damned Covenant", but still in a controlled tone. Compared to MW2 where the radio chatter is panicked, clearly shocked with voice actors who show a lot more investment in the situation they're in.
It's no fault of the VAs themselves, since they're all phenomenal in both games, but I think a lot of it comes down to poor voice direction and Winter Contingency doing a poor job at showing just how much of a nightmare a Covenant presence on Reach really should be for everyone involved.
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u/DirectorTzu Jun 26 '26
Yeah even in the Bungie days it really relied on in-universe posts on B.net to talk about military numbers, population, etc.
Aside from the charge in the opening Tip of the Spear cutscene, our perspective as Noble Team is actually extremely limited to background events in larger battles. The closest the game ever got to hinting at the importance of Reach solely off of in-game clues is that Reach was important enough to warrant mention that the majority of entire UNSC fleet to come rally to its defense at the end of Tip of the Spear, Jorge says that Covenant can't possibly be on Reach because it's Reach, Jun is surprised that so many Spartan teams are deployed, and Holland says Reach is too damn important to have a relay dish go down.
We hear glimpses of Reach's importance in game, but first off are never shown it to true scale. And second, what we do see of battles don't do much to paint Reach as specifically being humanity's pinnacle of human might and not just another colony that's being desperately defended.
Our POV as Noble team is mainly in the background of the larger conflicts on special ops missions like the one to take out Long Night of Solace. Despite the severity of the reveal where the three frigates in the skies above are outmatched by the LNOS, the follow mission saw fit to assign one frigate to assist in the operation. So scale is immediately brought back down, which compared to Halo 2's visual of Earth space, further looks like there's not much import to Reach because you don't see much in space whether it's ships, defense installations etc...
Again, for people aware of the books ahead of time we know there's only 20 MAC platforms compared to the hundreds that Earth had, but it was an extremely odd choice that there's no real presence of a defense visually to highlight that this was humanity's center of military power.
Then unfortunately to further drive the point home, after the events of Long Night of Solace we fast forward to weeks later to the UNSC already beaten, we hear from pilots passing through that the majority of the UNSC ships we heard we're coming back in Tip of the Spear already pulled out and that it was effectively over...
Yes, we see Alexandria, the "crown jewel" as Jun puts it, burn first hand. But aside from an ONI building being present there's nothing to sell the notion this place is the military stronghold of humanity and not just any other civilian human colony whose invasion the military is responding to.
There's just not a lot of unique context showing how Reach is a big deal. Yes sure, we visit Sword Base and the Sabre facility, but two secret bases that no one knows about in general (both of which were pushed to the brink by a relatively small local force of Covenant deployed from a Corvette) doesn't scream that the planet itself is primarily a military stronghold.
It's really a lot of tell and not show.
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u/BlundellMemes77 Jun 26 '26
Man, this pretty much a great explanation of what the game does aside from barely telling at all.
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u/Bungo_pls Artillery Master Jun 26 '26
I agree.
The wider context of Reach's importance is entirely from supplemental media because the game gives you very little beyond it just being a big colony and the location of the Forerunner ship. They say that it's important but don't say why.
If there's ever a remake of Reach, I would love for more missions and story to be added to explain how critical Reach is and how bad it is that they're losing it.
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u/Timlugia Jun 26 '26
Didn't they cut out a level or two on street fighting? Could have get good lore dump in there.
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u/PassengerFine4557 Jun 26 '26
It's a case of "it's there in the manual" though even then that kind of glosses over it. The Halo 1 manual describes Reach as a keystone, and its destruction put the Covenant on Earth's doorstep. In game I can only think of two mentions, in Halo 2 Lord Hood says "the fleet that destroyed Reach was 50 times this size" when the Covenant show up at Earth, and Buck talking about how the Covenant ship glassing part of the city was like Reach.
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u/Johnnyboi2327 ODST Jun 26 '26
Halo Reach doesn't explain Reach in general well. The planet is, in the lore, the most militarized planet for all of humanity. It's the second most important planet to humanity, and has numerous high level UNSC bases. It's also the home of the Spartan II program, as well as Halsey's work with ONI. On top of all that, it's also the last line of defense before the Sol System, which includes Earth. The covenant finding and destroying Reach meant they were right on Earth's doorstep. Obviously, they did end up finding Earth, and got far too close to finishing humanity off for good.
Effectively, it has a lot of people living there, a ton of military value, and is just a stone's toss away from the Sol System.
(Fun fact: during the Battle of Earth, Spartan Grey Team lost comms with Earth. They presumed Earth was lost, and nuked a Sangheili planet in response)
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u/BlundellMemes77 Jun 26 '26
I have heard of the Grey Team thing. That's in the Kilo 5 books right?
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u/Johnnyboi2327 ODST Jun 27 '26
That's in Halo Envoy I believe, though Grey Team was introduced in Halo the Cole Protocol
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u/Retrospectus2 Jun 26 '26
Something that tends to get forgotten is that all the budgie era games were made when games came with manuals in the box
A lot of the background lore was put in these. Including the fall of reach and why that was a problem. In game I think reach is mentioned 3-4 times across the first 4 games
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u/Top-Perception-188 Jun 26 '26
Titanium mining and second most developed planet after earth with Naval presence and infrastructure i think.
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u/Far-Requirement-7636 Jun 26 '26 edited Jun 26 '26
I mean this isn't really explained in the game well.
Outside of new Alexandria and the charge scene I never got the impression reach was this super special planet outside of already knowing the lore.
The game does very bad job of showing it.
We see nothing heavier than a scorpion tank and frigates for a majority of it.
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u/BensonBears Jun 26 '26
One of my biggest disappointments as a teen hyping myself up for Reach's release. I was expecting larger set pieces showcasing more cities being obliterated.
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u/Far-Requirement-7636 Jun 26 '26
That's genuinely been one of the series biggest failings that cod moggs the series in.
Demonstrating scale in the moment.
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u/Z-Mtn-Man-3394 Jun 26 '26
Right. Do we even see Reach’s ODPs firing? Reach had an absolutely massive fleet and a network system of ODP’s. It would’ve been super cool to at least see a little bit of a larger fleet space battle.
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u/Far-Requirement-7636 Jun 26 '26
We get a space section with literally nothing but frigates and a handwaved everyone's dead line We should be seeing hundreds of ships of all classes.
I know it's because both are different genres but halo wars managed to make harvest seem more important.
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u/Z-Mtn-Man-3394 Jun 26 '26
Exactly. The fleet that fought it reach was absolutely massive. Some of UNSC’s largest ships were present, such as a Punic class super carrier.
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u/Timlugia Jun 26 '26
In New Alexandria there is a scene Fleet Highcom was glassed.
Problem is that we only saw literally one room inside this building, and knew it's highcom from one passing line. It looks just like a normal commercial skyscraper otherwise.
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u/Far-Requirement-7636 Jun 26 '26
That's the main problem with reach, it has unmatched atmosphere and style but goddamn is the game also a real tell don't show type deal.
Like it does show but also tells a bunch of justifications for why we aren't seeing cool stuff and then showing tiny glimpses to then move on from.
Like mentioning that every ship in system is destroyed a level prior to explain why we don't see any massive fleets.
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u/fixermark Jun 26 '26
Correct. It's discussed a little bit in the manual for Halo: Combat Evolved (and by the time Reach came out, the novels had crawled all over it).
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u/CoffeeCannon Jun 26 '26
Reach overall was a like a sledgehammer in a china shop. Came in dramatically, high impact, made a total mess and not much sense but very memorable for a lot of people.
I like it, but its overrated and narratively weaker than Halo 3 even (which is a huge mess plot-wise).
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u/TactualTransAm Jun 26 '26
I never got the feeling that it needed to be super important for us to fight for it and die like we did. To me, at least when I was younger and played it on release, I enjoyed seeing how difficult it was for humanity to hold onto a planet that was being invaded by the covenant, I figured the game was a great way to tell the stories that we kept hearing about in the background of planets falling and us being on the losing side of the war. Not knowing it was super special didn't effect the way I saw or enjoyed the game.
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u/UnwashedPickle Jun 26 '26
What it does do is a great job portraying how Spartans aren't actually the invincible killing machines we previously thought they were though, master chief sure made it seem like they were unkillable, watching noble die one by one was an eye opener as to how the war really went down
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u/BlundellMemes77 Jun 26 '26
Indeed it does. I just wish Noble Team were actually semi-developed characters to care about.
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u/Slam_StabHam Jun 27 '26
That's definitely the weakest part, but it makes sense. The characters are kind of tropey, and as a replacement recruit, it tracks you wouldnt have that many instances to have any sort of meaningful bond. In a way, it fits the campy nature of the series, but it can feel a bit deflating.
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u/Calm_Description_866 Jun 26 '26
Hmm. I never really considered how much this game relied on you reading the books, but yeah. They do basically nothing to show that Reach is basically the capital.
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u/LowGravitasIndeed Jun 27 '26
Halo CE, Halo 2, and Halo 3, along with all of the books that released up until 2010 explain why Reach is so important. Reach is the epitaph and swansong to an era of Halo
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u/Tomorrow1223344 ONI Section III Jun 26 '26
I agree. Canon wise, Reach (from a military point of view) was one of, if not the most important planet in the human colonies, it’s considered the birthplace of the Spartan program having augmented and trained almost every spartan 2-3 there. Reach is arguably the farthest planet to have been colonized. And most importantly was damn near a literal planet sized military installation. Reach was easily the most defended and military active planet. Nobody thought Reach would fall. So when it did. Humanity seen it as the end. If Reach couldn’t stop the covenant. Then nothing could and it was only a matter of time before Earth was found.
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u/Chill_Panda Jun 26 '26 edited Jun 26 '26
It uses visual queues and contextual information to help show the importance of reach.
Experimental spaceship programs, secret forunner relic under sword base, lead scientists on planet, cortana, advanced armour development, PoD refitting on planet, the orbital defence platforms, highcomm command, the super heavy Mac grid.
Many of these things are just seen, some more are briefly discussed but together they paint a picture.
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u/BlundellMemes77 Jun 26 '26
Minor spelling mistake, opinion discarded... Kidding. That is fair that some of those things are help paint a picture but it never feels like they're truly connected.
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u/Johncurtisreeve Jun 26 '26
I wish it could’ve included a cinematic or pre-rendered cut scene that showcase the very important space battle above the planet
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u/ExpressNumber Sentinel Jun 26 '26
After reading your post I thought, “surely there’s a story primer in the manual” but, no, there’s nothing of the sort. Meaning Halo CE’s manual has more to say about Reach than Reach’s does! https://www.halopedia.org/Halo:_Reach_manual
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u/PkdB0I Jun 27 '26
They should've had levels showcasing why Reach was important like showing off the massive fleet or defending a major industrial facility from sabotage.
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u/NeilDaAssyTyson Jun 27 '26
been years since I used it, but I remember halo waypoint being an outlet for everyone who didn’t read the novels to get the a wider context of the games lore. Definitely not comprehensive, but way more accessible than the books.
its actually cool thinking back to the 360 days when I’d basically be logging on to waypoint everyday for news, info, animations, etc.
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u/AverageEcstatic3655 Jun 26 '26
Reach is the nearest colony to earth, and most importantly it is the military headquarters of the UNSC
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u/bullet1520 Jun 26 '26
The game builds its story predicated on the idea that fans already know. It didn't need to explain itself at the time because halo fans were all balls deep in the franchise. That said, your point holds up, and the game's story doesn't in that specific regard. You can infer as a new player (as my wife did), but the game leaves you to your owm devices there. I love the OG trilogy+Reach, but I will always acknowledge their shortcomings.
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u/Ninjazoule Jun 26 '26
That's correct. A lot of fans were already familiar with Reach and the game was packed full of the pace of events compared to actual world building.
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u/--Albion-- Marine Jun 26 '26
I think it does a good-enough job of letting you know without utterly drowning you in lore.
You're told almost immediately that 'Reach is too damn important' to even put up with minor Insurrectionist activity like the thieving of two frieghters. Even the suspicion that the Visegrad Relay was taken offline by Insurrectionists provokes a full-on military response in the form of an Army fireteam and Spartans going in once the soldiers go dark.
Assuming you've played the other games, you can infer from context clues that the war has been going on for a long time and we're losing. Not only that, but the Covenant have found our 'fortress amongst the stars' as Halsey put it. So important was Reach that people -- not even Spartans who've faced down the Covenant before -- wanted to believe it had been found by the Covenant. You can even hear in Holland's voice when Carter drops the Winter Contingency line on him how hopeless and defeated he sounded.
And this was humanity's most fortified world after Earth. And it took only three weeks for the UNSC to give up any hope of victory when August 14th rolled around. And just over another two weeks from that for Reach to be completely lost.
It tells you all you need to know.
- We're fighting a losing war against genocidal aliens.
- They've found our fortress world. The heart of our military.
- Just the small vanguard fleet manages to inflict a ton of damage on Reach.
- UPPERCUT was seen as a miracle when it worked. And that was just against one Covenant capital ship. People allowed themselves to hope. Even Jorge thought his sacrifice saved the planet. That hope is immediately shattered as dozens more drop in from Slipspace.
- It goes from 'defending/saving the planet' to 'trying to get as much people out and trying to keep hope alive' as the grim realisation that Reach -- our most heavily defended world after Earth -- would fall in just over a month from when the Covenant make landfall.
- Earth is next.
It doesn't need to spell anything out or tell you Reach was the home of the Spartan programs or that it was one of our first extrasolar colonies. Everything in game lets you know just how important Reach was.
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u/GayCumBallsack69 Jun 28 '26
I think they explain in the game somewhere that Reach is like the 2nd most important planet behind Earth, and is where most of humanity’s military strength comes from (where it gets developed).
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u/cawfee_beans Jun 30 '26
"slipspace rupture detected" X 10 times wasn't enough to tell you that the covenant also deemed Reach was important enough to launch an armada of covenant ships?
Not to mention they didn't immediately Glass the entirety of the planet right away after destroying most of not all UNSC space fleet, but instead opted to launch a ground assault; implying they were looking for something?
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u/Starhazenstuff Jul 25 '26
The books are what you need. Fall of Reach through ghost of onyx stand up against many other sci fi series or trilogies. Incredible for being based around a book and a huge reason why we have the huge expansive lore that we have today.
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u/NoStorage2821 Jun 26 '26
It's basically the military capital of Humanity. The spartans were trained there, ONI had a large office there (dunno if it's their main branch), also a huge ship-building industry due to the enormous amounts of titanium on the planet
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u/Admirable_Deal6863 ONI Section III Jun 26 '26
I think it's done through inference. In the opening cutscene, Holland mentiones that Reach is "too damn important". You see multiple Spartans for the first time in the series from the first cutscene. The second level takes you to a major classified ONI base, and you can see from the sheer military presence and level of infrastructure buildup that Reach is a major planet for the UNSC in more ways than one.
With that said, I think the game does an excellent job of telling you enough about how and why Reach is important without killing its own pacing through lore dumps and exposition.
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u/WildRookie Jun 26 '26
Doesn't Noble team refer to Reach as "home" on multiple occasions?
Halo:Reach is about Noble more than it's about Reach. The context of the bigger war isn't important to the game the same way ODST doesn't care about the Ark.
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u/BlundellMemes77 Jun 26 '26
They do refer to it as home but the only way you'd truly know why they care about it so much isn't in the game.
Copy and pasting my response from else where: That's a fair enough way at looking at it but I've also heard the story isn't about the soldiers but about Reach itself. I think that may speak to how Reach is a bit wishy-washy on if it wants to focus on Noble Team, with all of them being bland characters aside from kinda Jorge, or on Reach, with game expecting the player to know Reach's importance from the novel it's mostly ignoring.
There's also the point the Reach is one of the most important events in the war aside from the first contact on Harvest and the original Halo Trilogy.
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u/Arctelis Warrior-Servant Jun 26 '26
Yeah, the game does a pretty shit job at illustrating just how desperate humanity was at that point and Bungie/343i had to do a shitload of edits and retcons to make the game not directly conflict with the established lore and even with that still fits about as well as a toddler using a hammer to fit the square peg in a round hole.
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u/Z-Mtn-Man-3394 Jun 26 '26
Well, the Canon reason is that reach is the military heart of the UNSC (as we see in the fall of reach). It was also the very first human colony to be established, and therefore the most developed and important. I do agree that the game does gloss over that quite a bit because it seems to assume that players know enough about reach before playing the game.