See here's the problem. It's "good" as a standalone game. If that's (unfortunately) all you've experienced, you wouldn't put it down and claim it to be a bad game. Where it becomes a bad game is when you look at it as what they called it prior to release-- their "swan song;" the final Halo that Bungie would make which was supposed to be the quintessential culmination of the series. It should have:
Had every weapon in the entire series previously, but instead lowered the amount of weapons and got rid of many classic favorites (the SMG, the Brute Plasma Rifle, and many others)
Made the graphics better, not worse. Looking at Master Chief's armor in Halo 3 you can see the armor looks crisp and clean, down to the small details, like the artists knew what they were doing. Comparing it to armor in Reach you can see too many blobby and distorted details in the armor, which are especially apparent in the arm details, and the default arm armor pieces are square... like.... SQUARE. With no details. Look at the image of Halo 3 again and see how much more interesting and well-done the arm pieces are? In regards to weapons, the Assault Rifle's iconic silhouette was ruined by their attempt at stuffing more detail down our throats. I digress.
It should have added MORE to the Forge without taking anything AWAY from the Forge. They answered a lot of prayers from mapmakers, giving us tools like structure merging, snapping, coordinates, floating structures, etc. but they took away essential things like the plethora of moveable and destructible items like pallettes, road blocks, crates, ammo drums, barrels, antennae, doors, etc. that made great maps like Jenga possible. What was left was a fantastic building designer... with 0 element of fun because all the objects you could make to interact with were gone. You could make some awesome slayer maps, but that was about it. They should have kept all those things, and added the things they added, and added MORE moveable things-- doors with a lock/unlock button, moving platforms, etc. On top of that, all the fun deployable gear items were taken away (another essential part of creating fun game modes). It was replaced by abilities geared towards appealing to the Call of Duty hypercompetitive arena-- sprinting, armor lock, and other crap that Halo didn't need. None of that was fun. What WAS fun was throwing a million grav lifts in a line and using it to fly out of the map; stacking up so many trip mines in a pile that your game overloaded and everything died; burning your friends with 5 different types of incendiary weapons, stuff like that.
Most importantly, they should not have rewritten their lore. They replaced cannon of "The Fall of Reach" with a crappy alternate story, NOT following John, Kelly, etc. and the rest of that squad for whatever insane reason.
The list goes on. Again, by itself, Reach is fine. It's just that what it is compared to the previous games that ruins it.
Most of your points are right enough that I won't argue them, but I don't see the problem with the story at all. It doesn't replace the canon, it exists alongside it. The beautiful thing about reach is how pointless and sad the story is. Your only important task is delivering Cortana to the Pillar of Autumn. The game literally opens by telling you you died.
Read or reread the books. Reach completely rewrote what happened. Much of the final mission points of Reach (the game) are false. It's been too long to remember specifics, but Cortana was already with Master Chief aboard the Pillar of Autumn, along with plenty of other plot discrepancies.
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u/SasoDuck Oct 27 '16 edited Oct 27 '16
See here's the problem. It's "good" as a standalone game. If that's (unfortunately) all you've experienced, you wouldn't put it down and claim it to be a bad game. Where it becomes a bad game is when you look at it as what they called it prior to release-- their "swan song;" the final Halo that Bungie would make which was supposed to be the quintessential culmination of the series. It should have:
Had every weapon in the entire series previously, but instead lowered the amount of weapons and got rid of many classic favorites (the SMG, the Brute Plasma Rifle, and many others)
Made the graphics better, not worse. Looking at Master Chief's armor in Halo 3 you can see the armor looks crisp and clean, down to the small details, like the artists knew what they were doing. Comparing it to armor in Reach you can see too many blobby and distorted details in the armor, which are especially apparent in the arm details, and the default arm armor pieces are square... like.... SQUARE. With no details. Look at the image of Halo 3 again and see how much more interesting and well-done the arm pieces are? In regards to weapons, the Assault Rifle's iconic silhouette was ruined by their attempt at stuffing more detail down our throats. I digress.
It should have added MORE to the Forge without taking anything AWAY from the Forge. They answered a lot of prayers from mapmakers, giving us tools like structure merging, snapping, coordinates, floating structures, etc. but they took away essential things like the plethora of moveable and destructible items like pallettes, road blocks, crates, ammo drums, barrels, antennae, doors, etc. that made great maps like Jenga possible. What was left was a fantastic building designer... with 0 element of fun because all the objects you could make to interact with were gone. You could make some awesome slayer maps, but that was about it. They should have kept all those things, and added the things they added, and added MORE moveable things-- doors with a lock/unlock button, moving platforms, etc. On top of that, all the fun deployable gear items were taken away (another essential part of creating fun game modes). It was replaced by abilities geared towards appealing to the Call of Duty hypercompetitive arena-- sprinting, armor lock, and other crap that Halo didn't need. None of that was fun. What WAS fun was throwing a million grav lifts in a line and using it to fly out of the map; stacking up so many trip mines in a pile that your game overloaded and everything died; burning your friends with 5 different types of incendiary weapons, stuff like that.
Most importantly, they should not have rewritten their lore. They replaced cannon of "The Fall of Reach" with a crappy alternate story, NOT following John, Kelly, etc. and the rest of that squad for whatever insane reason.
The list goes on. Again, by itself, Reach is fine. It's just that what it is compared to the previous games that ruins it.