Dear Creature of Darkness or Devourer of Children
Why are you raping Halo: Reach? Forgive me but I mean this sincerely. I assume that if you actually deign to play this game – with headsets – yourself, then you will hear this word tossed around a lot: “Fuck! I just got raped by that rocket launcher Fuck!” or “I just got raped by that shotgun whore” or “that evil mother rapist with the sniper just raped me” or “oh man I just raped that guy – in the ass, with nails – did you rape rapey raped rapes?” or – well my point is the word rape is overused and has lost a lot of its potential to shock. Be under no illusions here, 343, I mean rape in the sense of full on sexual assault that was neither desired nor asked for.
It’s difficult for me to articulate just how sullied I feel when I play Reach now – because I do occasionally play it – even when playing the vanilla playlists (which you seem to have narrowed to 4v4 and FFA, thanks for the plethora of choice!) there seems to be a general state of disrepair. Shots don’t hit that should and shots that have no business hitting do hit. I say this being on the receiving end of both instances: “how did that guy not kill me?” and “God fuck it I am going to rape him the next time I see that cheating piece of shit!”.
And then there is the fact that half the texture in the environments seem to have gone AWOL, particularly and definitely in forge world – this is not just my Xbox breaking, all my other games look as lovely as they ever did and my friends have commented on this too. Add to this, myriad tiny glitches that don’t break the game in so much as take you out of it, like a corpse sticking to the wall outside the yellow lift in sword base and spazing out for the remainder of the match. What’s the deal with that exactly? I don’t understand how things like this slip but I’m sure it’s all your fault.
These are the pettiest of my concerns and criticisms.
Since you took over from Bungie I’ve watched in horror as you, slowly at first, pandered to the petulant, narcissistic, retrograde and plain retarded that screamed on the forums for months and months instead of actually playing the fucking game.
Armour lock. I understand why this annoys people. Valid opinions include: “it breaks the pace”, “it’s too powerful” and “it just made me loose”. I feel all these points are wrong, obviously: pace needs variation otherwise you have a constant sprint. Like with a good novel there’s lulls (spawning) and moments of intense action (lobbing grenades and assault rifle spraying half a squad to death) and moments of tension (waiting half a corridor away from a fuzzy static ball to come out and face you – when is he going to come out? What weapon does he have? Is he going to throw grenades – it gives YOU the same few seconds to prepare as it gives the armour locker). Plus it’s the only thing to stop you getting slashed by some sprinter with the energy sword or that jet-packing air to surface rocket heading your way, or the tank that’s been battering your team for the first five minutes. It takes timing to do all these things right, and if you were off with your popping and locking you were left very vulnerable.
It did not need changing. It was easy enough to work around, and if you did die because of it could you not just wear it and get on with the game? I mean the assault rifle kills people – would I not be bum rushed out of town if I asked for it to have no ammo and be a melee only weapon that takes five punches to kill?
You’ve made it near useless now, successfully making the game less varied and therefore more predictable.
And shield bleed through? This isn’t even “tweaking” (I mean raping obviously) something people (I use this term loosely) complained about – this is just changing the rules! And why? Because older games were like this? Then go play older games! You could argue the mechanics of a non-existent bullet repelling device until the sun dies (although I imagine we will have bothered inventing bullet repelling devices by then but that too is by-the-by) but the way it was introduced to me when I bought the game was it deflected so many bullets before breaking – leaving you vulnerable, abandoning your teammates for cover and a place to recharge. But now shield are meagrely an extension of your health rather than a different thing. Meaning you can be shot in the head twice with pretty-much any gun and be dead. In what way does this improve the game? By making it more like CoD games where you kill the person before they’ve even seen you? Or at least giving them no chance to turn their fortunes. This is not the way forward for fun games.
And the pistol? What the hell were you thinking making a load out weapon feel like a power weapon? Why would anyone use anything other than a three shot weapon, when ammo is dropped for it with every kill and it has the range of a sniper rifle? So long as you see your prey first of course. If you’re on the receiving end of the first shot you’re fucked. Sure it was fun back in halo CE – well I can’t imagine it was I wasn’t there – when I heard people talking about it, it was with nostalgia and even slight embarrassment. You know like how you used to spell your name with a 6 or a first girl/boyfriend who dumped you for being an abrasive asshole to their friends. You take the shaky foundations and build upon them to become a better speller and more tolerable person to live with.
And what was the deal with releasing a map pack that you could only play with “anniversary rules”. You essentially tacked onto Reach a small multiplayer for your re-skin of CE. That was astonishingly inferior to both people who liked CE and people who liked Reach. You know that you didn’t expand Reach by doing that don’t you? But whatever it was in its own playlist I didn’t have to play it. That’s my main objection to this title update bullshit. It could have been in its own playlist with a couple of the more popular game types. That way the whiney bitches could have their instakill fun away from the grownups, much like the MLG crowd segregated themselves from us lowly playing-for-fun piss flaps.
But you didn’t.
A good friend of mine – whom I met through Reach – tells me that 343 is made up of people from Bungie who wanted to continue working on Halo. I’m completely ready to believe this, the large steps backwards you’ve taken were to make Reach look and play like the Halos of yore. This is as obvious as it is tragic. Bungie made an effort to make Reach the best Halo yet. I think they succeeded I played CE and 3 and didn’t think a whole lot of them, solid but lacking. Reach cured that and then you took it away.
The thing that really really makes me want to sick blood on your stupid faces is your little moderation to the Halo Reach title screen. The little “1.1” that you put there. Did you think that was funny? That’s the equivalent of a rapist – and you are rapists – tattooing his initials on his victim’s cheek.
.
Up yours,
Orian57
