Quote from: BaconShelf on July 30, 2015, 01:14:13 AM

Literally everything before the mission The Package is irrelevant.

WELL NO SHIT! What did you expect? For them to actualy save Reach? Everything they did to save the planet was in vein. That was the whole point.

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It just feels like random military operations done with no particular order to them, just "Hey, let's just do what is cool now!".

So was I like the only person actualy listening to what anybody was saying or paying attention to what was going on, because it seemed pretty fucking clear to me.

You are a spartan assigned to a team called noble and get called in to investigate a relay that went dark. Insurrectionists are initially blamed but it turns out it was actualy the covenant, which is a major "oh shit" for the UNSC (despite Carters apparent disintrest) it is also here that you come across some scientists with a macguffin plot device that Kat, being the unlikable whore she is takes it for herself.

After shooting down a ship attacking one of ONI-chan's bases, and giving Halsey her macguffin back (and a brief argument about its importance to the plot), noble 6 and Jun go on a recon mission to scout the covies base of opperations, which turns out is a massive invading force.

The UNSC goes out to fight said force head on, but shit goes south when it turns out there was a cloaked massive covenant supercarrier as the brunt of the invasion.

With help too far away Kat devises a plan to take out the supercarrier. Jorge and 6 go to space to execute said plan ( the execution of which may or may not involve certain plotholes involving the engines of a certain ship) however every possible escape plan goes to shit and the detonator to the bomb that are using is damaged Jorge, already dismayed at the apparent death of Doctor Halsey, sacrifices himself to complete the mission as Noble 6 Master Chiefs his way Back to the ground.

Jorge dies thinking he had saved Reach, but only moments later an Entire covenant armada arrives. The UNSC realizes they're fucked and it's time to get the fuck out of there.

Noble 6 lands in the middle of nowhere under the wreckage of the covenant ship. mildly injured from the fall, makes his way back to Noble team, aiding in a civilian evacuation effort along the way.

  Now reunited with noble, they aid in the last of the major evacuation effort in New Alexandria before the convenience store begins glossing the city. As they seek shelter from the glassing, a friendly Elite shows up in his phantom and saves Noble team from Kat's driving, however the poor Samaritan is only thanked with a hail of bullets from the ungreatfull SJWs.

With the planet fucked, noble team is sent to Aid in the destruction of sensitive documents to prevent the covies from finding earth among other unpleasant things. However when they get to their supposed objective, it turns out they are actualy being called to an apparently far more important mission by doctor Halsey (who hadn't been turned into barbecue Senior Citizen as everyone previously thought)

As it turns out Halsey was right about the macguffin being important to the space nazis and the plot, since it contained plotdevice.exe which she gave to (a fragment of) cortana, and now she needs you to bring Cortana along with plotdevice.exe to the Pillar of Autumn for the next game.

Jun goes to escort Halsey to castle base so he can abandon her there and get off the planet alone and later recruit the biggest dumbass in the Halo universe since ahistorical own AI , while  six carter and that some random black dude cosplaying as Ghost from MW2 go to bring Cortana to the autumn.

carter sacrifices himself to allow six and that black guy safe passage, and you fight your way to the autumn with the black guy tagging along. 

Once you get to the autumn you meet heavy resistance from the air including an approaching battleship.  The black guy chooses to stay behind provide you anti air support so you can go.
However, the same freindly elite from earlier shows up to teach Emile how to properly use close quarters weapons, as he noticed his poor skill with his shotgun. However the lessons get messy real fast and they both end up dead. So noble 6 takes the AA rail gun.

After destroying the covenant ship threatening them Keyes takes off Imediately and leaves noble 6 despite their having been about a million ways he could have gotten you on board the autumn in time.

Keyes and the rest of the autumn go off to start a successful gaming franchise while noble six dies a lonely virgin on a shithole of a burned planet.

Or we could have a story where what you do at the beginning is actually fucking relevant to what happens at the end. Take out everything from Sword Base to Package and the story would still make as much sense as it does now. Remove the final two missions and the story still feels pretty fucking complete.

We could have made a game just as long from the segments of The Fall of Reach and First Strike involving John's mission to the Circumference and the other 25 spartans' operations on Reach with defending ODP generators, Blue Team's retreat to CASTLE Base with Halsey and the fight in the Forerunner Caverns, with room to spare for a mission on Unyielding Heirophant to link CE and Halo 2 together. We could have had a story that directly links to the other games in a meaningful way rather than a half-arsed attempt to link in the final mission, thereby destroying all previous canon surrounding the event in the process.

All the characters in Reach were created for the one game, and killed off about half an hour after introduction so that they can't be used again (Exception: Jun) for stories to make them more interesting. Like Jun, who has since seen usage in Initiation and New Blood as a spearhead for the SPARTAN-IV program.

Halo Reach, the majority of it, isn't actually the story of the fall of the planet, as the majority of the game takes place weeks before the few hours whoch sees the UNSC get utterly destroyed by Thel 'Vadamee. If they wanted to tell the story with new characters, we could have had a 'true' marine/ ODST/ army trooper game in which we get to play in the actual full invasion, and get to see the utter devastation brought upon the human defenders by the Covenant, and we get to see just how devastating a covenant fleet can be. With how they (didn't) show off what Reach was, we could have subsituted Reach for any other UNSC world and it wouldn't be out-of-place. But Bungie, as usual, wanted to do 'muh spartans' and decided to create yet more characters instead of using the massive backlog of characters we hadn't heard from for years by that point. Red, Black, Grey teams were all available. Team Katana was available, as were Spartans Cassandra, Maria and Nicole, who had literally been mentioned once then promptly forgotten.

At least Halo 3 actually causes substantial change for the Halo Universe, even if the preceeding half made no sense. Reach neither links with the main or expanded lore nor presents anything we didn't already know. You could remove the game of Reach from the lore entirely and you would change pretty much nothing.

I'm a great believer in MAD, an it being why we haven't had a major war since WWII.

Quote from: BaconShelf on July 30, 2015, 01:16:26 AM

The Canon version of that level is one where you help Buck out. Buck and Jun talk about it in New Blood ^ ^

What happens if I push Buck off the platform and he falls to his death? Does Halo 3 ODST still happen or nah

The Guardians kill everyone because buck wasn't there to stop tem with the raw power of being Nathan Fillion.

Reach had the most boring intro level out of any Halo and that marine on the radio sets the tone for the rest of the game when he says "The Covenant is on Reach. I repeat, The Covenant is on Reach." You could get better emotion and acting out of a bag of potatoes than that guy.

The next levels are all pretty much the same thing until you get to Tip of the Spear. You're leading a huge UNSC force and it gets attacked by tons of Banshees and other Covenant vehicles. The cutscene makes the level look like its going to be a giant battle which we were promised by Bungie but nope, that huge battle is off in the distance as part of the background with like 3 Scarabs, hundreds of Falcons/Banshees fighting, and tons of Scorpions and Wraiths engaging one another. We're off on our own taking down AA guns instead. The hell is this? I want to be out THERE in that huge epic battle instead of blowing up AA guns. When I first played through this level, I just looked out towards that battle and got angry because we're not the ones out there making a difference.

The only highlight of Reach's campaign is the space battle on Long Night of Solace because something like that has never been done in Halo. The Sabre handled well and we had a breathtaking skybox to look at while fighting in space. That skybox was so beautifully crafted and remains one of my favorite in any Halo game. Unfortunately while the space battle was cool and felt very Battlefront-ish, it was rather short and the opportunity to have this in custom games was lost right here when it was just campaign-only.

Another cool thing was the New Alexandria mission as it has you do different objectives each time you play. In one playthrough you'll have to rescue Buck but in another playthrough he won't be there and it will have you rescue a squad of marines from Hunters on a rooftop or something like that. The level still had the same main objectives like going through Club Errera and the hospital though, and the pilotable Pelican and Phantom Easter Egg on this mission was pretty awesome as well.

The Canon version of that level is one where you help Buck out. Buck and Jun talk about it in New Blood ^ ^

I look forward to Season 2.

Regarding Reach's "story". The new tabletop game has actually made the random-ass invasion fleet that's there a month early make sense now! With this and the datadrops, I dare say that Reach actually makes some sense now!

My Xbox crapped out so I'm going off.

Rush or Conquest. Ideally on DLC maps but I guess not everyone has premium. If everyone has it, I'd love to play Carrier Assault

I'll join if I'm back from Manchester comic con.

Quote from: Verbatim on July 16, 2015, 10:06:18 PM

what is it about this one

A lot of those other conflicts are based on the same foundation: civilisation vs. fundamentalist Islam. It's no use ignoring Israel and Hamas if you can't ignore Kurdistan, Iraq, Syria, Boko Haram, the various terrorist attacks in Western countries et cetera.

And I think, both morally and for your own intellectual sake, one can't ignore any of those conflicts totally. Or, at least, you must affirm your position on the right side of the divide. Those who do not stand with us stand against us by default, there is no neutrality in this war.

Only a Sith deals in absolutes.

I once played the original Mario. I got bored before I couldn't figure out what to do.

One volcano lowered the average global temperature by 2-3 degrees C. Only a couple hundred nukes would be enough to throw enough shit into the atmosphere to kill most plant life and thus the food chain.

I'm presuming the nuclear weapons used are smaller nukes but more numerous, based off some impact craters we see and actual weapons we see in bases. Not just that, but the majority of the populace survived the bombing in-lore. The most death occurred from the 'rain' in which the ash from the atmosphere, combined with radioactive dust and water that created a black, acidic rain that rained on the planet for weeks an killed most life on Earth. The nukes themselves comparatively did very little.

Quote from: Azumarill on July 15, 2015, 06:05:38 PM

Quote from: Prehistoric on July 15, 2015, 03:08:30 PM

Why anyone is buying Halo 5 for the multiplayer is beyond me. Everyone I know is getting it for the story.

buying halo for the story? after h4? wat

Halo 4 has a far better story than what Halo 3 and Reach have. With Halo 4 you actually know what you're doing in the levels from the start and the story until it gets a new objective. The first half of Halo 3 is so random that you can remove it from the game and nothing will change story wise. For Reach the majority of the game is random up to the point you get Cortana. After Halo 2 Bungie didn't even try anymore when it comes to the campaign. It's sad when a small team working on a side game which is ODST ends up having a better campaign than what the whole team did for Halo 3 and Reach.

Binge got a new writer, and Staten got pushed to the sidelines after Halo 2. He got creativ control on ODST which is why it was really good, but got largely ignored on 3, Reach and Destiny. Which is why Destiny's grimoire is singlehandedly te most interesting aspect of the game

Looking forward to Shadow of Intent later this year.

Halo 5's story looks great. The buildup we've been getting in the past couple years in the EU is really doing a good job of setting the scene, so to speak.

Halo 5's story is looking to be the best one yet, undoubtedly. Might even beat ODST and Halo 4 for best one.

Quote from: BaconShelf on July 15, 2015, 10:35:18 AM

Quote from: eggsalad on July 15, 2015, 10:23:39 AM

Raid in WoW if you want that shit you fagger. The niche is already well done and filled you just have shit taste.

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That isn't an MMO

grow a pair

You seem very angry at something. Do you have a lot of pent up anger?

Archive killed off it's older userbase by turning into a hugbox.

Please don't do that here. I need somewhere to go to call people retards <3