Halo Reach, The Beta Has Ended

   Two weeks ago I told about my opinions for this marvelous betage. It was a great first look that overall went very smoothly, outside of servers melting at launch and the jaded, conservative Halo 3 players ranting against the changes at Bungie.net, they are so silly. After the message saying its over, reverting back to Halo 3 has been sad, but not impossible. Moving around the map without the help of a jetpack or sprint is not as fun and less unpredictable since going after the power weapons doesn't involve quicker map controlling. Speaking of lack of armor abilities, the use of equipment just had me say "what were they thinking", they aren't terribly fun and getting in the right situation to use them just results in me conserving them for the right moment that just never came. In terms of weapons, halo 3 still has a great arsenal but after playing with the one from Reach, you can really see there was a lot of fluff when we finished the fight. Yes, dual wielding was cool back then but really the only pair of single handed weapons I consistently used were a pair of plasma rifles, but the plasma repeater's powerful rate of fire and feel to it does away with that pair. "Well Tim, what about the Battle Rifle, the three round burst was awesome?" Your damn right it was awesome, but after playing Reach, using one of my personal favorite videogame weapons is clunky but still overpowered as a mid-range weapon. As it seems it won't make an appearance in Reach the only thing I'll miss is the fact of having A three round burst firearm, besides the Halo 3 BR wasn't quite as cool as Halo 2's

   Now to what I didn't talk about in the last impressions of the beta, its on to Invasion and Generator Defense, and they are awesome. Most online shooters are just random shootouts and not so much cinematic, Invasion tries to take a step in the cinematic direction. Invasion is broken up into 3 phases, in the first, elites make their way up to a broken UNSC frigate and capture one of two territories. In the second, that frigate becomes a spawn point for the elites and shield doors open up so they can push towards the refinery and capture one of two more territories, which opens up a safe holding a data core, which in the final phase elites carry it to a drop off zone. This is all while spartans attempt to defend against their enemies and hold their ground, vehicles spawn for their side, and more loadouts become available. Its so different from all the other gametypes since it actually acts like its part of the Halo mythos, spartans actually duke it out against their covenant counterparts and it reminds me a lot of the Star Wars battlefront series in that two sides play differently, players choose how they want to play with different loadouts and vehicles can be used similarly. Less interesting but still just about as fun is Invasion Slayer, which focuses on the killing of each side rather than finishing objectives. What makes it interesting is that like normal Invasion, there are basically no weapons on the map and players have to choose different loadouts as the game progresses, but there are territories to be controlled, which results in a weapon and/or vehicle spawn for the side who captures it.

   Then theres Generator Defense, which like Invasion, is an attack/defense gametype that goes out of its way to make it feel part of the Halo universe. Both sides have five different loadouts from the beginning and shortly after the game starts, UNSC weapon pods are dropped from the skies to deliver a healthy dose of human power weapons. Its really nice to see weapons appear on the map this way as opposed to them just lying in the classic Halo matches. Elites make there way towards the Spartan's base and destroy all three generators. The catch is that spartans can lock the generators, where the generator is invulnerable for a limited amount of time, in theory forcing the attackers to fend off the defenders before they can do this. Expect this gametype to be much improved by the finished products release as its currently prone to exploitation. Spartans could have an extra edge and the generators could be more durable, but even then they have annoying tricks up their sleeve even when they lose. Generators can be locked an infinite number of times and even when an elite is attacking it, so you could be meleeing it with an energy sword, and a spartan can walk up to the generator and blatantly lock it before killing the attacker. And more repetitive, generator Bravo on the map overlook is placed inside thee base, where spartans tend to camp with the shotgun, turning into a slow slog as elites eventually defeat the spartans and take out the structure rather than doing so with an interesting firefight.

   Now, generator defense being part of "network test 1", the playlist was put under stressed conditions, and yes there were irregularities but even that gave me a sign of hope. There was lag, but stereotypical lag with slow framerates rather than players teleporting everywhere and severely harming the experience. Seeing that this was under "stressed conditions" with the game being pushed to its limits, I was surprised that games could be smoothed out easily. I was never really frustrated with it, it was annoying but it shows that by the retail game's launch, the networking will be unparalleled when its set to work as efficiently as possible.