As I'm sure most of you have seen, many people have been saying they prefer Reach to Halo 4. And this got me wondering, because i happen to agree with that opinion, why is that the case? What makes Reach more replayable and enjoyable? Well, after some considerable thought and consideration, I think I have uncovered a few key points.
1. Forge World. I put this as #1 because this seems to speak loudest to me. In Reach, we had vast forging space. I admit, you have this as well in Halo 4, specifically Forge Island. However, it is a different sort of map. For starters, all of the islands have enormous bodies of water between them, making it impossible to have large land battles such as the sort of battles we saw in Reach such as on the map Hemmorhage. I would be unbelievably happy if they introuced another sort of Forge World. It dissapoints me that the background art for many of the maps looks infinitely more fun than the map itself. For example, on Forge Island, if you look out to sea in almost any direction, you will see many long and interesting islands with montains and different terrains, which is completely in contrast to the bland flatness of the actual forge islands. Even if they just revamped the Reach Forge World and kept the actual structure of the map, I am absolutely positive that Halo 4 as a game would be incredibly more entertaining.
2. Ranking System/ Armor. In Halo Reach, you will remember that it took quite a long time to get to rank up, and when you do, if you're on a grade instead of a rank, (ex. Commander grade 2), you are not guaranteed to aquire new armor. You could argue that in Halo 4 it takes a long to reach mastery or ranks, and you'd be right. However, it doesn't really give incentive to rank up past rank 50, other than to unlock new perks, gun camos, and armor, which defeats the point in a way. Reach takes a lot more time to achieve max rank. If I had logged as many hours into Halo 4 as i have in Reach, I'd probably have reached mastery rank at least 3 times. What that means is that being a high rank in Reach (Field Marshall and up) has more meaning than it does in Halo 4. Although this can't exactly be fixed in Halo 4 because the full game has already been released, it still represents a large flaw in the idea of replayability.
3. Weapon Pickup vs Loadouts. In Reach, everyone is assigned the same starting weapon, and the same capabilities. The only change between the loadouts was/is the armor abilities. This meant that all players were on more even ground. This made the game more skill based rather than strategy/ weapon-map balance (ex. using an AR because you're playing on a close quarters map).
4. Bloom. Continuing on the skill based point, the bloom on Reach meant that not just anybody could pick up Reach after never having played a Halo game before and preform as well or almost as well as a long-term Halo fan. This especially apparent in the magnum. In Halo 4, you can fire rapid shots without losing much accuracy. If you've ever played Reach, you know that it was quite the opposite, and firing quick-successive shots would dramatically reduce your accuracy.
5. Air Warfare. In Reach, you had the option of using a Banshee or a Falcon, and you could have no gunner at all, or one, or two, the power of the falcon of course increasing with each person. In Halo 4, all you have is Banshees, which drastically reduces the possibilities of both air transport, Air-to-Air warfare, Air-To-Ground warfare, and vise-versa.
Althought the majority of these points are minor changes/tweaks/additions, I am absolutely sure that the effect of them on the replayability and fun would be anything but minpr. Thanks for reading, and please respond with your opinions on what you would like to see as an update in Halo 4 or an addition to future Halos.
