Btw, the "confirmed" prospect of an action class/squad shooter in the Haloverse with sprint makes me :D

If Bungie gives us custom lobbies and more online variables I will be extremely hyped.

They definitely look real.. no one puts that much effort into a hoax--usually.

I would actually prefer they kept the same level of fidelity and greatly improved on performance.. but I realize that shiny graphics have mass appeal.Yup. It amazes me that people are bitching that it's not different enough.... based on a dozen or so leaked screens that are questionable quality and terribly early. Plus, ya know, they imply pretty tremendous differences in gameplay already. I have no idea what people seem to want here.

I said console shooter.

For someone who doesn't care for Halo you seem to have a lot of hopes for Halo Reach. Halo doesn't need a saving grace.

HL2, COD4 and Killzone 2 are in the other school of shooter from Halo 3 though. They rely on encapsulating the player in a quite plotted path and bombarding him with scripted, cinematic events. It's essentially what I was talking about before in regards to Uncharted 2 aswell.

If that's something you prefer then obviously you will prefer the games that follow that philosophy. In Halo's case though, only Halo 2 - which is widely considered something of a misstep for the series - does the campaign semi fall into that category. Halo is about its core, cirtculating gameplay mechanics and how that still fuels entire 10 hour campaigns thanks to its original strengths, by providing open, dynamic locales for it to bloom.

You can't throw that into a scripted shooter without compromising what Halo fans gravitate towards in the first place.

So yeah, naturally if another STYLE of shooter captures your fancy more, then Reach has to morph into that style to be successful.

I half agree that Reach has work to do in terms of animation and visuals. I'm a Halo fan (that never touches multiplayer so don't chuck me into that slot please) and will play pretty much anything Halo related - even when it's a little bit on the average side like Halo Wars - so for me it's not a HUUUUUGE deal if Reach simply looks "nice". I would be immensly proud and excited however, if it were to tickle me like Uncharted 2 does visually.

And that's not to say it has to be a technical wonder, but there's a humanity and emotional gravity to Uncharted 2 (and even 1) that the strangely robotic Halo people cannot remotely match. I would very much like to go up against Elites with actual volume and weight to them, instead of having them very game-like skid around the battlefield.

It boggles my mind that there are huge Halo fans that don't play online :P

At the end of the day it's all about fun and gameplay (and to a lesser degree story and lore), and I think Bungie can play it safe with technology.. while still blowing away their competition.

I totally agree with your observations about the campaign though. The closest cousin I've played to Halo in recent years is Crysis.

Well, I'm an all-discriminating non-mp player as you know. :)

Perhaps one day when I dial down the wanting to experience as many games as possible angle I've got going, I will allow myself to linger on a single game for the amounts of time mp consumes without giving a sense of closure.

But yeah my fascination with Halo, the start of my love story if you will, was in the second level of Halo 1.

I walked towards a rock, shooting at an Elite standing beside it. The elite then ducked out of my gunfire, in behind the rock. I threw a grenade to the right of his position, to the right of the rock and started heading off to to the left of the rock. The elite DIVES out of the way of the grenade, out from the cover behind the rock, to the left. Where... I arrive to greet him with a melee attack to the face.

Long range shooting, delayed long range/radius attack, close quarters. Guns, grenades and melee, In perfect harmony. That has ALWAYS been the reason I keep coming back to Halo because no other game does it even REMOTELY as well as Bungie's FPS franchise. I absolutely adore that the AI is written so that you can take advantage of it, and the levels are - ideally - made so that these situations in all sorts of combinations happen over and over. In fact, from this standpoint I think ODST is the most well structured Halo to date, simply in terms of its battlegrounds.

Even the enemies were originally built to encourage flanking them (shields, insta-death melee from back) and getting up close and personal in the thick of it to almost "bullfight" the Hunters into shooting them in the sweet spot.

Even the guns themselves had properties you figured out, almost like meeting legions of Megaman bosses. Plasma taking out shields, bullets gunning down hunters in a few shots, sniping Jackals through the tiny bit of the shield where their hand is.

Now it's all too common to empty a bucket of the exact same enemies on top of your head for the duration of an entire campaign, only to break that up with scripted explosions and things falling down. So yeah, with Halo being virtually the only franchise that still plays like an honest to god GAME (though Gears 2 really did make real strides in that department) there's not a whole lot it *needs* to be doing to be the go-to franchise if you dig this type of thing like I do.

Man I go on, don't I.