I was impressed with the look of Crysis's water, but it didn't react very well.

Now, I've played a good amount of Halo 3 and Bungie's plans for Reach have me extremely excited. What follows will be pretty in-depth and assume some knowledge of Halo 3's multiplayer, but I'll try to explain things in as much detail as possible.

New Features:

Active Roster - This is a throwback to Halo 2. When you boot up Reach, right at the main menu or lobby, you'll see a list of what your Xbox Live friends are doing within Reach. You'll get detailed information about any friends playing Reach including who they are partied with, what game they are in (plus score and remaining time), and more.

Basically, Bungie wants to make it so that you do not have to utilize the Xbox Live Guide to find out what your buddies are doing in Reach.

Queue-Joining - In Halo 3, it was difficult to join friends that were already playing in a match. You had to wait until they were finished. If you started a game while you waited, they would then have to wait for you. Instead of going back and forth, Reach will support queue-joining. Simply put, Reach will automatically join up as soon as your friends are joinable.

Improved Voting System - Halo: Reach will utilize a new voting system, which Bungie described as "Veto 2.0". Each playlist will provide players with four options. The first will be a combination of map and gametype, much like you would see in Halo 3. The other three options will offer players additional choices to vote on. Thankfully, you'll know up front what your four options are so you no longer have to risk voting down a favored map, but unfavored gametype and getting an unfavored combination.

Behind-the-scenes, a lot of work has been done to give more flexibility to the playlist designers. A designer could, for example, ensure that the first choice is always Team Slayer on a set of 3 popular maps, but offer different gametypes in the additional choices.

Arena Playlists - Possibly the largest change coming in Halo: Reach is the Arena. This is a Slayer and Team Slayer set of playlists entirely geared toward the hardcore. If that wasn't enough, players will be rated and placed into skill divisions in month-long seasons.

The rating system is smart enough to realize that kills aren't the other determining factor behind skill. This is especially true for team games where assists play a huge roll. Similarly, players that have a greater kill/death ratio (had more kills than deaths) will rank higher than players that die as much as they kill.

The divisions are Onyx, Gold, Silver, Bronze, and Steel. It is possible to move up or down within a single season. To qualify for ranking, players will have to play a certain number of games a day to gain a "Daily Ranking", which will be an average of a player's best games from the day. To get a divisional ranking and compete in a season, players will need a certain number of Daily Rankings.

Casual gametypes will not appear in Arena playlists. You won't be seeing Rocket Race or Fiesta here.

Even though Arena is geared toward top-level players, it should help less skilled players avoid being matched up against people they have no chance of winning against.

Ranked and Social Combined - Since the hardcore will be in the Arena, Bungie doesn't want to further splinter the community. In Halo 3, Ranked and Social playlists served two different purposes. Ranked games were generally of a higher quality, while social games were more casual.

In Reach, the playlists will be smart enough to put you and your party in the proper match based upon how many players you have. Say you're looking for a game in a four-on-four playlist. If you bring four people, Reach will attempt to match your team against another group of four at a similar skill level. If you go in with more than four, it will properly split your party across the teams and fill in the blanks with additional players.

Streamlined Party-Up - After a Halo 3 match, players were presented with the option to "Party Up" and merge lobbies with all willing players. In Reach, it will be an opt-out system. After a match, players will be kept together and it will automatically roll into looking for the next match. The system is flexible enough to allow Bungie to determine, per playlist, whether to keep a team together and find a new set of opponents or keep an entire game together and move onto the next map.

Matchmaking Connection Options - The options for finding games in matchmaking will be more open to the player, if they so choose. If you only ever want to play in games with a good connection, that can be set in the options. If you only ever want to play against players of a similar skill, that can be set. The same goes for finding players that speak to same language.

Social Settings - In addition to these connection options, players can rate themselves along four axes to add another layer of criteria to the matchmaking. These won't trump anything else, but it will help Bungie build better teams. Players will define their playstyle in the following four categories:
+ Teamwork - Team Player vs. Lone Wolf
+ Motivation - Winning vs. Having Fun
+ Chattiness - Chatty vs. Quiet
+ Tone - Polite vs. Rowdy

This allows Bungie, for example, to try and build a team of chatty, polite, team-playing, winners in serious playlists.

These new features are a huge part of Halo: Reach and should help foster a better community than Halo 3 or Halo 2. Personally, I'm extremely excited about the Arena system. I've been having a lot of fun in the StarCraft II beta test with Blizzard's Leagues & Ladders system. Arena is the same concept.

It should also help alleviate the epidemic of smurfing (creating new Xbox Live accounts) to give maxed out players something to do in Halo 3. Instead of starting over, destroying noobs and reclimbing the skill charts, these top-level players will be encouraged to play season-after-season in the Arena and be meaningfully compared to each other. It's a system that has been a long-time-coming to a first-person shooter.

I spoke with the following group to find out more about how the hardcore Arena system will function as well as how the ranking system will determine comparative skill between players.

* Luke Timmins - Lead Multiplayer/UI Engineer
* Tyson Green - Systems Designer

The Arena System - A Ranked Set of Playlists for the Hardcore Community

Luke Timmins: We want to take a new stab at the scoring system and come up with a 'pure scoring system'. We thought a lot about the different pros and cons of [our previous system. We didn't like that it penalized the best player on the losing team. What we came up with was the Arena. It has a different vibe. It is a hardcore, Slayer-only [area]. You are going to be given a rating compared to the rest of the population broken up into divisions.

It's a season-based model, which [helps prevent account smurfing]. If you played a bunch in Halo 3, you'd hit around 40 [skill] and all of a sudden you're number isn't going up. Players would say, 'I guess I'm done. Do I make a second account?' The season model does some really cool things. At the end of the season, it goes on the back of your 'baseball card' and the next season begins fresh.

Tyson Green: With the Arena rating system, we're trying to say, 'Here are the things we value and our players value in-game.' You get a higher rating by doing things that good players do: working with your teammates, getting kills and assists, and not dying a lot. You're playing Slayer, so if you die, you're giving [the enemy team] a point. Say you have two guys, one has a kill:death spread of 10 and the other has a spread of 2. Even if the guy with 2 scored a few more kills - the guy with the higher spread will get a better rating. The game is saying, 'You did the better job. You were playing the game better and working with your team better. This is what contributes to your overall rating.'

Luke Timmins: If you look at the different layers of Halo players, there are guys that really understand kills, deaths, assists, working as a team, and all the stuff that [will go into this rating]. We basically wanted to bubble that up, pull it out, and put it on the table: this is what Slayer is. We can now tell you, 'You did well', if you actually play well.

If Tyson wants to play with his little brother, who isn't that good, Tyson can play with him. His brother might suck, but Tyson might be really good. He can go in and get a good rating game after game after game. This is something that our Halo 3 model did not do well.

Play with who you want. You're going to get scored individually.

Probably the single greatest strength that Bungie gets so little credit for, their amazing ability to do online features that are always ahead of the curve. I have little doubt that Reach will leave almost all other online shooters in the dust when it comes to features and the way that playlists etc are set up and organized.

Plus, Halo without lag wouldn't be Halo! The game can barely handle 12 people let alone 16 without a bad connection.

Yes, but Halo 3 was far from perfect. The voting system felt like an afterthought and the implementation of new maps is a pain in the ass (they didn't learn from Halo 2 for this one). Seems like both problems are being dealt with, unless they don't take full advantage of the new party/voting system. I'm hoping for the best.

Anyway, it sounds great. About time they got rid of social play lists, as long as the new system is flexible enough to let guests play in online matches this should be the best new feature.

So much focus on the Beta has been amazing and we’ve made some major improvements to the engine and many across multiplayer. So, now we’re beginning the shift toward focus on the campaign again. I’m super excited about giving some love to the huge number of new campaign features that have been waiting patiently for the Beta dust to settle.

Even in the absence of getting 100% engineering support, our next full campaign playtest is nearly ready to be hammered on at the labs. It is already in a state of major improvement over our last playtest, which was just a few weeks ago. This is the most fun part of a project – when all the planes circling around in development space begin landing.

Stop pretending like you play multiplayer. :P

Plus, Halo without lag wouldn't be Halo! The game can barely handle 12 people let alone 16 without a bad connection.

The game looks great though, I'm pretty excited. It's going to be the best multiplayer console exclusive hands down.

Optimus, why in the hell would you not play multiplayer? Especially in a halo game?
that's like buying Forza 3 and only playing the time trials...

You should REALLY give Reach's MP a chance b/c once you get into the MP vibe, it adds SOOOOOO much extra value to your games. Even if you aren't a great online player it's still a lot of fun.

Active Roster - A list of your friends in Reach, showing their status in real-time.

Luke Timmins: If you remember from Halo 2, there was a really easy way to get to my friends list. In Halo 2, it's right there. My friends and what they're doing. When Halo 3 came out, we had this big thing about trying to integrate with the Xbox 360 Guide. We had a lot of deep-thinking after that and decided we really wanted [Halo 2's system] back. We want easy access to friends. We want to see what they're doing and who they're partied up with.

[In Halo 3], we lost something there.

The active roster really is the tip of the spear for getting people this quick access to "what are my friends doing?" Oh, they're in a game? How much time is remaining? What's the score?

Lars Bakken: Active Roster is, by definition, always on. When you log into Reach at the Main Menu, the whole right half of the screen is going to be your Active Roster. You're going to see what all your friends are doing in real-time in Reach. No going to the Guide. You click the left stick to the right and you are in the Active Roster.

It has all the information what all your friends are doing, whether they're partied up or not, who they're partied up with, what gametype they're in whether they're searching in matchmaking [or in a lobby]. That is fed to you, real-time, in the menu at all times. It's always there.

Luke Timmins: We actually made a substantial investment in engineering tech in our user-interface architecture. We basically rebuit huge swaths of the UI [and players] will be really impressed by the quality of the UI. It's sexy as hell and our UI guys have done an amazing job. The most important button - if there's one button that matters - in the Active Roster, it's the "join" button.

This brings us to the next-big thing that we have wanted this since Halo 2. We couldn't get it in to Halo 2 or Halo 3, but Reach will have: Queued Join. We built this sytem where you can queue a join to a friend that's not in an immediately joinable state (in the middle of matchmaking or watching a film). When he becomes available, it will automatically put you guys together in a lobby.

It's damn Counter-Strike 1.6 man. Playing that game with friends is just so damn addicting that if I'm gaming online at all, it's usually spent playing cs 1.6 with buddies. Gotta branch the hell out lol, and I plan to make to make it happen with Reach :)