Eh. I firmly believe that's mostly nostalgia messing with your head. After every iteration of Halo has been retired, people start getting all misty-eyed about the old maps, and seem to forget all the things they complained about. I guarantee you when Halo 4 has been out a while, people will 1. complain about the maps like crazy, because it's been happening in every game since Halo 2; and 2. start reminiscing about the good times on Countdown, Powerhouse, Zealot, Sword Base, etc. One thing Reach does have against it though is not enough memorable, unique maps, at least outside of DLC. There should have been more maps on the disc that weren't made in forge, because the non-forged maps are still the ones people most want to play in matchmaking.
I think the problem lies with the feedback they are getting. If you ever read the stuff people post in the Waypoint forums, you'll notice its just constant bitching about the settings one way or the other. Nobody has any real solid feedback. Its either "I hate the TU" or "The TU fixed everything and vanilla sucks". At least thats my take on the situation.
Guardian, Valhalla, The Pit and Avalanche are all-timers in my book. High Ground, Narrows and Rat's Nest were also good. Standoff was pretty good though it lended itself to some annoying games.
This is a genuine question: was Halo 3 your first Halo game? CE and 2 maps are, by and large, much more iconic. That said, Nutduster is right. The power of nostalgia is huge in the gaming community, pop your head in to /r/gaming if you don't believe me, and you don't hear these things about Reach because it's impossible to be nostalgic about a current game. People weren't saying those things about Halo 3 when it was the current game, they were bitching and moaning about how awful Halo 3 was in so many ways and how Halo 2 and CE were basically perfect. Now, as always, many of those complaints about H3 were legitimate grievances, but what should be obvious is how people have all but forgotten those grievances now that they don't have to put up with them any more. The same was true of H2 when it came out, people hated that game in comparison to CE. If you can't see how nostalgia, current and past game attitudes work, then I really don't know what to say to you. EDIT: Nutduster, replace Avalanche with Narrows (I know, plenty of people hate me for this opinion) and I agree completely.
Very true. However, I don't think 343i is that dense... At least I hope not. Assuming that 343i are mature, intelligent adults capable of critical thinking, they should be able to cut through the bullshit. Another theory going around is that 343i is experimenting with Reach right now in preparation for Halo 4. This seems pretty legitimate to me... I hope they really come through with a kick ass game that Reach never quite was.
This point can't be made often enough. I know a lot of you guys (probably ALL of you guys) aren't old enough to remember this firsthand. But Halo 2 wasn't the hugely popular, iconic game it is today in the eyes of all of the Halo faithful. A lot of people did like it, but a lot of other people were extremely vocal in their hatred. It was glitchier than CE; the magnum was neutered and many people didn't like the BR that replaced it; dual wielding was too dominant and the sword was so ridiculously overpowered that I actually kind of miss having it; the graphics were kind of dirty-looking compared to the very clean and pristine CE graphics, making it hard at times to pick out targets; there was a fair amount of texture pop-in during games; the first person POV was very different in feel from CE, as was movement speed, jump height, and the visual and controller feedback when you got shot; on and on. I remember with great clarity somebody posting a video a few weeks after H2 came out, featuring some silly song they made up about how bad the game was - one of the main lines in it was, "What the **** have you done to my Halo?" And there were a lot of people who swore never to play it again unless the original magnum was patched in. [br][/br]Edited by merge: I could actually get on board with that. I really liked Narrows, it was an extremely fun objective map. I really did love Avalanche too though - it improved on Sidewinder in every respect, to the point that it felt like a different map just based on the same basic idea, and I never got tired of it coming up in BTB (which happened far too seldom).
Precisely. You know, I only got in to MLG during Halo 3, and entered in to a community largely filled with hate for the game that we all played. Now, Shadow will be able to tell you that, in retrospect, I do see what they were saying in many senses, but it still sticks in my mind how gratuitously hateful people were about Halo 3. Then I started to get hints of how the same had happened with H2 at release. I didn't believe it to be honest. This game that people put on such a ****ing huge pedestal actually got criticised? Hell no. Then I started looking further back in the forums and my god, it was true. Then Reach came out and, sure enough, suddenly people wouldn't shut the hell up about how awesome Halo 3 was. Halo 3, the game I spent 3 years playing and following amidst a constant clamour of how godawful it was, had suddenly becoming the pinnacle of competitive gaming. A part of me died that day, not because of the opinions people hold, but because of how short sighted and fickle they are. Considering how often Halo 2 is cited as the pinnacle of competitive console shooters (admittedly with the CE crowd still bitching in the background, and they're not really unjustified in many senses), this video made me laugh the first time I saw it: Halo 2 Noobified - YouTube Yeah, Narrows was much better in CTF than it was in Slayer, though the latter was helped by the set side spawns in MLG. And yeah Avalanche was great, I just didn't get to play it nearly enough to actually fall in love with it.
Ascension Beaver Creek Colossus Containment Desolation Elongation Foundation Headlong Ivory Tower Lockout Midship Relic Sanctuary Terminal Turf Warlock Waterworks Zanzibar
Fixed that for you. (And I spotted you Headlong, which I was never a fan of - not a fan of the new version, either.) Halo 2 did have a bunch of great maps, but also its share of mediocre and bad maps, and a lot of the ones people loved were just remakes of CE maps. I'm frankly stunned that people will still stick up for Ivory Tower while talking **** about Reflection five seconds later. Are you kidding me? Reflection does have a couple extra problems (though it fixed one or two of Ivory Tower's issues, so all's fair). But both maps boil down to holding top hallway like you're allergic to the entire rest of the map. I liked playing Ivory Tower, but objectively that map was not competitive or good, and if I wasn't such an excellent camper I would probably hate both versions of it with a white-hot passion.
Nah, just old enough to have played hundreds of games on those maps and unfortunately obsessed enough to remember them all. Mind you, I'm not arguing that Halo 3 had better or the same quality of maps as Halo 2. I'd have to bust out my spreadsheet and calculator to tell you how I feel about their relative merits. I'm just saying, people oversell the awesomeness of things from the distant past and are far too cynical about what they have right now,and it's always been that way. It makes me very exhausted when a new game comes out and there's always that round of griping about it. Reach has suffered the worst from it, but then it has three predecessors to live up to, not just one. I really think both Halo 3 and Reach had some good maps and were fun games in their own right, though both also had their problems. For me the pinnacle of the series was probably Halo 2 or CE, not sure which... Halo 2 might have had the best maps (if you spot them all those remakes, and give it an asterisk for benefiting from DLC that Halo CE couldn't have). Halo CE had the best and purest gameplay, plus a bunch of iconic maps that are still being remade to this day. But I don't hate any of the games, even if bloom or armor lock sometimes give me the shakes. Oh, one other thing has hurt Reach, too - the new policy of never making the DLC free, and the weird, ever-changing handling of DLC in matchmaking. Fewer people have played the DLC maps, and the people that have played them did so a lot less than they probably did in H2 and H3. For that reason, some legitimately good maps are going to be less-fondly remembered simply because a lot of players that might have liked them never truly got the opportunity. I have no love for Anchor 9, but Breakpoint, Tempest, Condemned, and most of the Anniversary maps have things to recommend them - even if 343 did their level best to **** things up by stuffing 800 power weapons into most of the maps they made. (Oh 343, I'm beginning to think you're going to be a problem...)
Does the health recharge on its own sometimes? I haven't paid enough attention to tell, but I'll notice after barely surviving a close encounter I'll suddenly have a lot more health again. I could just be nabbing health orbs though... I simply like Nexuiz. Its amazing how a game that was designed with competitive play in mind is more enjoyable for casual play than games that cater to casual players. Have the devs made any more changes since nerfing the shotty?
Colossus was amazing in Team Snipers Containment was good for BTB, esepcially CTF Desolation was an enjoyable 4v4 map, maybe a tad too big. Ivory Tower is tons better than Reflection simply because the Sniper spawn is smaller and not as easy to camp at. The paths from the sides of the map up to the sniper spawn weren't as long as on Reflection either. It's not one of my favorites but still good. Nothing beats Terminal one-bomb. Waterworks is a good BTB, bit big, but it worked well. I don't tell me it's all nostalgia, I still play Halo 2 from time to time and the maps still keep up.
Here be opinions... I'm not a snipers fan as a general rule. I found the map kind of boring and stale for the main gametypes we played on it: slayer (where action would be sucked inexorably up to the top corridor, and would just push back and forth along that one area), CTF (better than slayer, but mediocre). It wasn't a great map. Now you're in my wheelhouse. I'm a huge BTB fan but Containment did nothing for me. It was OK for flag, but had one significant problem (which also afflicted Sidewinder): too large to run the flag on foot. This map was very meh to me. It was definitely a bit too big, and it had the same problem as the original - the top is insanely dominant against the bottom, so as soon as one team controls top and your team starts spawning on the bottom, you're doomed. Gameplay on this map was incredibly predictable as a result. Had a few fun FFA matches on it though. The latter point doesn't mean much - Reflection has sprint as a loadout almost any time you play it. As for the sniper spawn, that seems close to irrelevant to me (and not as significant as you're making it out to be - we had some grotesque runs camping at sniper on Ivory Tower). The basic problem with BOTH maps is that gameplay sucks into top hallway and people just set up camping traps: watching the two ends and elevator with sword (with no ammo limit!), shotgun and sniper (which spawns right up there, how convenient). If it weren't for rockets spawning elsewhere and the amazing equalizer known as the Noob Combo, the map would be intolerable - of course they give sniper a look at killing the guy with rockets anyway, so you have to be sneaky. Funny enough, the one thing people ***** and ***** about on Reflection (the jet pack) is the one thing that in my mind almost makes it better than Ivory Tower. At least there's an extra way to break top control that doesn't put you in a position that is painfully easy to camp with almost any power weapon. // One thing Ivory Tower did do better though was the OS, which was also critical to breaking top control. They shouldn't have removed it in the remake, but Bungie had some weird vendetta against power-ups in Reach. But it's a poor slayer map and a bad, imbalanced two flag map. It basically only works for one bomb and one flag. Which is cool (as you know, I'm working on a map like that myself right now) but it holds the map back from legendary status, in my eyes. I don't even like it as much as, say, High Ground, which is equally good for one-sided objective games, but also makes a solid slayer map. Disliked that map every time I played it, and I couldn't quite tell you why. Personally I think BTB maps benefit from clarity: two well-defined bases with obvious, large paths from one to the other, and lots of space for vehicles to move, plus some routes and cover designed specifically to balance out infantry. It's not all nostalgia. It's also YOU BEING STUPID. Zing! For me, everything I've stated here is based on how I felt about the maps at the time I actively played them, which was for about two solid years up until Halo 3 came out. Your mileage, as always, may vary. But I am a bit surprised to hear you laud a few maps that I thought were extremely boring or plagued with issues back in the day. Ivory Tower in particular seems like a classic example of a map that is fun to play on, yet fraught with problems; I can't imagine any serious competitive player thinking that map was anything but a joke. The best strategy for it is wall-to-wall camping. People complain about the camping on Countdown but at least there are multiple angles of attack and a little long-range visibility on most of those positions; Ivory Tower had a single corridor, with just three points of entry that you had to actually walk through to find out if you were going to die or not. It's horrific map design, unless you like slayer matches that turn into de facto king of the hill.
I'm quite the opposite. Halo 2 maps weren't jack-of-all-trades but were all specifically build for a certain type of gametype. This is what made them awesome. They sucked for a lot of gametypes, but this meant that they were better for other gametypes. Most maps in 3 and Reach are decent at every gametype but they don't excel in any specific ones.
Hmm. You make an interesting case. I'll have to dwell on that for a while. We used to play all kinds of random games on every map (well, within the limits of Halo 2's relatively thin gametype selections). For me, the MOST fun maps were the ones that played really, really well for at least two gametypes: slayer and one other. This is why I liked Relic over Terminal - it was a better slayer map and it was just as fun for one flag as Terminal was. Especially with BTB maps, I preferred them to be capable of doing serious objective games or drive-around-and-****-****-up games, because odds were that we were going to quickly alternate between the two. You're right though that sometimes it feels like maps try too hard to be jacks-of-all-trades. But I do feel like most any map should be at least acceptable for slayer (which is the core of Halo no matter how you slice it), and I really disliked slayer on Terminal; it alternated between boring and frustrating, depending on where you spawned and what the other team was doing (usually holding down the red team's half of the map with wraith, and peering down that very long walkway with sniper).