Right - no AR in H2. My bad. The SMG served the same purpose, and was similarly dropped for any other gun by most players, despite it's niche usefulness. I'm not saying everybody hates it. I'm sure some players prefer it over other options, but do you think it's actually anyone's favorite map? Valhalla on the other hand - now there's a map you can't forget. As far as getting voted for so often in BTB and Team Snipers - I just attribute that to sadism.
I would only want Sandtrap if they brought Elephants back. If they do have elephants in the game, I will be incredibly disappointed if they don't have a sandtrap remake.
Lol, I tried appealing to the masses, but got slammed by the Halo elitists for saying Elephants are fun...but I totally agree.
I loved Elephants. I played H3 at a friend's house once and he joined a Custom Game of his XBL friends and they were playing on Sandtrap with only Elephants and Flags at them and you had a Sword and the two Elephants would crash into each other and the boarding began. So much fun.
I don't think it plays that differently than it ever did. The main reason people vote for it is obvious enough: they like having a big, open, simple playground for driving vehicles around (or skulking around the fringes of with sniper rifles). Whether it "plays well" or not, it offers something in BTB that surprisingly few other maps do. Paradiso/Utopie are too cramped for all vehicles except flying ones; same with The Spire; Boneyard is a weird design that is too segmented, offering really just one main area for vehicles to do anything, and in that entire area you are extremely exposed to fire from all directions; etc. Wayont actually is a good warthog map, but the base design encourages infantry to stay put and reduces the map's overall enjoyability. I feel like people's memories are short. People loved the Gulch in CE but it certainly didn't lack for problems, chief among them the wretched spawns (among the worst on any Halo map ever) that allowed tanks, ghosts, or simply guys good with the pistol to float around your base and pick up one cheap kill after another. Beyond that, speaking of "weapons that can shoot long distances," that's exactly what the pistol was. I remember 3- and 4-shotting people from one teleporter to the other. At least vanilla Reach (and even TU - anything but ZB) have some bloom to force shot-pacing and minimize players' ability to cross-map you in just a couple of seconds. I do agree that the vehicles (except the wraith) are too fragile in Reach and that reduces the enjoyability of the map somewhat. Crossing into enemy territory in any non-wraith vehicle will usually get your ass killed in a hurry, unless the other team is just bad. But to me that's the only significant problem that Reach has that CE didn't. In a way CE just had the opposite issue - unless you were a godlike sniper or really good at leading with rockets, it was TOO hard to take vehicles down. Warthogs would circle your base for minutes on end, just wrecking your team with impunity while one guy snuck inside to steal the flag. Ghosts were fearless, particularly with that evil freeze effect from their guns.
Screenwatching heaven, I called it. That was fun though. We played CE on 4-way split for months before getting a real LAN game going - some of us (I'm not saying who, but his name rhymes with "Gutbuster") got way too good at anticipating everyone's movements and leaving grenades in just the right places. I used to run around the gulch staring at my own feet just so the other players couldn't tell where I was.
Those are my only memories of the gulch. 4 way split on gulch for HOURS. Even then I preferred every other map lol
I don't really know much about this stuff, but is it possible that taking up this much storage space means framerate lag won't be much of an issue? Cause if so, then it's totally worth it.
Considering the maps themselves, graphics quality update pushing the xbox to the limit, counting forge objects on every map, then counting the forge 3.0 map and the abundance of objects on that alone. I seriously think you nailed it on the head here. I don't think Halo: Reach (put on the hard drive) even with it's DLC amounts to 8GB. I think it's like... 7 at most? I could be wrong. 8GB just for multiplayer? Yeah, I would like to say that framerate lag is going to be gone. If this wasn't a must buy for some people here before, it should be now with that news, or at least when 343i confirm it. I'm sure as hell glad I got my slim with a 250GB hard drive now.
Uh did I miss something? Where have they confirmed forge 3.0? Also Reach with all DLC is 6.6 gig for the game. 1.3 gig for aniversary map pack, 629MB for defiant and 393MB for Noble. My total file for Halo reach including all map varients, game varients video clips and what not is 9.1 GB.
They confirmed Forge was returning months ago. Most recently they said they would be discussing forge details sometime during the summer.