Halo: Reach

[Flawless]

I hope they do the wambulance for Reach like they did for Halo 2. I loved reading the comments from those that got banned.

"Please! I'll destroy my mods. i'll snich on some people that r getting away with mods on matchmaking! Just PLEASE appeal my ban. i want to play matchmaking again. i want to be clean for the arrival of Halo 3! c'mon! i didn't know what i was getting into when i got mods from my friend and from [website censored]! you have to believe me!!!"

[TracerBullet]

I haven't been too this thread since the last vid released and after reading what I've missed I am definently excited for Halo again. Bring on the Beta!

[Flawless]

Community Manager, Brian Jarrad:

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The March podcast with Sage & Carney looks like it's going to land first thing next week. The next round of multiplayer coverage should surface tomorrow morning courtesy of some media partner websites and then Urk will spin his own special version of it for Friday on Bnet. Expect to see some new info dropping in similar fashion over the next few weeks. It'll be a while before any official Bungie videos emerge but April should be a fun month on a few different fronts, hopefully making the wait a little more bearable.

[Steel5]

I believe they said they are talking about the new overall ranking/xp system this week. It will be interesting to see what they are going to do. Everything they have said about this game so far has been brilliant.

[Flawless]

Yep, sounds like we will start to get info on what the mysterious cR system is.

http://twitter.com/BungieTweets

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New Reach multiplayer info coming tomorrow AM. This week's subject: Player Investment

[Flawless]

Player Investment System

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"Whatever your preferred flavor of Halo is, we're gonna find a way to reward you," said Bungie player investment designer (and former games journalist) Luke Smith in a phone interview with me earlier this week. "Whatever you enjoy doing in multiplayer, we're gonna find a way to reward you. Through the Player Investment system, you're going to be building an identity for the first time in a Halo game."

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Player Investment is driven by credits ("cR" for short). Credits are given to gamers simply for playing Halo: Reach, either through rounds of multiplayer or by working through the single-player campaign, but the amounts of credits vary, based on the actions of the player. Different actions will dole out a different amount of credits, but Bungie is being careful to not encourage player actions that would potentially damage the gameplay experience. It does mean that more challenging tasks (say, five headshots in under a minute) would produce more credits. Bungie's currently balancing how credits are doled out, but credits drive the Player Investment experience, both to increase a player's Military Rank (replacing Halo 3's Ranking system) and to purchase customization items in Halo: Reach's "Armory."

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Everything that players gain access to via credits in Halo: Reach are used solely to purchase helmets, shoulders, chests and other accessories that allow Halo: Reach players to create a Spartan who is uniquely them. These items are for visual changes only and do not affect the flow of gameplay.

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"When the cut-scene comes up in campaign, we want you to see you," said Smith. "For instance, that trailer that we showed with the helmet and soldier picking it up, the Noble 6 trailer, that helmet is going to be your helmet. If you're pink and adorned with unicorns, that's how you're going to look. [...] With Reach, this is your story, this is your identity, this is your version of a story that we want you to be a part of."

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In speaking with Bungie, Smith pegged me as someone they are targeting with another new feature called "Challenges." Smith knows me. He understands I'm not the most skilled Halo player and am more likely to finish the single-player, maybe dabble in multiplayer, get frustrated because most players are better than I am and move on. Bungie's hoping Challenges will keep players like myself coming back for more. Challenges come in two forms -- daily and weekly -- and are Bungie-developed obstacles that provide short to medium-length goals to be achieved solo or with groups. As Bungie expects most gamers will tackle Challenges after spending a chunk of time with Halo: Reach, many Challenges will have a notable difficulty curve.

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Smith knows what kind of Halo player I am because we've played Halo together. But it's hard to know exactly what kind of player someone is just by looking at their user profile. An impressively high rank doesn't tell you anything about their play style. Bungie hopes to help alleviate that problem with "Commendations," described as persistent medals that reflect player actions over an extended period of time. For example, if the game tracks that you spend most of your time battling with a sniper rifle, your Commendations show that. The profile can eventually represent a snapshot of your Halo play style and provide a better understanding amongst friends and strangers where player strengths are. Oh, and along the way to earning Commendation medals, you'll of course be earning credits. "I can look at your service record, Patrick," explained Smith, "and see that you have a ton of assists and a ton of progress in your wheelman Commendation, so I know that you like to be a support player, you like to drive vehicles. That's your preferred style. One of the things that we really want to do a better job with Reach is [highlighting] the guys out there who do like their Halo maybe differently than, for instance, I like mine. I like head shots, I like killing people with a sniper rifle, I like all that stuff. But there are guys that we've encountered along the way who just love to drive; they just want to drive people around. We haven't really done a great job of reinforcing that kind of behavior in the past and the Commendation system is one way we're doing that."

[Steel5]

Looks great. The RPGish currency and buying different armors is pretty cool. Hopefully they make it so you have to play for a long time to reach the max level and be able to buy all of the armors.

[Steel5]

http://www.bungie.net/News/content.a...ink=BWU_032610

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Rank - Rank as you knew it in Halo 3, is dead. The concept of Rank has been revamped and divorced entirely from Trueskill (more on that in a few paragraphs) and the concept of EXP (at both the Global and Playlist levels) has also been discarded. In Halo: Reach, Rank is a global, cross-gameplay-mode-encompassing representation of the time you've spent in the game. So whether you're a Campaign-only guy, or a Matchmaking-only girl, or you swing both ways, you're going to be seeing that Rank advance as you keep playing. Rank will increase over time as players earn more Credits. Credits are the lifeblood of the Player Investment system and they can be earned in all of Reach's gameplay modes, through a number of systems. Finishing games and Winning Games in Matchmaking - For the purposes of the upcoming Public Beta, this is going to be a significant source of earning Credits. There are very clear constants in the ways that Credits are earned in Reach across game modes and at the heart of those constants is Time. In the long run, the majority of Credits will be earned from this bucket. Commendations - Commendations are persistent, aggregating awards that will advance through gameplay. When players are progressing Commendations, they're going to be earning Credits - and when Commendations reach milestones, players will earn a bunch of additional Credits. Most importantly, Commendations serve as virtual scouting reports with information on what type of a player someone is, what weapons they use and what tricks they bring to the table. Commendations in matchmaking won't aggregate specific actions - like say, a Sniper Headshot - but instead, a Headshot. The Beta will have a small subset of Commendations at very limited levels of completion. Challenges also contribute to Credit earn (among other things), but there's a question coming up about those later, so I'll save it. Achievements - Spoilers! There will be Achievements in Reach and completing an Achievement will give you some small amount of Credits. And more... This new Rank has jack and squat to do with your Arena rating. The two are wholly unrelated and having an amazing Arena rating won't directly correlate to how many Credits you earn per hour, per day or per minute. Indirectly, however, we fully anticipate an acceptable delta in Credit earn moment to moment between good players who win regularly against a guy whose never played Halo before.

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Credits don't give access to better weapons. If we were going to use them to gate Playlist entry, it'd probably be akin to the newbie Hopper in Halo 3. Done right, earning Credits won't alter the core gameplay at all - we don't want to incentivize behaviors in our sandbox that are at odds with our gameplay philosophies. We don't want to introduce rewards and awards for behaviors that disrupt other's playstyles. The stuff you earn with Credits is purely cosmetic. You can use the right analog stick to move the camera's position so you can check out your gear from all the right angles.

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A race implies a conclusion, by mapping Trueskill to Military Rank in Halo 3, we created a race that the vast majority of the population couldn't finish. It was fun seeing the number next to your name climb, and keep climbing - we recognize that. The unfun part, is when that number stops changing and players are mostly powerless to change it. There are other measuring sticks in Halo: Reach - like the aforementioned Arena, with its Daily Ratings, Season models, resetting Leaderboards. Among other things, the Arena will introduce our competitive population to something they haven't really had before in Halo, the hope that "next month, I can do better."

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While we're not including Challenges in the Public Beta, they are a suite of activities that will help keep the Reach experience fresh by offering new content every day, and targeted, challenging Content each week. When players log into Reach each day, we want them to check out the Challenges menu and see if anything piques their interest. Challenges will arrive in a few different forms: Daily Challenges: Short-session tasks, analogous to Double Double from Halo 3's DLC Achievements, or Kill X players in Matchmaking, or Kill Y Enemies in Campaign, or Help Kill Z enemies in any game mode today. Weekly Challenges: These can be harder, take more time, maybe it will take you a week to accomplish a Weekly Challenge. Maybe sometimes it'll remind you of an Achievement like Annual from Halo 3 - where you and three of your friends will get together for something. Maybe we'll ask you to play a Mission like few have dared...

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In the Public Beta players will customize Helmets, Left Shoulder, Right Shoulder and Chest (alongside Emblems and Colors, of course!) - in the retail game, it's a pretty safe bet that there will be other things on your Spartan to customize.

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Elites will be customizable, but not in the same way as the Spartans. Spartans have their own dedicated massive part of the UI, you'll be able to customize your Elite, but it won't be the same as decking out your Spartan. Your Spartan is your identity in Reach.

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Oh, and in case you haven’t caught on, the plan of record is to keep dumping out truckloads of Reach multiplayer information from here on out. The closer we get to the public release of the Beta in May, the more information you’ll find yourself armed with in the form of articles, podcasts, and yup, videos. We couldn’t bear the thought of sending you out into the wild and woolly new multiplayer world without arming you with the information you need. We don’t want to see you get hurt!