I gotta admit to poppin’ a little stiffy when Bungie revealed that the Halo Reach campaign would incorporate space combat in the vein of Wing Commander or Colony Wars. I love a good space dogfight and can only hope there’s more of it in the full campaign than the couple of minutes we were shown at the Bungie booth at E3 2010.
Bungie confirmed that up to four players playing the campaign co-op will be able to pilot a Sabre in the game. Unfortunately, you won’t be able to do so in player vs player Matchmaking. Yeah, I’m disappointed too, but Microsoft’s got a hell of a spinoff game idea if they ever wanted to, you know, print some money.
Campaign Space Combat Gameplay Video:
“Firefight 2.0”:
Building on ODST’s Firefight game type, Bungie’s added a lot more customizeability to Reach’s Firefight. Some the things we’ll be able to change are the number of rounds in a game, the types of enemies we face, and the weapon/armor ability loadouts that we take into battle. From there, we can save the customizations and upload them to our Bungie File Shares for others to download.
At first I was concerned that this would fracture the player base, but Firefight’s four player focus on cooperative survival means that each game will be fairly self contained. Each player is going to be dealing with the same conditions in a given play session. I just hope there’s a better way of discovering and playing the best user generated gametypes. I always found it difficult in Halo 3 to find and play custom gametypes that weren’t available in matchmaking buckets.
In the live gameplay video below, you’ll also see the unimaginatively named new weapon, “Target Locator” in action. Frankly, they could have called it “stapler” for all I care. Nuking stuff from orbit never gets old.
Finally, for those who played the beta, “Generator Defense” actually turned out to be a test for Firefight 2.0. I’m glad it turned out to be a gametype tuned for AI enemies. As a player vs player gametype it got very one sided and frustrating at times.