Teabag Prevention: Halo Reach Beta – What Has Changed?
Last Friday, Bungie put out new details regarding Halo: Reach. Having played Halo for over eight years, I’ve covered what I feel are the most important changes to the game we all know and love.
Elites
The first thing that should be pointed out are the changes with the Elite player model. As you may or may not know, the Elites, who fight for the Covenant, rival Spartans in the field of battle. In Halo 2 and 3, Elites made their debut in the multiplayer as playable characters. In those two games, they could do everything a Spartan could do and had identical hit-boxes as well as the whole health/shield system. The only thing Elites had the one-up on was the fact that they could growl, and I mean really, we’ve all tried growling like that at some point in our lives.
Since then, our friends have been forced to hunch their backs and bend their legs so that their size wouldn’t interfere with the fairness of battle in multiplayer matches. All of that is about to change.
Starting next month, gamers will get to experience the new and improved Elite. Bungie promises to have this version of the Elite move faster, stand taller, and have better shield technology than the spartan. Still, it’s unclear if these new Elites will be available in all gametypes or not.
Health and Shield System
The health and shield type system will undergo a change as well. Bungie states:
“In previous titles, when you were laying into a shielded opponent and bringing them right to the brink of shieldlessness, any damage you did before the pop would transfer into their underlying health. Hypothetically, let’s say they had 5 points of shield left when you clocked them for 10 points of damage. The result would be the loss of their shields and a 5 point reduction to their heath.
Not anymore.
Now those additional 5 points are absorbed by the shields as they wink out of existence and the underlying health is left unscathed.”
Note that this doesn’t mean Sniper Rifles, Rockets, and Shotguns won’t be one-hit kills, so in all honesty, this is fine by me and only means we need to be more precise and that grenades with spray-and-pray won’t do as well.
Loadouts
Those familiar with the Call of Duty games know all about loadouts. So, does this mean Halo is copying the CoD games? Not at all. Loadouts will not be customizable, but instead will be displayed in a set of loadouts determined on both the gametype and map. If anything, this is more like Star Wars: Battlefront.
Power-ups and Equipment
The Active Camo will also be different come May 3rd. To put it simply, if you were to stand still while being invisible, your camo will both last longer and be more effective as opposed to moving around at quick speeds. The faster you move, the less effective it will become.
The Armor Lock is a new to Halo. Its purpose is to provide the user with invulnerability. Now before you go off saying this will ruin the game, be sure to know that once you activate it, whether it be for one second or ten, your spartan will be in a kneeling down stance kind of stance well, you can look at the pic below. So what does this mean? You won’t be able to move for the duration of your not-dying phase, which might kill a lot of people’s game; but nobody likes people during their invincible phase anyway.
As you can tell, this feature is going to work out great when trying to return a flag, capture a territory, or as you saw in the multiplayer beta, destroying a vehicle that’s trying to splatter you.
Take Evasive Action!!!
Let’s flashback to 2002 when you found out you couldn’t roll as an evasive maneuver like all the bots did in Timesplitters 2. How angry were you? I know I was. Luckily, we’ll all get to take evasive action on May 3rd. By rolling, you’ll be able to shake off locks and anything tracking you. Now, the fact that rolling isn’t capped for every few number of seconds worries me. I would hate to see every Halo game start off with players rolling forward. We already have a game for that and last time I checked there were no loopdeloops in Halo. Also, we already saw Critters.
ZOMG, TEH HALO 1 PISTOL IS BACK!!1!1
Not exactly. Though Bungie explains that the Magnum will take someone out almost twice as fast as the new DMR, expect the Magnum to fly all over the place the faster you shoot it. That’s right, RECOIL, BITCHES.
This has been a Special Teabag Prevention Announcement. For more stuff regarding Halo: Reach, go ahead and check out their weekly update.
Love,
Jake108
