This text originally appeared for 3 seconds on Bungie's Halo 3 fourm. Enjoy
It seems that every time I come on here nowadays I see the same topics. "I want Lockout back!" "HALO 3 MAP SUCKAGE!?!#" "When will the fix that damn melee?" It kinda makes me nostalgic for a long bygone time. I'm sure not a lot of you were here back when Halo 2 came out (I was NeedlerFanPudge, had to change my name to link my Gamertag), but if you think this is bad, you should have seen the posters back then.
"Where are my 3-shots?"
"Auto-Aim Sniper SUCKS"
"I hate duel-wielding!"
The transition period from Halo 1 to Halo 2 was arguably much worse than this current transition. I know I'm not gonna make a lot of friends by saying this, but Halo 1 was a perfect game, and Halo 2 was flawed to say the least. This was for a lot of reasons that I wont get into here, but one of the big reasons was the Bungie team changed drastically from Halo 1 to Halo 2, mostly because Alex went off to make Stubbs the Zombie and took staffers with him. He was the game play goto guy for H1, and without him, Bungie basically made a new game and called it Halo 2. Every weapon was changed, tactics were changed, vehicles were emphasized, and I wont even begin to get into Jar Jarbiter. What I'm basically saying is that fans of the original Halo never really got a sequel to their game, they got a new experience.
Halo 3 is much more akin to a sequel then Halo 2 ever was. It took most of the problems of Halo 2 (SMG spawns, Spray and Pray, Massive Auto Aim, the Slotgun) and fixed them without changing much of the fundamentals. The BR still does 4 shots after all. Bungie focused on making sure the game play for this game was the best that the Halo 2 weapons could make it and I think they succeeded in that respect. Halo 2 fans got a sequel instead of a new game.
I can understand the problems with Halo 3 that a lot of you have. The OS doesn't last as long as it should. Forge is limited in scope to say the least (No plasma rifle on Valhalla...) Bungie promised us that we could keep a huge library of customs and forge variants, then my screen pops up to say that huge library is only 100 items big. Bungie gave us some of the best custom game options in any FPS, but no good way to play them beyond small gatherings of friends. Isolation is one of the worst maps I have every played on an FPS, and I played Doom 1 Deathmatch. But all that is fixable. Bungie will patch the game. Bungie will release new maps. And I have no doubt in my mind that Bungie will give the players Halo 1 and Halo 2 maps as DLC, if anything because of the profit for themselves and M$.
Be thankful that you guys got a sequel. Us Halo 1 fans never got that luxury, and that old M6D can never be replaced.
