What's the key to a good Halo game?

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What's the key to a good Halo game, and by implication, a good game of Halo: Reach?

Several elements are key. Here's a few of the ones I think would make a good game. See if you agree!

Noble soldiers

Keyes, Cole, Johnson and even the Arbiter are noble soldiers. They perform certain functions in the games to give them respect and nobility. If Johnson was an immoral wag, Halo fans would be turned off. Instead his noble death at the end of Halo 3 symbolised the strength of one man and thus humanity. Game players love that stuff.

A noble soldier who is also 7 foot tall

Take the above, wrap it with an augmented human who was stolen from his parents and forced to sought out ‘problems between humans without prejudice’. Then throw him on a strange Halo installation with Elites and Floods giving him all they’ve got. Let him fight the good fight in a most heroic fashion and save the day. In a sense. You’ve got a crowd pleaser and an instant Haloween costume favourite.

A great story with Plot Twists

Oohh, we need a key! Get the Key! Ohhh there’s the flood! Look out! Oooh there’s a mystery to solve! Oohh Why are we back on Earth? Oooh it’s a Cliff hanger ending?! Play as the bad guy and arbitrate? Don’t get out of the Warthog? There’s a traitor? It's a trap! Always something going on in the Halo story to keep everything going along, keeping the player’s (and buyer’s) interest. A huge back story, slowly drip feed into the canon ala the Terminals also a key to keeping people interested.

Classic one liner Quotes

I would have been your daddy, but that dog beat me over the fence / Wort Wort Wort!  /  I'm glad that food nipple is waiting for me on the starship cause man, have I worked up a big, grunty, thirst!  / I know what the ladies like / Relax. I'd rather not piss this thing off / Don't they teach you kids to SWEAR in basic anymore? / Please... don't shake the light bulb! / Were it... so easy / You know they let me pick? Did I ever tell you that? Choose whichever Spartan I wanted / I heard their main weakness is bananas! / Do we have any bananas? 

Beautiful scenery:

Unforgettable music.

Dadda da da Dadda daaa etc. You know what I'm talking about, Marty.

Legendary Mode

Lets face it, before Halo: CE there was the setting 'difficult', 'hard' or 'Hammer, please don't hurt 'em'. Legendary mode changed all that. It's now a badge of honour* (and some achievement points) to complete a Halo game on legendary. Points off if you do it with a friend. Unless she's hot.

Guns, Lots of Guns

You know in The Matrix when Neo gets taken to the place with all the guns? And how cool was that? Halo's guns are better.

Mulitplayer

 Lets face it, if Halo CE did not have multiplayer net work, Halo would merely have been a ‘great’ Xbox game, not the game that spawned this generation’s Star Wars. Come for the campaign, stay for the multiplayer. Halo 2 nailed the format and was the reason Xbox Live became a flag ship for Microsoft.

There's way more to the Halo series, these are just the elements I think were key to making the games so good. What worked for you?

*Real world spelling, not Americana. K?

The Space Ships of Halo: Reach

Long Night of Solace

The Long Night of Solace was the Covenant super carrier that destroyed the UNSC Grafton in the Halo Reach game and destroyed  several other UNSC deployments. 

Grafton

Pillar of Autumn

The above Pillar of Autumn was where Halo really first began - as the Master Chief you were woken to fight the Coveant who had found you - so in the context of Reach, the Pillar escapes with Noble 6's help, to which then the Master Chief takes over the protection of Cortana. 

Ardent Prayer

The Ardent Prayer was used as part of the plan to destroy the Supercarrier, Long Night of Solace. You may not know that Ardent Prayer is the setting of the Halo: Reach multiplayer map Zealot, and the Firefight map Corvette.

The Space Ships of Halo: Reach (The below was all speculation before the Reach game was released)


You can't have an epic space battle between two different races without one at least having got to the battle in a space ship. Where the Fall of Reach is concerned, the allied forces of the Covenant had a massive armada of ships and the humans had a few too, with perhaps the Pillar of Autumn being the most famous.


So what are the human ships that might be found in the game of Halo: Reach? Here's some of the contenders:


Three UNSC ships, the destroyer Heracles and the frigates Arabia and the Vostok, were sent to investigate the destruction of the Harvest colony by Covenant forces. Only the Heracles survived the subsequent encounter with the Covenent and made it back to the planet Reach.

During the battle of Reach most of the UNSC space ships in the area were destroyed. Some confirmed KIA, others MIA. The Herodotus was a UNSC Destroyer that notably got carved up by an Energy Projector. The projector is a laser that the Covenant used to glass Reach and many other places including a bit of Earth in the game Halo 3 to prevent the spread of the Flood. 


Other vessels to fall to the Covenant included the Musashi, the Minotaur and the Tharsis. The Frigate Euphrates also was KIA and the Applebee and the Lark also got pwned. They all might rate a mention in the game.


The Longsword Starfighter bomber Knife 26 was also used:

Longsword

During Reach, a Longsword was used by Lieutenant Keyes destroyed a Covenant Supercruiser. The Longsword delivered a Nuclear Warhead to the ship - it was was an unmanned sortie flight controlled by remote piloting.

During the Fall of Reach, Keyes is in command of the ship Iroquois, in which he showed gallantry in destroying 4 Covenant vessels. This is perhaps ironic given Keyes was unwittingly responsible for the Covenant finding Reach as the Iroquois was tagged by a Covenant Spy Probe which gave them the planet's positioning.

Given this ship had a fairly prominent role in the space battle over Reach, it is possible that Iroquois will be mentioned in the Halo: Reach xbox game - it all depends on the timing of the ground mission of the Spartans as it's understood the game is focussed largely on the ground.

Given the sad fact that the Pillar of Autumn is the only known UNSC space ship to have survived the reach episode, and all other being presumed to have been destroyed (stated in Halo: CE, I think?) the fate of the Iroquois is that it is presumed to have been destroyed as well.

Pillar of Autumn

So the Pillar of Autumn is probably the only space ship that we can pretty much guarantee will be in the Halo: Reach game as it was the ship that found the Halo installation after Keyes followed the Cole Protocol and its the ship the the Master Chief eventually ended up on. In the original Halo: CE, you start and end the game in the space ship - so it must surely be going to feature!

Extra for Experts: Aegis Fate

One keen Halo fan has made a Lego version of the Aegis Fate which although having a larger role in the time frame of the Halo 3 game, during Reach it was on duty protecting Earth.

Aegis Fate made of Lego