Changes to Halo: Reach Since the Beta

Many of us got a chance to play the Halo: Reach Beta when it was out. To be specific, more than 2.7 million players participated in the Beta, which lasted from May 3 to May 20. When the beta went public, more than a million people played the first day, causing back-end servers to struggle to handle the traffic. While the engineering team overestimated server load, bugs in server clusters caused game uploads to become backed up, slowing matchmaking to a crawl until the underlying issues could be fixed. Bungie has confirmed that the 16 million total hours of play time and large-scale rollout of the game was vital to seeing how Reach would perform.

Now on to the BIG question. What has changed since the Beta?

A lot of the changes have been covered in prior articles. Some changes that have been disclosed recently are:
- Increased run speed
- Increased jump height
- Grenade damage and radius decreased and visual impact toned down
- No more rapid-spam for Armour Lock ability
- Armour Lock ability no longer drains opponent's shield when meleed.
- Shield recharge time slowed
- Encounter time increased

Some of the other changes that have only just been disclosed are:


-Head shot characteristics for certain weapons have been tweaked
-The Elites shields take longer to recharge
-Invasion mode now gives each team a turn as an elite and a Spartan

Also thanks to the just released OXM Report that you can watch on your XBox Dashboard, we have confirmed some interesting details about Forge World. The movement controls of the editing tools are much improved, you have the option to change colors for certain bases and you have full control of team spawn locations.

Lastly the video we include below gives you an awesome preview of 2 new maps, the reimagined Ivory Tower and Zealot which is very similar to Midship from H2.

Enough with me trying to explain it, watch this video for the whole story.