#tons of fun
While we’re on the subject of Reach…
It has been 6 years and I am still salty about the completely unnecessary changes to the timeline, turning the battle of Reach from the Covenant absolutely steamrolling the planet with all their might in the space of a few hours to a month long series of relatively small skirmishes.
Here’s the dates for each mission:
- Winter Contingency: July 24th
- ONI Sword Base: July 26th (skip 2 days)
- Nightfall: August 11th (skip 16 days)
- Tip of the Spear: August 12th
- Long Night of Solace: August 14th (skip 2 days)
- Exodus: August 23rd (skip 9 days)
- New Alexandria: August 23rd to August 26th (skip 3 days)
- The Package: August 29th (skip 3 days)
- The Pillar of Autumn: August 30th
- Lone Wolf: August 30th
What’s the point of turning it into a month long campaign if we only see just over a week’s worth of events?
Some of these time jumps were just downright nonsensical. Why did there have to be SIXTEEN DAYS between the second and third mission? The entire game takes place on one continent, Eposz, so it’s not like they’re having to travel across the galaxy to get from place to place.
Exodus skipping 9 whole days from the end of Long Night of Solace makes no sense either. We’re supposed to believe that Six, after awakening from falling from the Ardent Prayer, just hobbled over to the city of New Alexandria over the course of 9 days without anything going on…
If they’d turned the battle of Reach into a week long event, I could deal with that. It could have had you starting out with small reconnaissance groups of Covenant in the first act of the game as they start setting up shop to gather intel about the planet and the locations of its Forerunner artefacts in order to prepare for the Fleet of Particular Justice’s arrival.
Instead, Bungie contrived that the Covenant somehow managed to cloak a 2900 kilometre long super carrier and multiple corvettes, as well as land a bunch of big-ass transportation spires to a completely open area of desert, when all some soldiers doing training drills would have to do to spot them (as camouflage generates a hell of a lot of heat) is look in its general direction with thermal goggles on. Or, a weather satellite passing over might picked up an anomalous heat signature that looks suspiciously like a big-ass Covenant ship.
We’re supposed to believe that this was deployed to Reach going completely unnoticed for almost a month…
These timeline changes were dumb and added absolutely nothing to what was supposed to be one of the definitive battles of the Human-Covenant war.
And also the Cortana stuff?? Like, they couldn’t have a game with no references to the previous ones so they unnecessarily had a team of Spartan IIIs take Cortana to the Pillar of Autumn which is so wrong it’s painful. And then they tried to justify it later with “Cortana stayed with Halsey in the excavation site and had to be taken back to the Pillar of Autumn” like what the fuck? No. She was IN THE SHIP. Piloting it. For their top secret mission.
