Halo: Reach is a 2010 first-person shooter video game that was developed by Bungie and published by Microsoft Game Studios, initially released for the Xbox 360. The sixth part in the Halo series and directly before Halo: Combat Evolved, Reach came out all around the world in September 2010. This game takes place in the year 2552, where humans are fighting against an alien group called the Covenant, which wants to wipe out humanity completely. In this game, players control Noble Six, a member of an elite team of soldiers known as Noble Team, who is trying to defend the human world known as Reach from being attacked by the Covenant.
After releasing Halo 3 in 2007, Bungie split into teams to create two new games, Halo 3: ODST and Reach. The team wanted to make a game that was connected to the first Halo trilogy but wasn’t tied to its storylines from before. They chose a human world that would be destroyed as the setting for their new game. By focusing on this setting, they made it a character in itself, rather than just a backdrop. The people who normally composed music for Halo returned, Martin O’Donnell and Michael Salvatori, to make sure the sound of Reach was dark and serious, matching the story.
Reach was first introduced at E3 2009 in Los Angeles, where a sneak peek at the game’s in-game footage was shared with attendees. Later that year, at the 2009 Spike Video Game Awards, a more detailed look at Reach was shown to the public. In May 2010, players who had bought ODST were given the chance to try out a beta version of Reach online. This allowed Bungie to collect feedback from players and make improvements before releasing the game in its final form. Microsoft invested a lot of money in promoting Reach, creating high-quality advertisements, toys, and other interactive content that showcased the game’s exciting features.
The new game made a huge amount of money on its first day, breaking a record for the entire franchise. It was very popular everywhere except in some areas where it didn’t sell as well; still, it moved more than three million units during its first month in North America. Most people who reviewed the game thought it was great and that it was probably one of the best Halo games ever made. The critics liked how the gameplay, graphics, and sound were all good, but they didn’t like the story or characters as much. This was Bungie’s last time making a Halo game; later, Microsoft took over and made new Halo games with a different group called 343 Industries. In December 2019, this first game came out again as part of a bigger package for Xbox owners, and it could be played on Windows computers too.
Gameplay involves the player character shooting an assault rifle at Covenant forces surrounded by Noble Team members.
Halo: Reach is a first-person shooter where players mostly see the game from their own perspective, but occasionally switch to a third-person view using specific items and vehicles. This type of gameplay is similar to Halo: Combat Evolved rather than later games in the series.
The player’s display shows what equipment, abilities, and health the player has; it also includes a map showing directions and an indicator that tracks moving allies, enemies, and vehicles within a certain range. The display changes when the player operates vehicles.
In the game’s story mode, players can play alone or work together as Noble Six, a highly trained soldier fighting against an alien group called the Covenant. The Covenant come in eight different types with special jobs and levels for each type; for instance, Elites are leaders of their groups, while Grunts are not very smart and only become threats when they’re in big numbers. When playing the game, players have a special shield that protects them from getting hurt by guns, explosions, or other impacts. If the shield runs out, the player loses health points. When the player’s health gets to zero, the character dies and the game starts over from a saved point. Players can get more health by picking up special packs of health throughout the levels in the Reach game. The enemies in the game are usually found in big open spaces with plenty of guns and places to hide, as well as good spots to attack safely. A new feature in the Halo series is dogfighting scenes set in space.
In Halo: Reach, players can use new equipment that serves different purposes for combat. In Halo 3, there were special power-ups that offered temporary benefits like extra strength or defense. In Reach, this system changed to something called “armor abilities” that are always available and don’t run out. These abilities let players do cool things like move faster, fly through the air, become harder to see, create a fake version of themselves to distract enemies, build a protective shield around friends, and make it hard for enemies to hit them. When this special ability stops working, the player gets hurt but is protected from more damage for a little while longer. If a vehicle crashes into someone who was wearing this protection, the vehicle will get really badly damaged. When playing as an Elite (a type of alien enemy), players also have an extra ability that lets them quickly move around in any direction and avoid getting hit.
Multiplayer Reach offers multiplayer gameplay through various connections on a single Xbox console, local area networks (System Link), and the Xbox Live service until servers were closed in January 2022. The game includes standard multiplayer modes such as “Slayer” and Capture The Flag, along with new types of games that are part of the series. In “Headhunter,” when players lose their lives, they drop skulls that other players can collect and put them at designated spots to earn points. When a player dies, all the skulls they accumulated disappear. In “Stockpile,” teams compete to gather neutral flags and hold onto them for as long as possible in capture points each minute to get points. “Generator Defense” puts three human soldiers against three enemy soldiers called Elites. The goal of the Elites is to destroy three generators while the humans protect the facility. After every round, players swap roles. In “Invasion,” two teams of six players are divided into three squads of two on each team. This game type pits Spartans against Elites; the Elites try to control territories to disable a shield protecting a navigation core. Once the shield is disabled, they must transport the core to a dropship; the humans have to stop them from doing that. As the game progresses, new vehicles and areas of the map become accessible. The gameplay for Spartans and Elites is similar but not the same. Elites are bigger, move faster, and can restore their health completely. Depending on the game mode players choose, Spartans and Elites have different default equipment. However, if playing locally, players can customize both Spartan and Elite loadouts to whatever they want in the settings menu.
Alongside other multiplayer games, there’s “firefight” mode where players have to fight against tougher waves of enemies in a game of survival. Players can adjust their settings for firefight, such as how many and what kinds of enemies they’ll face. In this type of gameplay, one player controls an Elite team that tries to stop another player-controlled Spartan team from scoring points. There are also different game modes available in firefight, like defending a generator.
Reach comes with another tool called “Forge”, which is a level editor. Players can change or add things to their multiplayer maps, including an empty map called “Forge World”. They can also adjust spawn points, weapons, and items. Objects in Forge can be made invisible or appear at specific angles. There’s also a feature called the “theater” where players can watch recordings of past games and take pictures or record videos for themselves. Another thing that players can do is share files with others, including their saved movies, game screenshots, custom maps, and special gameplay modes.
Setting and characters
Reach takes place in the future in a science fiction world. It happens in the year 2552, right before the events of Halo: Combat Evolved and during the story of Halo: The Fall of Reach. Although it’s supposed to be set in a specific time and place, some parts don’t make sense because it doesn’t follow the other stories. In this game, humans are fighting against groups of aliens called the Covenant, who are trying to take over their homes in space. By now, almost all of humanity’s colonies have been taken over. Reach is like an Earth with lots of people and a big military base that helps keep everyone safe. The colony has more than 700 million civilians living there too.
The game’s storyline centers around “Noble Team”, a top-secret UNSC special operations unit made up of super-soldiers known as Spartans. Players take on the role of a new recruit to the team, designated as Noble Six. The leader of Noble Team is Carter-A259, a tough and straightforward soldier who doesn’t mess around. His trusted second-in-command, Catherine-B320, has a prosthetic arm; together with Carter, they are the only remaining original members of the team left. Other current team members include Jorge-052, an expert in heavy weapons, Emile-A239, who specializes in close combat, and Jun-A266, a skilled marksman.
As Noble Six joined the rest of Noble Team, they soon found themselves being prepared for an urgent mission just before they set out to investigate why a key communications relay had stopped working. While on the way, they discovered that Covenant forces had invaded the planet Reach. The team was quickly moved to defend Sword Base, a top-secret facility owned by the Office of Naval Intelligence (ONI), from an unexpected attack by the Covenant. After successfully fending off the assault, Noble Team met Catherine Halsey, a brilliant scientist who created the Spartan program and designed their powerful MJOLNIR armor. Halsey questioned Noble about their mission at the relay, suspecting that the Covenant might have been trying to steal highly sensitive ONI information from the site.
Jun and Six find out that an enemy invasion force has assembled on the planet. The next morning, the UNSC sends in a strong attack to stop the invasion. Noble Team helps lead the assault, focusing their efforts on important artillery stations and command centers. Meanwhile, a Covenant supercarrier appears out of nowhere; since it didn’t have any conventional weapons to destroy the ship, Jorge and Six came up with a secret plan. They secretly smuggle a special engine into a Covenant spaceship that was heading to refuel at the carrier. Since the timer on the engine had stopped working, Jorge decides to drop Six off and stay behind to manually detonate the engine and blow up the carrier. Just as things were getting under control, another enemy fleet arrives soon after.
Back on the surface, Six helped with city defense and evacuating civilians, but then Kat was shot by a Covenant sniper. Noble Team was sent back underground for a mission to destroy everything in their path at Sword Base, but Halsey changed plans and took them to an ancient alien relic she thought could help win the war against the Covenant. The team was told to take control of a special computer called Cortana and her information about the artifact to the UNSC ship Pillar of Autumn, which was docked in a shipyard. Meanwhile, Jun decided to leave the team to escort Halsey to safety.
As they headed to the Pillar of Autumn, Carter got hurt and gave his life to let Six and Emile reach the shipyard safely. Emile used a big gun to protect Autumn from its enemies while Six handed Cortana over to Captain Jacob Keyes. When Emile died, Six stayed behind to operate the gun and make sure they could escape. With the help of Cortana, who was using information from an alien object, the Autumn flew into a huge ringworld around Halo, which led to the events of Halo: Combat Evolved. In a special scene after the credits, Six fought bravely against overwhelming enemies in a final stand. Many years later, in 2589, Six’s helmet lay alone on the grassy plains of a now-restored planet called Reach. A story by Halsey honored Noble Team, who had helped humanity win the war against the Covenant.
Development Reach’s E3 announcement details
Game reveals and hints were shared at the E3 event on June 1, 2009, where a trailer was shown to attendees at Microsoft’s Electronic Entertainment Expo conference. A statement released by the company announced that fans would get a chance to play the game’s open multiplayer mode in 2010. Halo: Reach is Bungie’s last game in the popular Halo series; after its release, control of future Halo titles was handed over to Microsoft subsidiary 343 Industries starting with their remake of Halo: Combat Evolved Anniversary in 2011.
A video trailer that was released on March 3, 2010, showed off the game’s multiplayer part. At E3 2010, Bungie shared some details about the game’s main story and another mode called Firefight. By June 23, the developers had reached a point where they could say their game was ready for the public, known as “zero bugs.” This meant that instead of fixing problems with artificial intelligence or other things that didn’t work properly, they would remove them from the game because it took too long to fix them. Bungie gave players a list of all the rewards they could earn in the game on July 30, and then finished adding more content called Reach between late July and early August 2010.
After Halo 3, Bungie created an internal team to work on a game planned by Peter Jackson, but this project was eventually canceled and the team shifted focus to a standalone expansion called Halo 3: ODST while another team led by Marcus Lehto and Christian Allen worked on Reach. This new team explored various ideas for the game before settling on a story that took place on the planet Reach during a crucial moment in the war. “Reach is an ideal setting because it’s a richly detailed world with great storytelling potential,” said Lehto. “We realized we had plenty of exciting elements to build a compelling narrative around.” With Bungie no longer tied to continuing the storylines from the Halo trilogy, they used Reach as an opportunity to introduce new characters and environments. Since the game ends with the destruction of the planet Reach, Bungie aimed to leave players feeling accomplished and successful. “The biggest challenge is ensuring that players believe their actions are correct until the end,” said Lehto.
Lehto said that creating a character-driven story was tough because players learned more about characters as they played, but Spartan characters also had to act smartly. The Halo games usually featured silent protagonists in gameplay sequences. Community manager Brian Jarrard wanted to let players choose between male and female Noble Six, so the cinematics and dialogue would change accordingly. After the credits, the game sequence caused a lot of discussion; some at Bungie thought it should be removed. Executive producer Joe Tung said, “the part about surviving felt great to us. We talked about different ways the ending could happen and how it could look in the movie version.” The developers originally planned to use existing Halo 3 assets for Reach and just update them. For Halo 3, Bungie had to cut parts of the game because the old engine couldn’t handle it, but they wanted Reach to look better than its predecessors. “The more we looked at this, the more we realized we could make each asset from scratch with much higher quality without spending too much extra time,” said Scott Shepherd, a 3D artist at Bungie. The game’s prequel idea gave the art team a chance to redesign important things like enemies, weapons, and parts of the series. Artists looked at old concept art for Halo: Combat Evolved for inspiration, including the shape of redesigned Covenant Grunts, which came from an idea Shi Kai Wang made ten years ago.
The people who made the game got a new engine, which helps with showing things and most of the gameplay. Bungie hired someone who’s an expert at taking movements from actors to make character animations look more real. Instead of making the animation studio from scratch, they built it themselves because now they could do something with the motion capture data right after recording it. The team wanted to make the game more fun for players by improving how computer-controlled enemies fight. They didn’t just put scripts together to control enemy battles; instead, they made a bigger area where players could explore and play in a different way.
Martin O’Donnell composed music for Reach with additional work by Michael Salvatori. Since Reach’s storyline focuses on a planet already known in the Halo universe, O’Donnell created “softer and more intense” music to match its emotional tone. The first piece he wrote for Reach was showcased at the game’s world premiere and served as the starting point for further themes. Before working on Reach, O’Donnell had started composing for another project, ODST, but didn’t begin creating music until August 2009. He collaborated with past Halo composers Salvatori, C. Paul Johnson, and Stan LePard on Reach. Unlike ODST, which divided musical tasks between contributors, Reach featured a different approach where the team shared O’Donnell’s initial ideas and built upon them. When asked about his process, O’Donnell explained that he created “basic starting points” for musical concepts and let other composers take over if they were inspired by those ideas. The resulting works-in-progress either got refined by O’Donnell or returned to the composer who started working on them in the first place.
In previous Halo games, music sections often overlapped and changed based on player actions. However, Reach took it to the next level with its more advanced interactive audio system. Unlike other games in the series, which only had two layers of instrumentation, Reach could combine up to seven different sounds at once. The game’s sound effect system also got a major upgrade. Every object or character that was interacted with produced two distinct sounds, depending on what was happening. For example, when a Warthog vehicle crashed into an armored Covenant soldier, it made a loud crunching noise that sounded like the metal of the two objects hitting each other. This interaction between objects and terrain was shown in a special area of the game called “the stripey room,” which had a unique layout with alternating colors on everything, just like O’Donnell’s band name.
The Reach multiplayer beta was available only to owners of Halo 3: ODST. By November 2009, more than three million copies of ODST had been sold. Bungie predicted that around two to three million players would join the Reach beta test, compared to about 800,000 who participated in the trial for Halo 3. Since they had a tight schedule, Bungie decided to release a six-week-old beta version, which was still dealing with problems that were already fixed in newer versions. Despite concerns about how this might affect their game’s image, Jarrard acknowledged that there wasn’t much choice but to send it out as it was and let players know about the fixes.
Over 2.7 million players joined in on the beta test, which lasted from May 3 to May 20. The game was tested by a small team at Bungie and Microsoft before being made available to the public. When it went live, more than one million people started playing right away, causing a big load on the servers that struggled to keep up. Although the engineers had thought they knew how many players would join, problems with the server clusters caused issues with uploading game data, slowing down matchmaking until these problems were fixed. Jarrard said that the fact that so many people played for over 16 million hours and the large rollout of the beta was important in seeing how well the new Reach game would work.
Bungie used the beta testing phase to identify and fix problems with their game. “We relied on our fans for feedback,” said Lehto, noting that having many players test the game allowed them to gather helpful information to improve it. The game tracked statistics such as how fast people uploaded and matched, as well as what they liked about the game. However, sorting out the good and bad comments from emails, notes, and online forums proved challenging. During the beta, Bungie’s community forum received over 360,000 posts from players. To manage all the feedback, Bungie created separate threads for specific issues, making it easier for fans to provide suggestions. “We wanted to give people a way to share their thoughts and make things simpler for us,” said Jarrard. However, not all feedback matched up with the data collected during gameplay. Chris Carney, the lead designer of multiplayer mode, remembered some players being unhappy with a particular gun early on. By the end of the beta, that gun was actually causing most kills to come from new weapons added to the game. To refine the game and remove any unknown variables, Bungie held special test matches.
On September 14, 2010, Release Reach was launched in 25 countries around the world. Many stores organized special midnight events for fans to attend; these events were also sponsored by companies in cities like London, Oslo, Stockholm, and New York. Three different versions of the game were sold. The basic version included the game itself along with its instruction manual. A limited edition was available which came with a cool bag that contained story details, special packaging, and an exclusive set of in-game armor called Elite. The “legendary edition” had all the things from the limited edition plus some extra features like developer commentary on the cutscenes, different packaging, a special in-game effect for the Spartan helmet, and a huge 10-pound statue made by McFarlane Toys. Players who bought the game first when it was released (either in-store right at launch time or pre-ordered) got an in-game Spartan “recon” helmet to customize; players in other countries had to pre-order their copy to get this cool accessory. When purchased, the limited edition of Reach came with a special Xbox 360 Slim console that played Halo-themed sounds and looked like it was made for the game, along with two controllers.
Microsoft added Reach to its Xbox Live Marketplace for download on August 12, 2010, with a price tag of 99,999 Microsoft Points (about $1,250). A company representative said the game was being made available for review purposes only and that it wasn’t planned to be released through Games on Demand. However, just four days later, hackers successfully broke into the system, downloaded the game, and shared it with others online. Microsoft announced they were investigating this incident. This wasn’t an isolated issue – similar games like Halo 2, Halo 3, and ODST were also leaked before their official release dates. To give fans a taste of what was to come, Bungie released a demo on May 24, 2011, featuring one player level from the game’s story mode, a multiplayer competitive map, and a cooperative firefight mission.
The video game Halo: Reach was made available on computers with Windows and gaming consoles called Xbox One as part of a special collection called Halo: The Master Chief Collection on December 3, 2019.
The team made a big decision about how to market Reach, deciding to go for something much bigger and better than ODST. Microsoft gave Reach an enormous marketing budget that was way more expensive than what Halo 3 had at the time, $6.5 million to be exact. Instead of trying to outdo Halo 3’s marketing efforts, the marketers focused on connecting with consumers through common themes that everyone could relate to. Two Interpublic Group of Companies’ agencies, AgencyTwoFifteen and AKQA, worked together to develop strategy and video content for the campaign, as well as interactive elements. They even helped work on Halo 3’s marketing. The advertisers had a simple goal: remind people about Reach and focus on its heroes, rather than just talking about the bad guys. The advertising started in April 2010 with a live-action short called “Birth of a Spartan.” Later, a series of online videos began showing what life was like for ordinary people on Reach before they were attacked by the Covenant. More TV spots followed soon after, and another short called “Deliver Hope” wrapped up the campaign in late August. To promote things, Microsoft created an interactive light sculpture that let users help design it online. If enough people contributed their ideas, a special monument would appear on screen – but only if more people kept contributing! Reach’s marketing won lots of awards from other companies in the industry, including thirteen medals from the MI6 Game Marketing Conference Awards.
A number of tie-in items were released. The company responsible for producing toys for Halo 3 also launched a collection of miniature figurines. Another set of action figures was made by a popular toy label affiliated with Square Enix.
The video game ‘Halo: Reach’ made a huge amount of money on its first day, breaking the record for the franchise’s sales. This impressive number made analysts think that other popular games in the holiday season could turn around the slow video game industry in 2010. In just sixteen days, the game sold over $350 million worth of merchandise. The new game was launched at the top of the charts on Xbox 360 and many other platforms, showing its strong popularity worldwide. According to figures from a company called NPD Group, the game sold around 3.3 million copies in North America, making it one of the best-selling games for its console generation (Xbox 360, PS3, Wii) during its first month. This made ‘Halo: Reach’ the third-best-selling game of 2010 in North America, followed by other popular titles like ‘Call of Duty: Black Ops’ and ‘Madden NFL 11’. By September 2011, it had sold a total of 4.7 million copies worldwide.
In the United Kingdom, Reach made its debut at number five on the charts, beating Halo 3 and ODST by a significant margin. It sold more copies than these games in their first week. In the UK, Reach stayed in the top spot for two weeks before being replaced by F1 2010. The game continued to do well in North America, keeping its position at the top. However, in Japan, Reach started off strong by selling a lot of copies – almost 45,000 units in its first week. But it didn’t last long and eventually fell behind other Halo games like ODST and even Halo 3. In its second week, Reach dropped out of the top 20 best-selling titles altogether.
Additional downloadable content can be downloaded from Reach supports extra content that can be added to the game. Bungie released the first package of this additional content called the “Noble Map Pack” and it was made available for download on November 30, 2010. This pack contains three different maps, which are special because they were not created based on any levels from the Reach campaign. Microsoft teamed up with a company called Certain Affinity, who had previously worked on some of the maps from Halo 2, to create another package of additional content called the “Defiant Map Pack”. This second package was made available for download on March 15, 2011.
343 Industries released an “update” for Halo: Reach that changed how some parts of the game worked, like how bullets spread out when fired and how much damage was done with close combat attacks. This update also included special playlists for playing Halo: Combat Evolved Anniversary on the Xbox console. People who bought the anniversary edition got a special code to download seven multiplayer maps directly into Reach. These maps were also available for purchase from the Xbox Live online store.
Halo: Reach got great reviews when it came out. On websites like Metacritic, which collects opinions from critics, Halo: Reach scored an average of 91 out of 100. Many experts thought that Halo: Reach was the best game in the series so far. Reviewers said that not many changes were made to the gameplay style of the game, but still managed to make it feel fresh and exciting. Some reviewers even praised the fact that new players could easily pick up where old fans left off.
Experts like Nguyen and Tom Hoggins of The Daily Telegraph said that Reach took the most exciting parts from previous games and put them all together in Bungie’s last game. Hoggins thought this approach made Reach an exhilarating conclusion to 10 years of work, but also that it might not win over people who weren’t already fans of Halo. Kevin Lynch from The Daily Mirror gave credit to Bungie for introducing new features like jetpacks without making the game too hard to learn or affecting its balance.
Brudvig liked how Halo: Reach avoided the same old boring levels and confusing storylines found in previous games. Some reviewers, like Chris Watters from GameSpot, thought the game’s friendly AI characters weren’t as smart or interesting as their bad guys, especially when you’re driving around. Steve Boxer from The Guardian said that Reach’s storyline made older Halo games feel like they were written by beginners. Meanwhile, another reviewer felt that Reach did a better job of having clear and understandable storylines compared to some other Halo titles, which had gotten messy with weird sci-fi jargon. Despite this, he still thought the game had some problems, such as characters you didn’t really get to know well: “I often forgot about Emile and his team because I rarely saw them.” Gus Mastrapa from Wired said that Noble Team was pretty forgettable compared to other teams in games like Aliens, where the characters were more interesting. The game also had some small mistakes with explaining what was happening, but this reviewer thought these issues weren’t too big of a deal. On the other hand, Charlie Baratt from GamesRadar liked Reach’s story better than another Halo game, but didn’t think it was as important or exciting as the game promised. Another reviewer said that while Bungie still wasn’t perfect at creating stories, Reach did a great job setting up exciting and dramatic scenes one after another.
Ben Kuchera from Ars Technica loved the multiplayer part of Reach because it had so many different ways to play. He said that no matter how you choose to play, you’ll always find something fun about it. Other reviewers agreed that Reach offered many cool options for customizing your gameplay experience. Some liked the idea of making profiles to pick teammates who are easy to get along with, but others weren’t sure if it really made a big difference. A review from G4 said that Reach’s Forge World was much bigger and more impressive than Halo 3’s version. One writer thought that having so many different multiplayer options would keep players playing the game for a long time.
Experts thought the audio-visual parts were a big step forward from Halo 3 and ODST. A reviewer from the New Zealand Herald named Troy Rawhiti-Forbes said that with the improved graphics and animation, “Reach looks like something you’d see in a big-budget movie.” Another magazine, Official Xbox Magazine, noticed better graphics in other games but praised Reach for its beautiful visuals and exciting gameplay, saying that adding wildlife and civilians made it feel like an entire planet was under attack. A critic from IGN UK liked the new music by O’Donnell, as well as the updated sound effects, describing the guns as feeling very powerful.
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