Does anyone else see it like this? From the huge emphasis placed on investing into your Spartan and furthering his/her career, to that sense of exploration the game provided, in many ways Halo Reach strayed from, what was at the time, the core Halo formula established by the original trilogy. At least for me personally, because I played Halo Reach so fracking much, the more I played it and involved myself in the game's community the more Reach began to feel like a living breathing world akin to that of an MMO. It was always fun going into matchmaking and wondering what kind of Spartan you were going to see. Sure, the customization wasn't THAT deep but every time I played Reach I would always encounter a player with a set of armor permutations and emblem set up that no one else had done before. Because of that, every player was visually unique in their own way. Then there were the brilliantly implemented daily and weekly challenges. Thanks to these, I've lost count of how many times I've replayed the campaign and, surprisingly, enjoyed the hell out of every second of it. These were so much fun and the credit bonuses provided the incentive to take on these challenges and play the game in unusual ways you hadn't thought of before. I suppose one could look at these challenges as quests. Assembling a team to tackle that one mission in a certain amount of time or maybe planning your route through a mission so a specific player doesn't die because doing so would void them of their credit bonus. How could you not see these as quests? And then, for those of you who were avid custom game players (which I hope all of you were or else you didn't experience what truly made Halo Reach a spectacular game), there was that sense of exploration in Forge World. Now this took a while as the community content improved and expanded with Reach's age. Sure, anyone could figure out Forge World's layout in minutes but this spectacular map was merely a brilliantly massive canvas for creative players to create their own worlds on. For me, that sense of wonderment and exploration kicked in every time I joined a custom lobby with a map and game variant I had not yet experienced. With Reach there was no shortage of that. The new player-created sights and places you could explore were near-infinite. These were the reasons I loved Halo Reach so much and this is why the concept of Destiny excites me because it seems like it's only going to take what they did differently with Reach and expand upon it even more to give us that game we've always wanted whether we've realized it yet or not. Perhaps Bungie wanted to condition their fans to these sort of gameplay elements to coax them into loving it but eventually wanting something more like a game such as Destiny. After all, these are the devs who practically plastered Destiny right in front of our faces in 2009's Halo 3 ODST with Destiny posters without anyone actually realizing that would be the next big thing. So what are your thoughts on this? Am I the only one who experienced Halo Reach in this sort of way? Can you now see the similarities between the two? tl;dr halo reach set the stage for destiny and we didn't even realize it