(Here's a re-posting of my original comment, which got lost when you had technical problems.)

Hey these video podcasts are getting pretty slick. Compliments to Blackstar on the the whizzy 'Titles & Effects'.

Can't say I'm particularly looking forward to the space combat shown here in campaign. It could turn out to be good fun of course, but it also means less soldiering on foot, which is the main thing I'm interested in. More generally, I wonder how vehicle heavy the campaign is going to be. I'd like to be able to tackle things on foot as much as possible, but in H3 that was really going against the flow and I suspect Reach will be similar. Also, at the start of the level seen here, I feel a bit dismayed at how few enemies there are to get your teeth into. Looked like just a light smattering really. What I want is plenty of intense encounters against masses of enemy.

The customization options in Firefight are highly welcome. I feel that ODST's Firefight was needlessly limited by being so hardwired. In particular I strongly disliked the way it was based on skulls. I forget the details now - haven't played it for ages - but I didn't like having various skull effects foisted on me from round to round, and that was a big part of why I never got deeply into Firefight. When I got to a skull I didn't like, I'd lose interest. It seemed very strange to me that Bungie did things that way, rather than doing something more natural like letting you choose what skulls you want to play with (like in Campaign), and instead racheting up the difficulty by varying the numbers and types of enemies. Reach looks like it's going to be far more satisfactory, with the way it lets you design how things work.

Except, will there be an option to turn off the display of points and/or the voice announcing kills all the time? I have no interest in points and I don't want some announcer telling me "Triple kill!" or whatever. I'd like things to feel like a real battle I can believe in, undiluted by the arcade-like elements just mentioned (and hence with objectives that have nothing to do with points). I'm not sure what options are available that might be relevant there. Anyone know anything about that?

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