Halo: Reach is on the horizon, and any time we can scrounge up some news pertaining to co-op...we jump on it like a Grunt on a crate of plasma grenades. Unfortunately, just about all of our co-op details so far have come from interviews, hints, and speculations. Today is no different, but bringing Reach back to the front page is a treat anyway - seeing Bungie so focused on bringing a true Halo opus to fans gives Co-Optimus hope for a seamlessly epic co-op game.
Shacknews got the scoop on some powerful upgrades to online matchmaking in Reach; so much effort seems to be poured into making multiplayer the best possible experience that one wonders where Bungie gets the time to manage everything else.
Halo 3 skipped the Active Roster feature from Halo 2 in light of the Xbox 360's friends list capabilites. Halo: Reach will bring back the Active Roster in full force, showing what modes your friends are playing, who they're in a party with, and even the score and time remaining.
Coupled with this is the new Queue-Joining, which will allow you to set yourself up to join a friend once a spot opens in their game; this essentially allows you to work on something else in-game - like your campaign - and warps you to your friend's game once they're joinable.
Whether or not these will work for co-op is yet to be determined, but we're holding Bungie to their word that we'll ginally get proper co-op matchmaking. In the meantime, the rest of the article is an interesting read (and features some great new interface screenshots), especially when you get down to where it details new filter options for versus matchmaking. In particular, I like how Halo: Reach will somehow profile players by their use of communications, teamwork, etc. in order to give you the option of whether you want a more social or more competitive experience. Hopefully it works as intended.
Source: Shacknews.com