Halo: Reach will be taking a page out of the Modern Warfare and Rainbow Six playbook and will be enabling players to level-up and purchase items through their “Player Investment” system, developed by Luke Smith. The only difference is that Bungie’s Player Investment system will still keep all players on even ground, separate from the level-up system you see in Modern Warfare 2. The Player Investment system is driven by Credits (cR for short) that players will be able to accumulate in both single player and multiplayer games alike. Character customization will not affect player performance, unlike the Rainbow Six: Vegas series, so armor will not have an impact on damage absorption. The customized characters will also appear in cutscenes.

Likewise to the Modern Warfare series, there will be challenges that take place either daily or weekly, depending on what they are. You can find something equal to “perform 5 headshots within one minute” or possibly “stick 5 players with a plasma grenade”, Smith says:

In addition, players will receive “Commendations” for their performance in matches. If a player spends more time using a Sniper Rifle or a Battle Rifle, Commendations will reflect that in the player’s service record. Similarly, players will receive Commendations for driving vehicles.

“Some of [simpler daily challenges] are aggregate actions,” said Smith, “like kill X dudes, help kill X dudes today. Sometimes those dudes we want you to kill are gonna be in multiplayer, [or] they’re going to be in another mode. Sometimes it’s going to say just kill anyone anywhere, we don’t care what you do, just kill people and we’ll reward you for that.”

Meta-game components in multiplayer games are usually a huge hit with fans. They certainly add that “just one more…” factor to your game time and I’ve certainly been there sitting and saying that I needed just five more kills to unlock my new weapon or to get that challenge done.

I’m very excited for Halo: Reach, which is definitely a bit of good news for me since I got burned out on Halo 3 pretty quickly. Don’t get me wrong, it’s a great multiplayer game, but I think Bungie was trying to do too much with something that was definitely not that broken.

The Halo: Reach beta will allow you to fly around on jetpacks while shooting at people on May 3, 2010.

Source: Joystiq and G4