So, I was thinking about how increasing difficulty in past games introduced new enemy ranks and more health and damage. But that’s it. And to me, that’s boring. So here’s my idea. When you increase difficulty, enemies gain new and tactics. They get much smarter. And easy mode elite wouldn’t be very smart. A Legendary Elite Major would be much smarter and actually be much more difficult. This would remove stupid artificial difficulty, and make the game a lot more fun. So, what do you guys think about the idea?
Agreed, it should also be sort of like CE which puts you at equal odds on every difficulty
Didn’t they already do that in Halo 4? I think I remember them stating that and I saw new tactics used by different enemy Promethean units on Legendary compared to my Normal run.
> Didn’t they already do that in Halo 4? I think I remember them stating that and I saw new tactics used by different enemy Promethean units on Legendary compared to my Normal run.
They simply seem to teleport away more to me, but then again its probably because they become so much bulletspungier they just survive longer to teleport away.
Have two levels of ai and two levels of damage scaling.
Easy: dumb and weak
Normal: dumb and strong
Heroic: smart and weak
Legendary: smart and strong
That way you get four distinct difficulties without having to create four legitimate behavior patterns, but you also don’t have elites that strip your shields with two plasma rifle bolts.
> > Didn’t they already do that in Halo 4? I think I remember them stating that and I saw new tactics used by different enemy Promethean units on Legendary compared to my Normal run.
>
> They simply seem to teleport away more to me, but then again its probably because they become so much bulletspungier they just survive longer to teleport away.
Hmm, for me a lot of times they’d use different moves, like this one where the Promethean Knight would rear back and then stomp on the ground, releasing an EMP burst that’d send me flying. Really cool, but I found it annoying that I had to keep my distance and spend all my ammo on taking the -Yoink- out.
Was this in Spartan ops? I’ve never, ever seen them do anything of importance with their legs in campaign.
> Was this in Spartan ops? I’ve never, ever seen them do anything of importance with their legs in campaign.
No, It was in campaign. I remember falling prey to that sneak attack when playing the pelican mission when I was dealing with the first tower.
Somebody made a thread about having a canon like difficulty built into the campaign, and call it “True”. That would be awesome, but hard to make/fight thru.
I agree.
Artificial difficulty such as damage sponges and guns that strip you of your shields in a mere second, are not the way to go about it. It shouldn’t be about the character with the bigger gun. It should be about the character who can actually analyze enemy tactics and weaknesses, and find a way around them. That is a challenge. I’ve never finished a Halo game on Legendary, just because I find the fact that I can get my shield taken down by two Plasma Pistol shots extremely aggravating. Smarter tactics as opposed to bigger guns would make me actually want to go back for one more run.
I liked CE in that on Legendary the AI was smarter than the AI on Easy. That’s what I want to see in H5.
> Have two levels of ai and two levels of damage scaling.
>
> Easy: dumb and weak
> Normal: dumb and strong
> Heroic: smart and weak
> Legendary: smart and strong
>
> That way you get four distinct difficulties without having to create four legitimate behavior patterns, but you also don’t have elites that strip your shields with two plasma rifle bolts.
That’s what’s killing the Halo series.
Damian Isla:
“A white elite fights more aggressively and is tougher than an ordinary red elite, and so is a different character type. In all other respects however, the white elite and the red elite are identical. <mark>It is therefore a waste to have to create an entirely new full set of behavior parameters when we’re really only interested in the fight and vitality parameters.</mark> What we therefore have, is a system which allows us to define only those parameters that are truly distinctive to a character, and then to rely on a ‘parent’ character for the rest.”
This is NOT good.
The AI in Halo 1 did not use this tree system introduced by Halo 2 and are thus truly distinct.
Whereas Halo 2’s AI are often clones, lacking in unique abilities and behavior.
TLDR:
strong, tough, vitality = overdone
fight, abilities = somewhat neglected
behavior, style = neglected
The Halo AI are stagnate. Halo 4 has barely lifted a finger to resolve the neglect laid out in previous Halo games. Prometheans need more abilities. They need more behaviors. They need more variety.
<mark>Also, it’s really disappointing having to put up with dumb AI on easier difficulties. The AI should be smart on all difficulties.</mark>
> > > Didn’t they already do that in Halo 4? I think I remember them stating that and I saw new tactics used by different enemy Promethean units on Legendary compared to my Normal run.
> >
> > They simply seem to teleport away more to me, but then again its probably because they become so much bulletspungier they just survive longer to teleport away.
>
> Hmm, for me a lot of times they’d use different moves, like this one where the Promethean Knight would rear back and then stomp on the ground, releasing an EMP burst that’d send me flying. Really cool, but I found it annoying that I had to keep my distance and spend all my ammo on taking the -Yoink!- out.
That was a Promethean Commander and it’s obscenely overpowered. There’s no depth to it, it just has a ton of spammable offensive ability.
> I agree.
>
> Artificial difficulty such as damage sponges and guns that strip you of your shields in a mere second, are not the way to go about it. It shouldn’t be about the character with the bigger gun. It should be about the character who can actually analyze enemy tactics and weaknesses, and find a way around them. That is a challenge. I’ve never finished a Halo game on Legendary, just because I find the fact that I can get my shield taken down by two Plasma Pistol shots extremely aggravating. Smarter tactics as opposed to bigger guns would make me actually want to go back for one more run.
This.
I’ve done CE Done Pro and CEA LCS (T&R specifically), and I’ve found these far more demanding/challenging than Halo 2/3/ODST/Reach/4. They required me to be really creative!
Heroic “This is the way Halo was meant to be played.”
So basically, the shield drop times and all that on Heroic are in theory canon, and Heroic/Legedary should use this system, but for Legendary increase the smarts on AI.
I agree.
I made a gametype for firefight in Reach called mythic attack.
I made the enemies smarter and more precise.
But I also put the game on legendary and I lowered the health to be similar to multiplayer,
Its basicly smarter enemies who are more precise but with health similar to normal difficulty.
Honestly, making enemies bullet sponges, letting them do more damage, giving them power weapons, it isn’t difficult, it’s frustrating and that really has been the downfall of Legendary Halo 2 and beyond
I would suggest having a difficulty setup similar to Reach, it felt right the difficulty on that particular game. However, I think we should bring in 5 difficulties.
Easy
Normal
Heroic
Legendary
Mythic
Yes, I’m suggesting we make the unofficial Mythic difficulty a fifth difficulty, which would be a blend between Halo 4 and 2 Legendary difficulties.
As a result, we would have a sixth difficulty that was only truely enabled when you go on Mythic difficulty with all skulls active, similar to LASO. This difficulty would be similar to Halo 2’s difficulty. Maybe even more…
Maybe we should call this new unofficial difficulty… Divine?