It’s seriously something that’s become ridiculous. Halo as I’m sure we all know is notorious for it’s moronic friendly AI, pretty much marines act like walking weapon caches unless they are on a turret or on a warthog. And for gods sake it’s ridiculous and needs to end for several reasons.
For starters they have no excuse for bad AI. In fact they haven’t for a while now. Lets look at another game. Half-life 2, maybe you’ve played it on PC or as part of the orange box collection on xbox360. Near the end of the game when you fight with the resistance you get a squad of soldiers. Their AI takes a dump on the marine AI and these guys are from a 2005 video game. They actually get kills, feel like backup, medics heal you, but they aren’t overpowered. They are useful but you still feel powerful, their usefulness doesn’t take that away. Or lets take a look at another Halo game, Spartan Assault! I know it is just a top down game, and good AI is easier, but they got the AI balance right. The friendly AI does damage without doing too much. Seriously the main Halo series should not have it’s AI shown up by a small top down shooter.
Reason number two this needs to end. Their uselessness is negatively impacting the story of the games. Lets take a look at Reach for a second, the campaign story sucked for multiple reasons, one of the biggest is noble team. They are the focal point of the story, it’s their story that we are playing through and I’m given no reason to care about any of them. They game wants us to feel sad when one of them dies but that doesn’t work because most of the deaths when you stop and look at them are moronic and clearly forced, but you also don’t have a reason to care about the characters. They were uninteresting in terms of personality except George and are useless in the game play. The only cool thing i can ever think of them doing is carter destroying the ghost on the beach and that was a scripted event. If they actually helped in combat i definitely would have felt sad when they died, I’d miss the backup they gave. Taking a detour lets look at Halo Wars. Regardless of whether you like the game or not that Spartans in that(Red Team) were 10 times more likable than noble team, and they had even less personality. I like them so much because of how useful they were in gameplay, they felt like an important asset and were completely badass. That made me care about them.
Reason number three. The bad AI is restricting the size of battles we can have. Obviously there might be technical reasons as well like AI limit, I’m not an idiot. But with the current friendly AI in halo, large scale battles just aren’t possible. Because if we had a big battleground with lots of enemy AI and a good amount of friendly AI, the friendly AI would be destroyed so fast the player would be left against impossible odds. I’m not saying a single marine should be as good as a single elite, but they should at least be able to stay alive longer than they currently can and give a bit more damage. This is especially annoying with S4’s, and while they might not have S2 or S3 training, they have ODST training, better armor and augmentations, they should be doing more.
TLDR: GIve us better friendly AI, it makes us like characters more, we could have bigger battles, and you guys have no excuse not to.