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| "Difficulty Balance in Halo" Redux. *long-ish* | |
| Posted By: Gravemind <kuukan_no_kage@yahoo.com> | Date: 3/25/12 7:10 p.m. |
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A couple of months ago we had a discussion about difficulty balancing in Halo. When I added my two cents to the discussion, I brought up the fact that my first playthrough of Reach, which was on Legendary, took me 14 hours and I died 300 times. Using that as a point to support my argument was criticized because, well, it was my first playthrough and therefore I was going in blind. Therefore, I decided to play through each of the five Halo games on Legendary, recording data by hand in the case of Halo 1 & 2. Of course, as I only have one playthrough each, that means a sample size of one to assess each game's relative difficulty, but as it took me some 40 hours to play through the whole series (and I can't be sure which past playthroughs of Halo 3, ODST, & Reach that I have recorded were for "serious" playthroughs), it'll have to do. Also, in the case of Halo 2 & 3, I hadn't played either of them in a while (not since Reach came out), so "ring rust" may have played a factor in the numbers recorded. I played each game as I normally do, with no shortcuts taken, though in Halo 2 I did skip the boss battle with Regret, which I've only been able to beat once on Legendary out of the maybe half a dozen H2 Legendary runs I've made. Here are the results: TOTAL DEATHS Halo 2: 124
TOTAL COMPLETION TIME Halo 2: 650 min
AVERAGE STAGE COMPLETION TIME* Halo 1: 61.5 min
*Note: For Halo 2, I use the stage count as listed in the stage select menu; the parenthetical value is for if we count each "super-stage" (New Mombasa, the gas mine, etc.) as a whole stage instead of a set of two levels linked by location and theme/objective, in which case there's seven levels instead of thirteen. For ODST, all passes through Mombasa Streets are not counted separately. For Reach, Lone Wolf is not counted. DEATHS PER STAGE* Halo 3: 11.33
*Note: See prior note. DEATHS PER HOUR Halo 3: 15.85
I have all the data for individual levels if anybody is interested, but they will be omitted from this post for the sake of getting this thing done. Anyway, here's my reassessment of each game's difficulty, based on my personal experience as well as the data I gathered from the recent playthroughs. Halo 1: Taken as a whole, the original game is not a cakewalk by any means, though the difficulty jumps around quite a bit from stage to stage. Pillar of Autumn and 343 Guilty Spark were pretty freakin' easy, whereas Truth & Reconciliation was the second hardest level in the series in terms of number of deaths after The Ark. Overall, it still provides me with a decent challenge. In terms of total deaths, I died more in Halo 1 than in Reach, and they're both very close in terms of average deaths per stage and frequency of deaths. Yet Combat Evolved was able to provide a challenge without having to resort to overpowered enemies or cheap tricks. It also has some obvious difficulty-mitigating factors in play: the lack of mid- to long-rage weapons for the Covenant, the enemy AI not reacting to the player past a certain range or to certain others threats (they never seem to notice grenades unless they actually see them), Covenant-controlled vehicles not being too terrible of a threat, and having access to invulnerable UNSC vehicles. Instead, the game relies on excellent encounter and stage design, AI that despite having a few faults is still overall pretty damn good for a decade-old game, the lack of availability of certain weapons on certain stages (no pistol or rockets on T&R), and not having any for of regenerating health. Halo 2: Seven words: Sniper Jackals and the Prophet of Regret. I died more in Halo 2 than in any of the other games, and I would have died a whole lot more if I had actually attempted to beat Flunky Boss extraordinaire Regret (Sesa 'Refumee and Tartarus were much easier). Even excluding that battle, Halo 2 is a bitch and a half on Legendary. While it took me about the same about of time to beat both Halo 1 and Halo 2, I still managed to die about fifty percent more frequently. Sniper Jackals were probably a plurality of my death (I did not record causes of death, only the number of deaths), which is no surprise considering they are the nastiest, most notorious "Demonic Spiders" in Halo's history, but the other major contributor is simply the grossly overpowered enemies. Elites can kill with a single melee or a half-second burst of plasma fire, Brutes can kill with a single Brute shot grenade, and by my count five Carbine rounds will flat out kill you even if you're at full shields & health. It's crazy. The fact that the levels are generally far more constrained and linear than those in any other Halo game. The game forces you to play in an extremely conservative manner and with a very narrow set of tactics. Should you not have access to a power weapon or a large number of allies, the noob combo is absolutely essential for dealing with enemy Elites, while dealing with Brutes requires dual Needlers or a Carbine (or BR if you can find one in those later stages). We all know that extreme caution, precision weapons, and a lot of luck are needed when dealing with sniper Jackals. Playing stealthy as the Arbiter whenever possible is a must as well. Equipping allies with power weapons also helps a a lot on Legendary, assuming they stay alive long enough for you to upgrade them so. Unless you know these tricks, Legendary can be impossible. For example, I never even beat Cairo Station until I learned from playing multiplayer online exactly how effective the noob combo was. For all these reasons, Halo 2 is clearly the most difficult of the Halo games, and it attains that distinction mostly through cheapness and "fake difficulty." Halo 3: Not as incredibly cheap as Halo 2 and devoid of any tedious boss battles, Halo 3 had its fair share of aggravation. Interestingly, while my total deaths was less than in Halo 2, I died much more frequently, with an average life of less than 4 minutes vs over 5 minutes in H2. Halo 3 moves at a much faster clip, being much shorter than its predecessors yet packing just as much action into that smaller space of time. The game starts with what is undoubtedly the hardest opening level in the series. Sierra 117 is narrow, linear, and packed to the gills with enemies, including multiple Jackal snipers — which, while toned down from Halo 2, will still kill you in one shot if they hit you — and a bunch of Brutes, all of which are Captains who are usually armed with Brute shots. By far the biggest causes of deaths were enemy vehicles, infantry armed with heavy weapons like Brute shots and fuel rod guns, and sniper Jackals. The main reason the game is as difficult as it is is the massive damage output of the enemies; they inflict the same amount of damage as they did in Halo 2. The fact that they typically come in very large groups doesn't help. You can fight a dozen or more Brutes at a time, whereas Elites typically only showed up three or four at a time at most. Another issue is that due to the vehicle damage system, being in a vehicle isn't exactly safer than hoofing it. A Ghost or Banshee will kill you just as quickly as if you were on foot, except that when you're in a vehicle you're a bigger target. A single Grunt isn't much of a threat, but in Halo 3 if he gets in a Ghost he becomes a freakin' Demonic Spider. A good chunk of my deaths were during vehicular combat sequences. However, there are some big difficulty-mitigating factors in play, namely AI that isn't all that great by Halo standards and the Brutes' powered armor not regenerating once destroyed. That the difficulty comes almost purely from overpowered enemies is more than a bit of flaw IMO. Of all the games, this one deserves another playthrough for reassessment. Dying 124 times in Halo 2 even after skipping the Regret fight is no surprise, but over 100 deaths in Halo 3 was a bit of surprise as I don't remember it being that difficult, and it might be because I hadn't touched the game in a year and a half. ODST: This game was a cinch. Even though the game runs on the same engine as Halo 3 and even though the Brute's AI was improved from Halo 3, it was still by far the easiest Halo game, not to mention the shortest. Sniper weapons and other power weapons were plentiful, Needlers worked like a charm, Marines on the Warthog's LAAG had great accuracy and could fire from long ranges, and, most notably, infantry units were relative pushovers. Jackal snipers could no longer kill in one shot and the Brutes were still relatively fragile. There were a couple of parts of the game that gave me a bit of trouble, those being the lobby of the ONI facility (where the "Alpha Site" Firefight map is) and the parts of Coastal Highway that involved facing Ghosts & Banshees while in a Warthog. Over a quarter of all my deaths in ODST were because of the latter, and that's mainly because of the same things that made vehicular combat a nightmare in Halo 3. Reach: While the game was extremely brutal on my first playthrough, subsequent playthroughs were not nearly as bad, with the sample playthrough in this post resulting in less than a quarter the number of deaths and a completion time nearly half that of my first playthrough. Once you know the ins and outs of the encounters and the AI behaviors, it becomes a game that is much less frustrating and not nearly as cheap as Halo 2. It also helps that sniper Jackals have focus rifles instead of beam rifles, the noob combo is almost as ridiculously effective against Elites as it was in Halo 2, and the weapons all around much more reliable and consistent. That being said, I stand by my assessment of Reach being difficult for all the wrong reasons. It combines the best AI in the series with the same massive damage output present in Halo 2 & 3, not to mention that there a lot of other difficulty-enhancing factors, including a high frequency of enemy attacks that kill in one or two hits, all Grunt ranks above Minor being capable of using charged shots, the projectile speed of non-hitscan weapons being given a 50% boost, the enemy rank distribution being even more heavily biased towards higher ranks than in prior games, a total lack of multi-sided battles, and "special encounters" like Stealth Elites armed with focus rifles. Of all those, the biggest factor is, like in Halo 2 & 3, the massive damage output of the enemies. Like Halo 2, it essentially shoehorns you into a very specific play style, where only an extremely narrow range of tactics are viable. Failure to play in these highly specific manners has obvious consequences. As I outlined in the discussion from January, there are many factors that affect difficulty, including but not limited to:
I still stand by my argument that of all the ways a Halo game could be made difficult, extreme damage output is one of the worst ways. Even with all the difficulty-mitigating factors in Halo 1, it still gives me a good challenge, and it doesn't need overpowered enemies to do so. Imagine if the Covies in HCE had better situational awareness (i.e., reacting to you no matter how far away you are), could engage the player at longer distances and had mid- to long-range weapons to assist in that, and were more aggressive when using vehicles, and if the Hunters were less predictable and couldn't go down with a single pistol round to the back. It goes to show you that with good AI, good level design, good encounter design, good weapon design, and so on can work to give a good challenge without having to make the enemies super powerful and/or super cheap. For example, Halo 2 Legendary would have been fun instead of tedious if it weren't for lame-ass boss battles, grossly overpowered enemies, and especially those damned sniper Jackals. Similarly, Reach would still be just as challenging yet be a more fun, fair, and flexible challenge if Bungie had reduced the enemy's damage output and compensated by altering other aspects of the game such as the health system. That the number and frequency of deaths I experienced in the cited playthroughs of Halo 1 & Reach were about the same speaks a lot to my arguments that simply making a game difficult isn't enough. Rather, it's what makes the game difficult is what matters greatly, and that there are good ways and bad ways a game can be made difficult. I don't mind dying 80 or 100 times in a single full playthrough in and of itself, but I do mind it when those deaths come from cheap mechanics. A game can still kick your ass without making it feel like an exercise in frustration. To cite a non-Halo example, your typical old-school Mega Man game comes to mind. So, what are your experiences like in each game's Legendary? How would you compare them? How much and how frequently do you die?
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