: Also I think they're very weak on character. For one thing they lack humour.
: I only gave that a closing mention in my recent opinion piece, but in
: retrospect I could've done with making that criticism more prominent. If
: you consider the original four covie types, the Elites and Jackals and
: Grunts were all good sources of comedy in various regards - especially the
: Grunts of course. Hunters not so much, perhaps. But in my two plays
: through the H4 campaign so far, I don't recall getting any comedy from
: Prometheans.

Halo has become too po-faced and their back story of being digitized, enslaved, humans doesn't help.

I miss the comedy of the first game. I liked fighting fighting enemies that I secretly liked. It was fun.

: The Knights might just as well be robots, they have so little character. And
: the Crawlers are robots, I think. It's not just the lack of humour that
: makes the Prometheans dull to fight, it's more generally the lack of
: character I think. I don't have the feeling that they're a people in the
: way the Covenant races are. In the case of Knights and Crawlers, the main
: opposition, it's like they're just killing machines, and the Watchers have
: quite a machine-like aura too. It makes them all less satisfying to fight
: and kill, compared to living breathing covies.

There is no trace of humanity in those digitized humans. We see nothing of their human origins in the Prometheans. Their back story does not fit their appearance or behavior.

: Are you talking about the dreadful engine sound or something else?

I'm talking about the fact that after the first game you can't man the gun without being driven to your doom or being taken away from the fight and parked against a rock. I'm talking about gunners that don't shoot at visible targets, that fixate on shooting corpses when a Wraith or Ghost is bearing down on you. I'm talking about how it's often a good idea to exit your Hog on the Coastal Highway mission in ODST and take shelter behind it as soon as you are under fire from a single Ghost because ~1 second of sustained fire will kill you.

I'm talking about all the nonsense that makes Hog usage un-fun in the later games.

I imagine that a quick fix would be to stop NPCs volunteering to drive any vehicle that I am using as a gun platform.

If 343 was prepared to do more work then I would like to use the buttons that are unused when driving or gunning to enable fast position switches and to let me toggle driving from the gunner position.

What I mean is if (X) is still the mount/dismount button then have:

• (Y) select driver position
• (B) select passenger
• (A) gunner position

When you press one of those buttons then a single animation puts you in that position. This should work if the vehicle is stationary or moving. If the position was occupied by an NPC then a swap animation occurs. If the position is occupied by a player then your button press becomes a request that they can accept by pressing the button that requests your position.

One of the bumper buttons could be used to tell the driver to start or stop driving. It would act as a toggle. Being able to set a waypoint may be nice so that you could tell the driver where to go.

They could also tone down 'taunt enemy corpse' and perhaps not perform it or cut it short if immanent threats are nearby or present themselves whilst the NPC is shooting the corpse. In addition the art style and increased clutter make it hard to see enemies. A gunner who has been shooting a corpse for the past x seconds makes you think that there is an unseen, live, threat over there.