: I still stand by this. Making the enemies inflict insane amount of damage
: should be down towards the bottom of the list of proposed ways of boosting
: difficulty. It's the lazy and cheap way of making things harder, and it
: doesn't really produce a legitimate challenge in and of itself. I die
: about as much and as frequently in Halo 1 as in Halo 3, Reach, and Halo 4,
: yet the enemies in Halo 1 inflict much less damage. It's also no surprise
: that I default to Legendary in Halo 1, whereas I don't default to
: Legendary in the other games, but that's because Halo 1 is the fun kind of
: challenging.

Good points. One of the other things about CE, though, is you are simultaneously much weaker and much stronger than in later games. You can't jump as high or punch as hard, and your health means a failed attack can come with consequences. But you are equipped with a powerful pistol in almost every scenario, and (crucially) the enemies don't have effective countermeasures to many strategies. If you have a sniper rifle, your only "threat" is lack of map awareness and a lack of ammo. If you're going up against single Elites, a plasma rifle to the face will stun them enough to close the distance and finish them off easily. Only until the Flood and a few select areas do your opponents have heavy ordnance. Hunters are fairly easy 1HK. Plus, with things like backpack reloading, you can effectively keep up continuous fire on your opponents. So in those respects I do find CE much easier, especially in the early part of the game.