: 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.

I did log my deaths and completion times for all levels when I was gathering data for that post. Here's what I got for Halo 1:

The Pillar of Autumn: 2 deaths, 25 minutes
Halo: 6 deaths, 40 min
Truth & Reconciliation: 20 deaths, 95 min
Silent Cartographer: 7 deaths, 60 min
Assault on the Control Room: 8 deaths, 115 min
343 Guilty Spark: 3 deaths, 35 min
The Library: 4 deaths, 55 min
Two Betrayals: 9 deaths, 115 min
Keyes: 11 deaths, 45 min
The Maw: 9 deaths, 30 min

Slightly over a quarter of my deaths in that run were on T&R, which incidentally is the only level that does not give you access to the pistol. To this day it is the most challenging level in the first game. Even though you get a sniper rifle, it is difficult to use in the tight quarters of the inside of the ship, so for many encounters I find myself using other weapons. In terms of frequency of deaths, Keyes and The Maw actually exceed T&R; in that run I died once every 4.75 minutes on T&R vs. once every 4.1 min on Keyes and once every 3.33 min on The Maw. But definitely for the first half of the game the deaths were by far most frequent on T&R. I wonder if it has mostly to do with the lack of the M6D, or the high density of enemies, close quarters of the ship interior, and the frequency of pincer attacks. It could be all of those, meaning the available equipment, level design, and encounter design were all factors.

The issue with the Hunters in Halo 1 is that their vulnerable spots functioned as a head for damage purposes, hence why both the pistol and sniper rifle (the only headshot-capable weapons in the first game) killed Hunters in one shot. Had their weak spots taken normal damage, it would take 20 pistol rounds or 10 sniper rifle rounds to kill them on Legendary (according to the game data files, Hunters have 490 HP on Legendary; the pistol and sniper rifle inflict 25 and 101 HP of base damage, with the sniper rifle inflicting only 50% damage against Hunter flesh). While the Hunters in Halo 1 had much simpler attack patterns than in later games, the inability to one-shot them combined with the fact that they work in pairs would have made them much tougher had they taken normal damage from the pistol and sniper rifle.

Had the Hunters been tougher to kill and the pistol been less powerful or less readily available, it would have made Halo 1 more difficult, but still fair. About the only other really big issue was the fact that the AI would not react to you past a certain range while sniping them, allowing you to take out large numbers of Covenant with relative impunity. This is most notably a factor on the towers in the second half of Halo, the very first encounter on T&R, and in the group of enemies that spawn at the base of the control room pyramid in Two Betrayals.

I still think that Bungie should have stuck with the same damage output as Halo 1 as well as retained non-regenerating health and focused on refining the AI, weapon balancing, and level design, but they took a different approach, one that has stuck to this day (they were generally fairly competent at encounter design, though, but the other factors, esp. enemy damage outputs, were bigger influences on overall difficulty). I hope 343i does some good things with the AI and level design, in Halo 5, but the whole upping the damage business has me worried that Legendary will be too sadistically hard unless you've familiarized yourself intimately with the game's levels, encounters, weapons, and AI behavior on lower difficulties. It might be getting close to Halo 2 levels of aggravation. Even on Heroic Halo 2 is more difficult than the other games, falling somewhere between the Heroic and Legendary modes of the other games in terms of number and frequency of deaths.