: I think 343 should use all that extra processing power to, for instance,
: remove taunt enemy corpse from warthog chaingunner AI.

: Or, in all seriousness, improve their situational awareness - don't shoot
: that crawler over there minding its own business - shoot that knight that
: has us in its sights!

: Our Spartan AI companions are like the keystone Cops.

: Who am I kidding? That's never going to change. Bungie and 343 both decided
: that the AI was good enough and spend as few resources as possible on it.

: Taunt enemy corpse is my litmus test. Every game that its left in for hog
: gunners on legendary is another game where the devs are just coasting into
: work. 343 are employing them as seat warmers.

: I see it as an attention to detail thing. The dev plays the game on legendary
: and realizes (2 seconds in) that this sucks and decides to do something
: about it.

: OTOH it feels like a manager thing and an agile thing - dev says "hey
: boss, taunt enemy corpse sucks when hogging on legendary - I'd like to fix
: it" - boss says, "put it on the backlog and I will prioritize
: it".

: dev says, "but it will only take two minutes to fix"

: boss replies, "that's not agile" ;-)

I'd say Halo 5 has some of the best allied AI in the series, relative to the other games.

The problem is that Halo 5 also dramatically increased your movement options, and the AI can't keep up. The problem with getting too aggressive on Legendary and using all the Spartan abilities was that if getting to your downed form required a sprint jump or a clamber, the chance the AI would be able to suss it out dropped dramatically.

Aside from that, they're generally more competent than marines (although it doesn't feel that dramatic because we rarely fight next to NPCs) and the ability to direct them via the d-pad works quite well, especially at giving them targets, so no "Marine shoot at *that* tank, not the ghost, the tank, the—*BOOM*" moments, or at least they were drastically reduced for me.