: I wouldn't be surprised if that's stuff's in there, save for the overheating
: guns. They definitely seem to be trying to port a more modern game
: experience back to CE and then wiggle around to find the right level of
: "close" to CE. One advantage of this being campaign only is they
: don't have to tune it for multiplayer considerations.

I have seen images of suicide grunts and I've seen a player EMP a hog.

In the original game: Grunts panicked when you kill the Elite and you can take advantage of that. It's fun.

In later games: Grunts run at you carrying stickies and you have to back pedal or shoot them.

I find the original gameplay more fun. The later games have a soupçon of suck added to them, and I find that people love to rationalise why you should add a touch more suck to the game, it lets all the games suck equally, it homogenizes them. To me it prioritizes other concerns over fun. I think that that is a mistake.

I had one moment of pure fun in a Halo 3 beam tower when every Grunt in the building went into suicide mode, started warbling and came running at me. Dozens of suiciding grunts. I couldn't escape or react because I was too busy laughing. But I would trade that one moment for years of better gameplay.

A guy from IGN said that human vehicles can take damage, I never saw that in gameplay clips.

: There's a lot of polish I hope happens, just because stuff like that I think
: is going to make the biggest difference to feeling more like a Halo game
: and rather just "generic job we did in Unreal", even as this is
: clearly the cutting the teeth project for starting the next big project. I
: missed stuff like the chapter names and the like sorely. I was kind of
: hoping the additional content would be The Flood elements like Alpha
: Base and the like rather than prequel stuff (although maybe that's the
: fight above Reach from TFOR or the newer teamups from the novel Silent
: Storm ? Could be cool.) but I'm here for any of it. The old game isn't
: going away so I'm more open to considered deviations.

It's a bit of a cop-out to make gameplay features, user selectable, but... they could be.

I'd switch off:

• enemy EMP


• suicide grunts


• hog turret overheats


• human vehicle damage

I'd turn on:

• grenade piles


• rocket wash danger

They could add telemetry to use the toggles as a form of A/B testing, especially if they had a public beta. They could see what proportion of people use the toggles, then, in that group, track their options.

If there was a marked preference for what I call fun features then they could back-port them to the later games to restore consistency.