: 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.

: 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.

Yeah I'm kind of hopeful that they add some "classic" toggles. You can sell it these days as an accessibility thing, but I think that having a more streamlined classic experience is probably better for me and people like me, while also admitting as a casual "first introduce PlayStation players to a Halo game" you want something a bit more modern for the majority.

I agree the suicide Grunts thing always felt like way too common an occurrence. It was extra weird in Halo Reach where they have that one segment where Grunts are just going suicide for... no discernible reason.