: I made some commentary on the issue in my Ultimate Halo Game article, saying:
: Personally, I think that the trend towards making enemies as
: overwhelmingly powerful as possible is a bad one. It considerably reduces
: the amount of viable tactics available to the player, essentially
: shoehorning them into a very specific play style — usually one that
: discourages aggressive movement and that’s heavily cover-based —, one that
: if deviated from will result in repeated death. Most of the challenge of
: facing an individual enemy should come from things like quality AI rather
: than brute force (no pun intended). As the saying goes, fight smarter, not
: harder. That should apply not just to the player but to the NPCs as well.
: If the enemies are sufficiently intelligent then they wouldn’t need to
: inflict absurd amounts of damage; in fact, if they were really smart and
: inflicted as much damage as they did in Halo 2 or 3, it would result in
: the game being rather cheap on higher difficulties (refer again to Reach).
: There are plenty of other factors that go into a game’s challenge,
: including but not limited to: • Overall resilience of the enemy (i.e.,
: shield and health levels).
: • The performance of the enemy AI.
: • The presence, number, and general effectiveness of friendly AI.
: • Overall effectiveness/performance of the player’s weapons (damage,
: accuracy, etc.).
: • Whether or not the player has regenerating health.
: • Level design, which affects the flow of combat.
: • Encounter design, i.e., number, placement, and rank distribution of the
: enemies, and presence/absence of multi-sided battles.
: • Availability of ammo, weapons, and other supplies.
: • The weapons and other gear the enemies are equipped with.
: • The presence, nature, and frequency of “Demonic Spiders” and “Goddamned
: Bats.”
: • Gameplay elements that could qualify as “Fake Difficulty.”

: Quality enemy AI, coupled with good encounter & objective design and
: proper utilization of the other aforementioned difficulty-altering factors
: (except of course Fake Difficulty, which should always be avoided) would
: result in a challenge that legitimately tests the player’s skills rather
: than just their patience. Despite the enemies inflicting less damage in
: Halo 1, the game is to me still as challenging as Halo 3, Reach, and Halo
: 4 (if we go by total number of deaths) but it was balanced in a way that
: made its challenge fun instead of frustrating. Therefore, if I was making
: a Halo game I would reduce the base damage output of the enemies back to
: Halo 1 levels (i.e., typically about half the player’s base damage output)
: and would focus on those other, better ways to enhance the difficulty.

: 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.

I just spent the better part of the week browsing your blog and loving all your philosophies and ideas when it comes to halo. I don't know if you've heard of my groups Halo project, but would love to get you a copy and get some feedback from you.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_TQSGzR95xU
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YmqbqSAt1RE