While not blogging in the past few weeks, I have been playing quite a few games. I own an xbox 360 since a little after launch (gamertag: swiecki) and am feeling overwhelmed with all the games out this holiday season. I played through Halo 3 on normal, and then I sat down to start it on legendary. I was almost immediately discouraged from playing the game because of how the difficulty is scaled.
On normal difficulty, the enemies do a good amount of damage and have a decent amount of health. On Heroic difficulty, the enemies do a challenging amount of damage, forcing you to take cover more and take better shots to kill them faster, and have more health. On Legendary difficulty, enemies do a ridiculous amount of damage (three plasma rifle shots will take out a shield, a brute spiker can kill you easily from medium range in about a second), and have an extremely massive amount of health.
I will say is once and only once.
This is not how difficulty levels should scale in a video game.
Ideally, difficulty should scale like it did in the game “Gears of War”. For those who didn’t play the game, the AI got smarter on harder difficulties. Sure, the locust had a little more health on insane mode, but that was to make the gameplay more balanced. Their weapons did not do more damage, but rather their aim was visibly better. The AI on insane would try to flank you, charge you while you reloaded, and lay down covering fire for their buddies. It felt as if you were playing against not dumb AIs whose bullets just hurt more, but thinking, adapting, humans. When I say this, I do not mean that some behaviors appear and some don’t. Grunts in Halo 3 will suicide grenade you more often on Heroic than on Easy or Normal. That is just a behavior that directly influences how difficult it is to survive in the game. When you turn up the intelligence level, the game becomes overall a different, more challenging, more realistic, and more fun experience. Its the difference between playing ping-pong with someone who has never played and someone who plays just as good as you.
Most of what I’ve been saying so far has been very high level concepts. I also thought about implementation, so I figured I might as well share that as well. I don’t know if the Halo engine can’t handle the proper pathing or logic for the AI to be that good, or if it is just the Architecture of the programming, but simply changing weapon damage values and health values just seems frickin lazy. I’m sure the Halo engine is capable of smarter AI, but I predict that Bungie would point to the massive levels as a public excuse. As they determined with graphics, Gears of War had much smaller environments and therefore could be saturated with beautiful graphics and calculate the AI movements and tactics without lag.
I guess I’ll stop here… but this is certainly an issue for me to look into.
This is just a thought that I repeatedly found myself thinking during Halo 3 on Legendary.
