Halo CE more difficult

[Dinikus]

I played Halo CE on my computer ages ago, and I loved it, so I'm playing Halo CE now, same difficulty (Heroic), but it's far more difficult, and from what I can tell this is associated to the tickrate, which was doubled, causing the enemies to be more aggresive, react faster, and being far more competent. So, what are the tips to get good, or just tips to beat the AI at double the tick rate I was used to, as I assume there is no way to have the original tick rate without breaking it.

[Dinikus]

Yeah, been trying that, but currently stuck in the hangar on Truth and Reconciliation, which annoys me because that's one of the missions I always thought was easier.

[Dinikus]

Ah well, thanks, might just try to learn the jumping thing. Also when I said stuck I meant stuck as in, just keep dying because of too many enemies (Lately been dying when the hunters arrive, which is better than before). Otherwise I might just find someone or a group to do all of the games on Legendary, or LASO if I find someone who wants to be as mad as I am

[softshellsoup]

For the hanger the biggest thing for me was to move from one hanger to the next as fast as possible, to force the AI to funnel in a line toward me, and to have access to plenty of ammo. Halo CE def has the strongest grenades out of the guns/grenades/melee three pillars of halo (ignoring the rando fourth pillars in 3, reach, 4), and being good at placing grenades can help clear out the grunts and jackals there. The main initial difficultly of TnR imo is that the only accuracy weapon the player has is the sniper rifle, which has very little autoaim with hip firing, so on higher difficulties it depends on either finding a good-ish hiding spot to pick enemies off, or to git gud (tm) enough to snapshot or hip fire it. I will say one way to make things easier is to not worry about saving ammo; one sniper clip replenishes 12 shots if I remember correctly, so keeping spare ammo in mind before picking up clips is def useful, but at the same time don't be too shy to spam shots if you really need to. And other weapons are def useful, I personally used the plasma pistol normal fire a lot to stun and kill grunts, because with good cover you can spam a grunt with plasma and it gets stun locked, and any covenant weapon will be easily replenished compared to human weapons.

TBH while yes, the higher tickrate does make all the games more challenging, it isn't entirely unplayable. It certainly takes a bit of adjustment to get used to, but it's really doable. I love Raycevik's quick take on Halo's loop as "speed chess", because a lot if it is knowing placement of geometry, enemies, and resources, and seeing what several actions you can take to complete an encounter. So yeh... the actual best thing with halo campaign is just practice XD

And skulls... skulls can make things so much easier... tho boom+grunt funeral can easily backfire XD

If you need someone to help with legendary, I'm down for that. But personally I believe LASO in CE/Reach/3/ODST is much easier to do solo because of speedrunning tricks (most may seem challenging but are decently doable and repeatable. Tho could never get the hanger grenade jump XD)

Also just read this, but TnR (to my knowledge) is considered one of the harder levels XD at least in speedrunning community it's one of the more skill based levels to complete due to the sheer amount of enemy encounters to deal with.

[Shitler]

CE is whack. I beat legendary with bandana, but gave up trying to get par scores because the ai is infuriating with how herky jerky it is

[TheRat62]

Yeah it's really too bad that the AI has been affected by the tickrate and that they aren't doing anything to fix it.

You think you're playing the original games in all their glory but are they really the same games when something as drastic as enemy AI is kinda broken?

[softshellsoup]

TBH the only time I found the tickrate increase to actually be annoying was with Reach and Long Night of Solace during the space battle.

Sure, the AI is more reactive, but you can still reasonably strafe shots in all the Halos in MCC. Plus... a lot of campaign ability comes from knowing the layout of levels and what behaviors the AI can do to the player. If you can know exactly where enemies spawn from in campaign, you'll do much better. All this comes from lots and lots of practice.

Also admittedly, it'd be very hard to separate AI behavior from tickrate. I imagine it's very much tied into the code of the game, as good game programming style/tech wasn't a thing in the industry for most of the halo games (and parallel processing really only became big "recently"). At that point it'd warrant a genuine remaster of the game by reprogramming the entire thing to separate processes like AI and physics to their own threads.

[Biscuit]

CE on heroic is a lot fairer than Reach. It's hard but never unreasonable. I suck at fps but this much was clear to even me.

If the hangar part means the area where you take the lift and face cloaked elites(the first area of the ship), it's a matter of remembering the number of cloaked elites in total. They come through different doors at different times. It's not possible to predict which one will come from which door. So keep their numbers in mind and always look around to all 4 doors frequently, even when in the middle of shooting another group.

[Saint Pablo]

Originally posted by Turtle50UP:

TBH the only time I found the tickrate increase to actually be annoying was with Reach and Long Night of Solace during the space battle.

Sure, the AI is more reactive, but you can still reasonably strafe shots in all the Halos in MCC. Plus... a lot of campaign ability comes from knowing the layout of levels and what behaviors the AI can do to the player. If you can know exactly where enemies spawn from in campaign, you'll do much better. All this comes from lots and lots of practice.

Also admittedly, it'd be very hard to separate AI behavior from tickrate. I imagine it's very much tied into the code of the game, as good game programming style/tech wasn't a thing in the industry for most of the halo games (and parallel processing really only became big "recently"). At that point it'd warrant a genuine remaster of the game by reprogramming the entire thing to separate processes like AI and physics to their own threads.

holy ♥♥♥♥ THIS. Even though locking the game to 60 fps during this portion helps a bit, it doesn't solve the issue entirely. I had to pretty much wait it out behind the space station or under the covenant ship.
The last portion with the MAC cannon feels much more difficult than I remembered but I'm sure that just comes down to memorizing the enemy patterns.

[Dinikus]

I didn't find Long Night Of Solace that difficult, for me it was the penultimate mission (when you are fighting to clear the LZ to give Cortana away). So from what I can see it's just that I just seem to have a weird relationship with Halo difficulty. Also I found Reach easier than Heroic, which is weird, and I never played Reach before I got it on MCC.

[softshellsoup]

Originally posted by Dinikus:

I didn't find Long Night Of Solace that difficult, for me it was the penultimate mission (when you are fighting to clear the LZ to give Cortana away). So from what I can see it's just that I just seem to have a weird relationship with Halo difficulty. Also I found Reach easier than Heroic, which is weird, and I never played Reach before I got it on MCC.

Not understanding, Reach easier than Heroic? Also ftr the difficulty I was referring to with LNoS was Legendary. Seraph AI is pure broken; I've seen them do turns on the dime to pelt you with plasma.

[Dinikus]

Sorry, I found Reach easier than CE, having played both on Heroic. My bad

[Spinning Harlot]

Don't mind me there, just reposting that one post I made months ago.

Ok y'all I also feel like CEA is a bit harder than CE (at least the Gearbox port) so I decided to make a little experiment.

I started AOTCR on legendary, moved as little as possible just to get the checkpoint (to make my little science project more bearable) stayed still and used a timer to check how long do I survive to the 2 elite and 2-3 grunt that come out to attack.

The timer ran from the first plasma shot to chief's death. I repeated this process 30 times each game to get an average.

On CEA I got 3.92 / 4.05 / 2.74 / 3.20 / 3.07 / 3.53 / 4.39 / 3.59 / 3.40 / 2.16 / 3.72 / 3.66 / 3.92 / 4.18 / 3.20 / 3.66 / 3.53 / 3.01 / 3.93 / 4.18 / 3.65 / 4.18 / 3.72 / 3.78 / 3.66 / 3.66 / 3.34 / 4.17 / 4.25 / 3.26

All of that lead to an average killtime of 3.62.

On the Gearbox port, I got 3.14 / 5.55 / 4.83 / 5.05 / 4.56 / 4.37 / 4.50 / 4.64 / 5.22 / 4.04 / 4.18 / 3.78 / 3.74 / 3.45 / 3.41 / 5.32 / 5.16 / 3.80 / 3.27 / 4.70 / 4.96 / 3.00 / 3.46 / 3.92 / 4.96 / 4.17 / 3.46 / 4.19 / 4.11

In this case, it leads up to an average of 4.27

So we got a difference of 0.65 seconds.

With the sample size of 30 deaths per game, and the likely human error of me not stopping the timer at the exact microsecond of my death it's hard to get a conclusive answer. But from experiencing 60 deaths in a row, I noticed that in CEA, the enemy AI shoot faster than on the Gearbox port in my opinion. Another thing that I did notice is that in CEA once again, the second grunt rarely came out in time to shoot at Chief, thus affecting the final result.

Another test, including the Jackals, a higher death count and a more consistent enemy behavior would probably shine more light on this.

RIP par score.

[Dinikus]

Huh, that's neat, thanks for doing that.

[Exodus]

Halo CE relies on a lot of grenade throwing, and I mean very precise throws, even in speedruns they are vital. Halo CE's enemies tend to be placed or spawn out in ways where a well placed plasma would kill them. I think for CE relying on plasmas can really help to not be overwhelmed because CE's pistol isn't laser tier precise like reach, you are going to get annihilated fighting two elites at a time. The jackals also shred in CE, they can be more annoying than elites at times.


It's just a matter of getting used to imo also I think everyone approaches every situation relying on their own individual playstyle. People think i'm being mad for saying I personally find h3 to be more harder than h2 on legendary, the levels seem very intimidating to me, halo 3 in general is a very difficult game for me for some reason mainly because I find it's weapons to be very underwhelming and inconsistent.

[Saint Pablo]

Originally posted by Exodus:

Halo CE relies on a lot of grenade throwing, and I mean very precise throws, even in speedruns they are vital. Halo CE's enemies tend to be placed or spawn out in ways where a well placed plasma would kill them. I think for CE relying on plasmas can really help to not be overwhelmed because CE's pistol isn't laser tier precise like reach, you are going to get annihilated fighting two elites at a time. The jackals also shred in CE, they can be more annoying than elites at times.


It's just a matter of getting used to imo also I think everyone approaches every situation relying on their own individual playstyle. People think i'm being mad for saying I personally find h3 to be more harder than h2 on legendary, the levels seem very intimidating to me, halo 3 in general is a very difficult game for me for some reason mainly because I find it's weapons to be very underwhelming and inconsistent.

I feel like H3 is much more easy on legendary than CE and 2. The brutes are much less of a threat gameplay wise in 3 than the elites in CE or the H2 brutes. I don't think I had trouble in H3 until fighting the pure flood forms, dealing with jackal snipers or a large amount of enemies in a small space. The brutes in H3 rely on large numbers instead of actually fighting smart or being fast.
H3 is all about power weapons, so prioritizing those in a fight is what works for me. Also the noob combo and making good use of the BR works too.