02-20-2024, 08:03 PM
calico Wrote:Underappreciated aspect of what makes the campaigns' of Halo-era FPSs so repayable is the way they scale difficulty. The Halo games both decreased player health (and regen) and increased the complexity of the enemies players fought. Not only upgrading the Elites to higher health versions/adding more but adding NPCs with higher level tactics (suicide grunts, etc.). Bungie also notably cut the timer on the grand finale to make it more rewarding.
This isn't to say making Legendary in Halo 2 kill you both in co-op if one player died was a good idea. It decreased the fun factor and due to a faulty checkpoint system (understandable in a co-op campaign) lead to game breaking loops of one of the players dying from a plasma grenade immediately after spawning over and over.
Most modern AAA games will simply reduce the damage a player does to enemies and increase the damage taken by an arbitrary amount, which does more to disrupt the flow of combat than increase difficulty. It also leads to the most common type of death being random AI grenade spam.
The only challenging aspect of playing Fallout 4 on hard is that you're having to carry around more (i.e. less fun) guns to make up for all the ammo you're going to blow through. And that's better than games which take after Skyrim, just forcing you to play their equivalent of stealth archer if you want to do anything.
I don't know if there was a "Halo-era", just Halo if you ask me.
Halo can become more "difficult" by creating more dynamic situations, yes. I think it ties into the "strategy game" roots and logic behind it. Halo is a relatively slow and thoughtful game, more like playing Myth with one unit than competitive Quake 3. The dynamism of everything facing you is more about forcing strategic responses than mechanical precision to overcome. You get two weapons, two grenades, you have your shield and your life underneath, different weapons and characters all interact differently and you need to throw the right things at the right problems in real time while it's all doing its own thing around you. There are so many more variables to mess with than the average "FPS".
Halo 2 evolved heavily towards linearity and spectacle. It's far more of a movie-game than CE. Feels a lot less like Myth. But it's still there, and it's a really good movie game so I don't hold it against it at all. Legendary in 2 is stupid, but Heroic works well. All the other Bungie Halo games I've beaten on Legendary. But probably have the most fun on Heroic.
I played Fallout 4 on its hardest difficulty to extract some fun from it. I sometimes enjoy doing that with games that obviously aren't made for that. I also beat The Last of Us on Grounded in my only time playing it. There is nothing dynamic, interesting, or graceful to how these games handle difficulty. They force you to play in retarded ways that completely clash with the intended experience to get anywhere. Since I have no real respect for the intended experience in either case this didn't really bother me. TLOU becomes shitty unresponsive 3D Hotline Miami on Grounded while Fallout 4 is Stealth Archer with Guns as you say. But I did find that Fallout 4 got easier as I went, certain guns are just stupid in that game. I was apparently outscaling the bad guys.
