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Notes -
Yeah, that was another thing that annoyed me about Halo, is the enemy AI went the wrong direction.
Since it keeps getting compared to Half-Life, I'll keep going. Half-Life introduces fairly dumb enemies, and then introduces smarter ones. You get to warm up on relatively dumb xeno-fauna, and then they throw marines at you, which talk, coordinate, dodge grenades, flush you out, flank you, etc. Now I know people have dissected how that worked and a lot of it was scripted to create the illusion of intelligent enemies. But it was still a really good illusion.
By contrast, Halo starts you off with really good enemy AI in the form of elites, and then halfway through the game swaps them out for retards that bum rush right at you. A sin doubly compounded by the fact that the game checkpoint saves, and you are consistently stuck in really annoying locked arenas fighting off boring hoards of flood. I positively loathed it.
For whatever reason, and I haven't played it recently enough to have a strong impression of why, Halo 2 and Halo 3 didn't seem as bad in this regard, even during the sections that were heavier on flood. Maybe the encounters were designed smarter, or at least less annoyingly. Maybe they changed the game mechanics to make it less annoying somehow. I think I remember Halo's health mechanic got dropped between games replaced almost entirely by shields? Whatever the reasons, after the flood appear in Halo 1, it's a far worse game for it.
I have a similar impression, and I think it's probably just that god-awful library level in Halo 1, which Bungie learned enough from not to repeat.
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