My Mod: Fixing Halo CE’s Multiplayer

Some of you may have gathered from reading my past blogs that I’m a strong critic of the Halo series. Don’t get me wrong, I do enjoy the Halo games, but I’ve had criticisms of some aspects of their design since I first started playing multiplayer around the college dorms about 5 years ago now. Now I’m made a mod to fix them.

My previous entry from November discussed various issues with the mid-range weaponry in the Halo series. Aside from the headshot spam nature of the BR in Halo 2, I mentioned the fact that the Pistol dominated Halo 1 to the point of monotony, not so much because it was overpowered but because most other weapons were so woefully inaccurate, restricting non-Pistol/Sniper/Rocket combat to close-range rush-downs reminiscent of Super Soaker and Nerf gun battles of yore.

Another annoying aspect of the Halo 1 is that explosives like grenades and rockets have such powerful blast radii that when attacking non-vehicle targets, unlike other competitive shooters such as Quake or Unreal Tournament, very little accuracy, prediction or leading is required to score a 1 hit kill. As long as you don’t blow yourself up, you only have to pick up a Rocket Launcher to be granted free kills.

I’ve been saying this stuff for years, but finally in recent times I’ve had the chance to put these ideas to test in reality. In the past couple years I’ve dinked around modding the game in my spare time trying to alleviate these issues. Finally last fall I started putting servers with the PC version of my mod up to test it out against whoever would randomly join in the game. Then I softmodded my Xbox so I could try my hand at Halo 2 and get my Halo 1 mod working on console with split screen action.

In the past week I finally decided to wrap everything up to get it to a state suitable to release across the internet. You can download the Halo 1 Xbox version here. The PC and Halo 2 Xbox versions will be out soon. Here are some of the features:

Accuracy of the AR in regular Halo; full auto on the left and short bursts on the right.
Accuracy of the AR in my mod, auto on the left, burst on the right.

One of the first things I wanted to fix was the Assault Rifle. Its spread was highly excessive and its mid-range performance far under par.

As you can see, on average the spread of the AR’s fire in my mod is much smaller. Also, employing burst or single fire (by adjusting how quickly you release the trigger) improves your accuracy much more than it did in Halo 1, or will do in Halo 3. The first shot of a burst has accuracy almost as good as a pistol shot, and as you continue firing the accuracy worsens gradually until you release the trigger.

Thus, depending on whether you fire in sustained busts, short bursts, or rapid single shots, your accuracy will be either low, medium, or high. At close range, sustained automatic bursts are the most powerful. At mid-distance, 3 round bursts kill much faster and waste much less ammo. Using rapid single shots, you can chew up targets and defend from Pistol and Sniper Fire half-way across Blood Gulch.

Unlike the AR of Halo 3, the magazine size is not being lowered to 32 rounds. In Halo 1, all human weapons are meant to kill using 1/4 the ammo in a magazine; thus the 3 shots to kill with the Pistol (12 rounds) , 1 headshot to kill with the Sniper Rifle (4 rounds), and 15 shots to kill with the AR (60 rounds). An 8 shot kill from a 32 round magazine AR would be overpowered; even in Halo 3 the AR will probably be a 15-16 shot kill.

The only change on this front in my mod is that now damage is lowered for body shots and increased for headshots (though headshot will not kill instantly in 1 hit after shields are removed). With 10 rounds to break shields and either 5 headshots or 10 bodyshots after that to kill, you will need to aim for the head to score a perfect 1/4 magazine kill, just as with the Pistol.

All in all, I have made the AR a much more versatile weapon. It doesn’t have as much close range power as the Shotgun or Plasma Rifle, and it doesn’t have as much long-range power as the Pistol or Sniper Rifle, but it can function moderately well at both close and mid-long range. With increased accuracy and increased damage when aiming for the head, you can put a lot more skill into it as well.

Since the plasma bolts of the Plasma Rifle and Plasma Pistol already travel slowly, their effectiveness over distance is already mitigated. Adding shot spread on top of that is essentially double-nerfing them, which is why I removed spread on the Plasma Rifle.

Accuracy of the PR; original Halo on the left, my mod on the right.

Few people know this, but the PR has always had locational damage even before my mod; using headshots, a total of 9 rounds will kill, compared to 15 rounds aiming for the chest (even though it only takes 3 rounds to break shields). With the enhanced accuracy of the PR in my mod, you can now go for headshots and kill quite quickly from a considerable distance, provided you can lead (aim ahead of your targets) in order to compensate for the slowness of the plasma over distance.

Since the freeze of the PR’s bolts prevents your opponents from dodging after the first hit and therefore limits the amount of skill needed to kill, it has been cut. The PR is plenty effective in my mod without stunning its victims. With the narrowed spread, and increased rate of fire, freeze effect on the PR would have been quite overpowered.

On the other hand, the normal shots of the Plasma Pistol have always been rather weak. Unless you are going to use the overcharge to knock out shields and then switch to another weapon for a quick kill, it’s a bit of a useless weapon. Therefore, I have added extra freeze to the PP; it’s now the go-to weapon for freezing opponents. Since the pre-mod Plasma Rifle had to be fired in single shots to hit accurately and freeze at a distance anyway, it’s a good fit for the Plasma Pistol.

Overall, the Plasma Rifle is now a very deadly and direct weapon at close range, with the ability to feed deadly plasma blasts into the enemy’s face constantly at a blazing rate. Unlike the Shotgun, stepping a few feet back from plasma fire will make little difference in how long the victim lives…while the Plasma Rifle generally works better at closer range, it can engage targets over distance as effectively as the player can aim and lead to compensate for the slow speed of the plasma bolts.

The Plasma Pistol is more of a tricky weapon, using indirect methods to attack. The overcharge is still available to down shields, and normal fire stuns opponents, severely impairing their mobility. Used in conjunction with melee attacks, grenades, or other weapons, the Plasma Pistol is surprisingly and indirectly very lethal.

The guy in the base in the pic on the right is about to suffer a fiery pink death.

To address the aforementioned accuracy issue with explosives, the outer blast damage of rockets and grenades had been reduced. A victim standing close to the center of a blast will still die in one hit, but a victim standing in the outer radius of the blast will only take partial damage.

Aside from requiring more precise ‘nade tosses and rocket blasts, this causes explosives to be used more frequently in conjunction with ranged weapons and melee attacks to complete as kill, as Bungie intended.

The differences between Plasma Grenades and Fragmentation Grenades are also made more apparent. A player partially hit by a plasma grenade is guaranteed to lose his shields but may not lose all his health even if his shields are depleted before the blast strikes. A player partially struck by a frag blast may not lose all his shields if they are full before the nade explodes, but if they are gone before the blast he is guaranteed to die if he is damaged at all by the grenade.

Astute players may question the Rocket Launcher’s effectiveness on vehicles if the blast is weakened. This is addressed by the RL’s magazine capacity being expanded to 4 rounds. If a driver survives the first blast, you have extra ammo to finish him off.

Another experiment in my mod is the removal of auto-aim, coupled with the retention of crosshair magnetism. Your reticule will still stick to targets and follow a bit by itself, compensating for the imprecision of analog sticks, and the likelihood to over-steer and pass targets while attempting aim on them unassisted. However, you still have to fine-tune the reticule’s position manually to hit targets at a distance; bullets will not be guided off from the center of the reticule by the cpu.

Spread of the shotgun in vanilla Halo next to the spread of the shotgun in my mod.

Since this is an experimental feature, it has only been applied to half of the maps. The other half of the maps retains full auto-aim so players can compare. Once more play-testing has happened I will decide whether to keep it or remove it for future versions. A list of which maps fall into each category is provided with other documentation in the mod’s zip file.

I have also experimented with a homing-less Needler. Without homing, the slow-moving needles are awarded high 6-shot-kill damage which makes the Needler effective at area denial and suppression at mid-distance and a power-hitter at close range (just don’t suicide with the huge combined blast). The needles also ricochet, so the Needler can be employed around certain corners and over obstructions in low-ceiling areas.

The mod has plenty of other changes, for example, the shotgun spread has been reduced a bit to keep up with the extended range of the other weapons, though it is still specialized for close range. Its magazine size has also been reduced (8 rounds) to make up for its increased effectiveness. The Sniper Rifle no longer splinters its shots off course when fired un-scoped, and the Pistol fires slightly slower, has less random spread over distance, and requires 6 instead of 5 shots to kill when no headshots are scored.

Things will be tweaked in future versions to fine-tune balance. There is a download currently available to add the maps and weapons from the PC version of Halo 1 into the Xbox version; I may add support for that map pack in my mod. I also might include patches for the campaign maps; this mod is geared towards multiplayer balance but the increased range of weapons is fun for blasting aliens. Of course, the actual PC version of my mod will be released soon as well as the Halo 2 version, which has its own set of features.

For a complete list of changes and features, you can view the readme file for the mod.

Download the mod here:
http://files.filefront.com/GnaMsMod_HaloXbox_v09zip

Give it a try, tell me what you think.

UPDATE 3/18/08:
Since this post originally went up, my mod has been updated to version 0.95. Info is available at these 2 locations:

download thread
videos thread

~ by Julian Gnam on May 11, 2007.