GnaM’s Mod 2.0 videos

I’ve indeed nearly cleaved gaming out of my life entirely, but I hit a stride about 6 months ago where I started working on my Halo mod again quite furiously. My friend and I would get together with beers and game it up till 4am, then I would make adjustments based on the properties of the weapons which either were or weren’t hitting the balance we wanted. Great strides were made over previous versions and a lot of progress was made. We ended up recording some footage for demonstration purposes, then I got burned out and busy with other stuff, and never did anything with it.

Finally in the past week I decided to get the footage together and cut it into some streaming videos, and here are the results.

Pistol, Plasma Pistol
Battle Rifle
Plasma Rifle
Needler
SMG
Rocket Launcher
Covenant Carbine
Brute Shot
Beam Cannon
Shotgun
Sniper Rifle

They can be slow to stream, so I recomend starting the video, pausing it, and waiting  a minute or two before you watch. You might just open them all, set em to load up, and come back later. They are all worth watching, but the Plasma Rifle and Rocket Launcher videos  are undoubtedly the best.

Pistol

This is basically the Halo 1 Pistol, nerfed to be an appropriate spawn/sidearm weapon, rather than a powerful mid/long range weapon. The rate of fire is the same, the accuracy is the same, but there’s no scope and it take 7 hits to deplete shields for a headshot; 8 shot kill total. It also has a 16 round magazine to compensate for the low damage.

It is indeed very weak when used as a primary weapon, but can be very deadly when used in conjunction with melee, grenades, or other weapons to weaken shields and open the enemy to a headshot. It can also be drawn and fired twice as fast as any other weapon (besides the plasma pistol) so for the purpose of finishing the enemy with a headshot, it is actually preferable to the BR in many cases, despite being exactly half as powerful.

I believe the video should drive home that that weapon is plenty capable of making kills, even against weapons as powerful as the BR and Rocket Launcher. It is intended to be the Halo equivalent of Unreal Tournament’s Enforcer pistol – awkward enough to use and weak enough that you are forced to spend your initial moments of combat looking for a primary weapon rather than attacking enemies head on, yet powerful enough in its own right to fend for itself.

The reason why spawning with the BR has been necessary in past Halo iterations is because the rest of the weapon set was too inaccurate and weak – if you didn’t have a BR you were screwed. In the mod, weapons other than the BR and power weapons are actually versatile and effective now. The PR and SMG are effective out to mid range and the Needler is powerful enough at close range to compensate for its long range deficiencies. Therefore, when you spawn, you have plenty of options at your disposal as long as you rush/sneak your way to a primary weapon prior to charging into combat. What’s more, the pistol is versatile enough to defend yourself with if you get cornered – it’s accurate enough to score a headshot in almost any situation, and its rate of fire is just high enough to be serviceable at close range.

Lastly, to answer comparisons to the ODST Pistol – the rate of fire is as slow as it is because the weapon is not intended to be a close range bullet hose. I have experimented with recoil models in Halo since my first Custom Edition (PC) mod in 2005. The problem with relying on recoil to balance out high rates of fire is that no matter how high the recoil, there will always be a point at close ranges where the recoil becomes negligible due to the practical impossibility of missing. Thus a weapon which is not intended to have close range advantage is given an exponential advantage where suddenly you can spam bullets to your heart’s content and not suffer any drawbacks. A higher rate of fire was tried in prior versions of the mod, and with the same damage, it easily out-shoot the SMG at close range. The pistol does not need the capability to fire as fast as you can pull the trigger – that would make it a veritable Assault Rifle-type bullet spam weapon. If you can’t pull off headshots without a faster rate of fire, you need to bring your skill level up to par.

Plasma Pistol

The most immediate change to the Plasma Pistol is the total and utter lack of homing on the overcharge bolt. Instead, the speed of the bolt has been increased a bit to make it more practical to use over distance without the assistance of homing. Still, success with the PP overcharge is totally skill based.

The freeze property from Halo 1 has also been added back to the Plasma Pistol – both to the normal shot and the overcharge bolt. Since the freeze no longer exists on the Plasma Rifle, this is a unique and useful ability, which can be put to good use to surprise and disable even with as weak an attack as the primary fire mode.

Lastly, the overcharge bolt now has a headshot property. It is extremely difficult to land a headshot with the PP overcharge, but it takes a lot of skill and if you pull it off you can land an unexpected kill from close range or across the map. This give the PP a bit of added clout as an actual primary weapon and not just as vehicle for weapon combos. Unfortunately, we didn’t get any shots of this feature on tape this time, though you can see it at 1:10 here.

Like the Magnum Pistol, the PP can also be drawn and fired twice as quickly as other weapons.

Battle Rifle

This is basically the Halo 1 Pistol, but with a rifle skin. It is single shot, 12 round magazine, and depletes shields in 3 hits for a 4 shot kill (if it’s a headshot). The extra shot required to kill makes it a little more fair and balanced than the original Pistol and moreover, you don’t spawn with it, so you are not given a powerful all-purpose weapon on a silver platter – you actually have to work for it. It is also has tighter spread than the H1 Pistol, so it’s more consistent and less random. Lastly, the bullet has actually been slowed down considerably, so you do have to lead subtly at very long ranges to score a proper hit.

To reiterate what I have said before, the 3 shot/second rate of fire was chosen to eschew the bullet spam techniques of the burst fire and rapid fire of the old BR and Carbine. Slower rates of fire as seen in weapons like the Halo 1 Pistol, Unreal Enforcer, Doom Pistol require more skill to score hits. Furthermore, the slower rate of fire is more in line with the actual definition of the term battle rifle as, as such weapons were specialized for long range, single shot firepower at the cost of heavy recoil which made rapid fire practically impossible. Contrary to popular belief, rapid semi-automatic fire was a provision of the assault rifle, and the mod Battle Rifle is intended to fulfill the battle rifle role. If you want rapid semi-automatic fire on the order of an assault rifle, you can pick up the Covenant Carbine.

Note: you may notice the clip a minute into the video where the player is firing from the balcony of Ascension and is swiftly killed by another BR. His shots are being blocked by the wall because the bullets are now projected from the barrel of the 3rd person weapon model (which is aligned with the corner of the screen in 1st person), instead of from the center of the player’s face. This was an experiment which results in much a much better visual of players shooting from 3rd person (it no longer looks like you’re spitting brute grenades and plasma bolts) and allows you to observe your tracers in flight (which helps with leading). However, it also means that in certain instances your shots can be blocked unexpectedly and you have to learn to expect it and compensate.

Plasma Rifle

The spread has been removed entirely and the damage upgraded to a 8-10 hit kill. As you can see, this increases the range considerably, and the weapon can hold it’s own against the BR and Carbine at mid range. One would think that this also overpowers the weapon at close range, but the truth is, without cross-hair magnetism it’s much harder than expected to make easy spray kills at close range. It takes 2-3 hits to deplete shields for a melee or headshot, which is virtually the same as in Halo 3.

All in all the damage of the weapon is exactly in proportion to the effort required to use it – if you can execute the leading necessary to land hits with the slow-moving plasma bolts, you deserve to make the kill. It is powerful enough to use as a finisher in conjunction with weapons like the Sniper Rifle and Rocket Launcher, but it’s still not as damaging against health (vs shields) as the SMG. All the same, Plasma Rifle still has been given the potential to score a total kill at distance much faster than the SMG, if you use it properly, because it takes MUCH more skill to land the slow plasma bolts using leading than to simply point and click with the SMG.

Needler

As should be obvious, the primary change to the Needler is the complete omission of homing. Instead, it is a skilled non-homing weapon which grants heavy damage (4-5 hit kill) in exchange for an extremely slow needle travel speed (twice as slow as plasma bolts). Coupled with the fact that needles have the potential to ricochet and deal damage around corners, the Needler becomes a unique close range powerhouse weapon. Unlike the SMG/PR/Needler of past Halo iterations, which were easily outshot by longer range weapons even at point-blank range; the modded Needler actually does have the CQB advantage over midrange weapons it advertises.

And the best part about the Needler’s close range power is that it is still not a mindless or unskilled weapon. The slow speed of the needles require a heavy degree of leading to hit even at short distances, so it is not just a point-and-click bullet hose. It can also be used to make a lot of tricky kills at various distances by using its ricochet properties to strike around corners or funnel heavy fire into narrow corridors. At times it outdoes the pointblank destruction even of the shotgun – and deservedly so, because it’s a skilled and complex weapon.

SMG

The SMG has come a long way from it’s piss-poor Halo 2 and Halo 3 counterparts. It now strikes comparison to the Quake 3 Machinegun or Unreal Tournament Minigun – it can be effective over almost any range as long as you can concentrate the fire on the target to compensate for its relatively low per-bullet damage.

The muzzle climb has been completely removed. The spread is now quite tight – about half the size of the reticule (unzoomed) and the entire size of the reticule when scoped (yes, all weapons have a scope now, besides the Pistol and Plasma Pistol). The damage is pretty low, it takes about 22-25 hits to kill, but the magazine carries precisely three times that many rounds, so you have plenty of ammo to get the job done.

As the video shows, despite the relatively low damage rate, the SMG can hold its own at close range against the Needler and Plasma Rifle. This is because the advantage of an instant-hitting bullet over slow-moving bolts is so pronounced, even at close range. The Plasma Rifle and Needler can definitely crush it if they do their job right, but a sloppy PR or Needler shooter can be easily toppled by a good SMG user.

The SMG clearly also has a use now over long range. It does take a while to kill, but its instant-hitting properties and bullet-hose rate of fire make it quite easy to use at such a range. As long as you make sure to concentrate the reticule on the enemy precisely, you can suppress or kill a BR or Carbine user in the amount of time it takes them to land a successful 4th or 8th headshot – unless they are just really good, in which case you don’t deserve to live anyway. Because of it’s high rate of knocking targets out of scope, it can even be effective as an anti-sniper weapon. It is indeed weak and takes a while to kill, but because that weakness is in conjunction with it’s high easy of use – it is still an effective weapon overall.

Rocket Launcher

The total and complete design of the mod Rocket Launcher is to achieve a style of rocket combat far closer to that of Quake and Unreal Tournament than Halo’s typical fire-and-forget mininuke rockets – where the only thing balancing the weapon’s mindless ease-of-use is it’s ease-of-suicide.

The rockets’ blast radius and blast damage have been greatly reduced. You will only score a 1 hit kill on a full-shield, full-health opponent by directly hitting them with the rocket itself. At max, a glancing blow will only deal about 2/3 of the lethal dose of damage. On the flip side, you get four rockets per magazine, and a relatively high rate of fire.

This makes for sustained, skilled rocket fights which revolve around precise predictive fire. You will either kill the opponent with 2-3 well-placed glancing blows, or a single masterful direct hit. You can not match the precision involved in a direct hit-only rocket using a mini-nuke design. This does not under-power the weapon, because the increase in magazine capacity and rate of fire is exactly in proportion to its decrease in explosive power.

It quite plainly does not erase the risk of suicide either, as the video shows. Firing double the rockets to make the kill means double the chances to fire one off near an obstruction and hurt yourself. Because of the reduced blast damage, and it’s increased damage versus health compared to shields, it is actually possible to shoot the enemy and kill yourself without killing the opponent.

Covenant Carbine

The Carbine is intended as the sole concession to rapid fire, bullet spam headshots in the mod. To bring it in line with the new Battle Rifle, the rate of fire has been increased a bit to double that of the Battle Rifle (meaning it now fires exactly 6 shots per second) and deals exactly half the damage (potential headshot kill in 8 shots). The magazine capacity is also now 24 rounds instead of 18, meaning you’ve got triple the minimum amount of ammo required to make a kill (as with most weapons in the game).

The big catch with the Carbine is that it now uses the shield damage vs health weakness damage property. That means that even though it depletes shields in 7 hits, it can take up to 24 hits or more to completely deplete the enemy’s health if you don’t score a headshot. This places a much higher emphasis on shot placement than with the BR and Magnum – if you don’t score the 4 hit headshot kill with the BR, it kills on the 7th body shot, if you don’t score the 8 hit headshot kill with the Pistol, it kills on the 12th body shot.

The Carbine also has a major difference from the Battle Rifle, Pistol, SMG, and Sniper Rifle in that those weapons’ bullets do not hit absolutely instantly. Their bullet speeds have all been reduced to speeds between 100-400 units per second, so that even though they still travel much faster than a plasma or needler bolt, you still need to lead a bit at extreme ranges to hit the target. The Carbine (and Beam Rifle) actually do hit instantly so that there is precisely 0 leading required even at extreme ranges.

While one might think the Covenant Carbine would those have a distinct long range advantage over the BR, the end result can often be the opposite. While the BR does require leading at long range, the fact that it does not require a headshot to kill becomes an increasingly large advantage the further you are from the target. This is exacerbated by the fact that the Carbine has virtually 0 spread, so whaling on the trigger at a distance is not going to saturate with fire the entire area over the enemy’s shoulders, as it did with past Halo iterations. Despite the fact that the Carbine beam travels 100% instantly, scoring a precise headshot at such great distances is so difficult that it all balances out.

If anything the Carbine’s ability to spam headshots becomes more of a close range advantage. The speed and ease of scoring headshots once shields are depleted is indeed very impressive, as shown in the many plasma pistol combos in the videos. I am almost tempted to call the current Carbine implementation overpowered as compared to the Battle Rifle and Pistol. However, I know for all the easy headshot spam kills shown in the video, I’ve seen firefights where the Carbine’s virtually worthless damage to the rest of the body resulted in countless magazines expended without making a kill. Ultimately I think so far it’s still a unique, complex, and varied equal to the BR and Pistol after the changes I’ve made to it.

Beam Cannon

This is the Halo version of Quake’s Railgun. It kills in one hit (to chest, legs, whatever) and overheats after every shot. It also has no scope magnification, so you are essentially noscoping every shot you make. The beam itself has also been made visually wider, larger, and it takes longer to fade. After such changes we felt the term Beam Rifle was ineffectual…one look at the weapon in action and you’ll see…it’s the Beam Cannon.

The weapon speaks for itself. It is immensely powerful but it also comes with challenges to match. Since it has no splash damage and the visual size of the beam does not affect the actual hit zone, it requires more precision that Halo 3’s Spartan Laser. The rate of fire is extremely slow, and while it can kill from across the map, you’ll have to make that shot without any zoom. I would have liked to disable the ability to switch weapons during the overheat cycle, and add some sort of reloading requirement every 3 shots, but it balances out pretty well.

This weapon was designed not just to add a very powerful, exciting weapon to the game, but to ad variety. First and foremost the problem with the old Beam Rifle was that it was essentially a purple Sniper Rifle with an overheat function and a spammy rate of fire. With my changes, the weapon now has much greater differences in terms of damage, rate of fire, and the basic manner which the weapon is aimed. What’s more, since the Sniper Rifle bullet has been slowed to lead-worthy speeds while the Beam Cannon is hitscan, that ads an extra layer of complexity – you have an extra incentive to try for those extremely long distance noscope beam shots.

Brute Shot

As with many weapons, the changes to the Brute Shot were geared to reduce spam in exchange for skill-intensive precision. The rate of fire was cut in half, the spread removed, and the grenade fuse time lengthened five or ten fold. This causes the Brute Shot grenade to travel further after bouncing, allowing you to utilize its arc and ricochet properties in a wider variety of situations – though it also means that if you miss the target, the grenade is more likely to pass by without exploding and dealing any damage. It now has a 6 round magazine instead of 4; at two direct hits needed to kill, that’s a healthy amount of ammo. The Brute Shot has also been added to more maps, making it more of a main stay of the game and less of a mere novelty.

I believe I have taken the Brute Shot from a spammy token weapon to a unique, tactical, and complex part of the arsenal. The ricochet physics change the weapon’s character completely depending on the situation – in some instances you are forced to make totally precise hits without relying on splash damage at all, in others you can skip the grenade off the ground to explode in the air, maximizing the area of effect. The slow rate of fire, heavy damage, and the precision of the weapon put it in league with the Rocket Launcher, but it still offers a large host of unique features, from the grenade physics, to the faster grenade travel speed, to the higher rate of fire possible.

Sniper Rifle

The Sniper Rifle is undoubtedly the least changed weapon in the game, because it’s always been the least broken. It has been made pretty similar to the Sniper Rifle of Halo 3 – the refire rate was reduced to one shot per 0.75 seconds, and the recoil effect was added to decrease the effective rate of fire even a bit further. The scope was changed from the 2x/10x of prior mod versions, to 5x only. This entails more skill in close-mid range shots as you are forced to noscope rather than rely on the easy 2x magnification, and it entails more skill at extreme long ranges as you have to make do with the relatively low-powered 5x, rather than have a silver platter handed to you with the 10x scope. Lastly, there is no spread on unscoped fire (or any sort of fire) and the bullet has been slowed to speeds where you have to lead a bit at extreme ranges to score a perfect hit.

A large part of the reason these changes were made is because after extensive time spent fighting at mid range with weapons like the BR, PR, RL, and Brute Shot…making long range kills with the SR just feels too easy, and despite the greatly increased range of all other weapons in the game, holding the Sniper Rifle still decides the game a little too easily even on close range maps. I believe the Sniper Rifle should still qualify as a power weapon which plays heavily into resource control to decide matches, and it has the skill curve in manuevers like noscope headshots to deserve that kind of power – I just feel it should be made a bit more challenging. Were it up to me, I’d change the weapon to a bolt-action with 1 to 1.25 second delay between shots, but given that completely remodeling and reanimating the weapon is not practical, recoil will have to do for now.

Shotgun

The Shotgun has finally been completely un-fucked. Gone is the donut spread pattern present in default Halo 2. Gone is the magic distance cap still present  even in Halo 3, where pellets would just disapear and no longer damage after 5-10 yards. In fact, as with the rest of the ordnance in the game, the damage of the shotgun pellets does not reduce over distance at all – it’s already hard enough to hit anything at range in the first place.

The spread has been dialed down from 10 degree to 6 degrees…this is actually virtually identical to the spread of the Quake 3 shotgun. The shotgun now fires 10 pellets, and it takes 10 pellets to kill, so the weapon essentially cannot be overpowered. You’re only going to score a one hit kill if you’re close enough that NONE of the pellets miss – however, you can still deal out a generous pelting over a pretty wide range, often killing in 2, 3, or 4 well placed blasts.

To protect against concerns  that the weapon would be overpowered, I dialed the rate of fire back so there is now a 1.25 second delay between shots, rather than the default 1 second. This is consistent with classic shotguns such as that of the original Doom, Doom 3, and Quake 2. However, it’s been found that the weapon really doesn’t need the slower rate of fire, so this will probably be changed back to 1 second in future versions.

To understand the balance of the Shotgun, it really must be pointed out how inneffective shotgun designs inherently are at longer ranges. The Shotgun really did not need all the EXTRA range nerfs present in Halo’s 1-3. Even with all those extra nerfs stripped out in the mod, the Shotgun still has the shortest range in the game. Even though the spread of the weapon is quite wide, one must realize that the center of the crosshair is still where the most pellets are likely to land. This means means that at mid range, you can’t just point the weapon in the general direction of the target and strike an easy hit. If you do that, you might hit 1 out of 10 times. If you perfectly center the enemy in your crosshairs, you have maybe a 50% or 75% chance of striking with 1 or 2 pellets.

That means at best it will take 5-10 shots to kill someone at a distance even if you aim every shot perfectly. The shotgun has a rate of fire of less than 1 shot per second; to fire 5-10 shots it will take 6-12 seconds. Also, bear in mind that the Shotgun only has a 6 round magazine so you would have to reload before finishing the kill. Meanwhile, an enemy with a BR has a 100% chance of hitting the target every time they have the enemy centered in the crosshairs, they can kill in 4 – 7 hits, and the weapon fires 3 shots per second so if they aim perfectly, they can score a kill in 1-2 seconds. The magazine is also 12 rounds.

If you have a perfectly accurate weapon which can kill in 2-3 seconds, and you are beaten by someone with a weapon that takes at least 6-12 seconds (plus reload time) to kill (if they are lucky), you fucked up royally and you deserve to die. That is the inherant stupidity in claiming that any added range to the shotgun makes it overpowered. The mod at least give you a chance – practically speaking you can at least knock the opponent out of scope while you try to land a grenade or escape the situation, and if the enemy fights so badly that they lose out of attrition – that’s their fault, the odds were all in their favor. In summary, making balance claims against my shotgun is like saying that in real life if a lunatic randomly decides to set up outside with a hunting rifle and shoot innocent bystanders, and a bystander is lucky enough to see the lunatic ahead of time, pick up a rock, and throw it – even though the rock has a very small chance of reaching the lunatic, hitting him in the eye before the lunatic makes the shot, and disabling him for an escape – the situation is unfair to the lunatic with the rifle unless God arbitrarily intervenes and magically scoops the rock out of the air before it gets halfway across the street.

~ by Julian Gnam on October 31, 2009.