(WARNING: THE FOLLOWING COMMENT IS VERY STREAM-OF-CONSCIOUSNESS ORIENTED. IT JUMPS TOPICS A COUPLE OF TIMES, AND FORGETS TO EXPLAIN SOME OF THE POINTS IT MAKES—who am I kidding, no one cares. Whatever. I’m posting anyway.)
Better, how about enemies that actually behave differently from one another?
I dunno about D2, but in D1, it felt like the hive and the fallen were functionally identical.
Thralls=Dregs with knives
Acolytes=Dregs with guns, Vandals
Knights=Vandals, Captains
Wizards=Servitors
Acolytes and Dregs work exactly the same. Take cover, peek out from behind cover, fire a few shots, duck back behind cover, change positions for no reason other than to give players an opportunity to shoot them...
The Vex and Cabal suffer from a similar issue, although the connection there is more tenuous.
Basically, those two groups completely ignore cover, and just sort of amble around the battlefield, constantly facing the player, shooting semi-accurately. If you get too close, their melee triggers, and they’ll run after you until they actually get close enough to swing. It doesn’t seem to matter much to them if they actually hit or not.
Plus, I’m sure this has been said before, but can I just point out how hilarious it is that the Cabal brought vehicles to Mars which they NEVER USED? Awfully nice of them to set out those interceptors for us Guardians.
I think they fixed that in the second game, made the Psions start piloting them. Still, though...for three years, the very presence of those vehicles made zero sense.
Back to the Fallen: anyone else feel like they just recycled the Covenant hierarchy? Dregs are basically Grunts—they’re even the only Fallen enemies who use grenades, just like Grunts were the only Covenant to use grenades in Halo 1. They’re also the only Fallen who use Pikes, which behave very similarly to Covenant Ghosts.
Vandals are Jackals. They may not use shields, but they still snipe, and—alternatively—still use projectiles which follow the player.
Stealth Vandals, on the other hand, behave more like the cloaked Elites with their energy swords.
Captains and Elites is a pretty obvious comparison . Their weapons may not be the same, but their roles on the battlefield—commanding a squad of lesser infantry, and playing the part of slightly harder-to-kill adversaries—are pretty much identical.
I think Bungie has had some cool ideas, even after Halo. The Vex as a story concept are cool; a race of colonial super-intelligent microorganisms that are networked together and wrapped up in metal shells vaguely reminiscent of bronze statues? Conceptually, they’re awesome. They borrow a bit from other works of sci-fi, like the Borg from Star Trek, but I think they’re a pretty fresh take on an old archetype.
What I like most about the Vex is that they don’t feel like humans wearing suits (even though they’re still bipedal)—there’s no indication in the narrative that they think at all like human beings. You never talk to a Vex. They’re obviously intelligent, but at the same time, very alien.
Their behavior in-game, on the other hand, makes me question how they managed to spread across space at all. They just sort of walk around and shoot at you. This is the best a hyper-intelligent hive-mind machine race can do? Do Guardians emit some sort of Stupidity Field?
Story-wise, Bungie has some good ideas. It takes them a couple of tries, which—given how little time they have to work on each game—is a bit of a disadvantage, but they get there. As far as enemy behavior goes though, they don’t really bring anything revolutionary to the table. Not since Halo 1.
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