GnaM's Weapon Balance Mod for Halo 2, version 1.5 released!

[GnaM]

The new version of my mod is done, fixing and improving tons of stuff. Get it here:

http://files.filefront.com/GnaMs+Mod+fo ... einfo.html

For weapon stats just expand the description on the filefront link and scroll down, or download the file (60k) and open the readme.

Introduction

Welcome to GnaM's Weapon Balance Mod for Halo 2. If you haven't guessed by now, the point of this mod is to address perceived problems with multiplayer gameplay in Halo 2. Of course, by this point, most players have moved on to Halo 3, but to the peception of some, not even Halo 3 has managed to fix many of the series' issues, and so development of this mod has continued.

For starters, this mod addresses the ever-present excessive auto-aim in the series by removing it entirely. Each weapon has 0 auto-aim, and reduced magnetism. You will not hit something if your weapon isn't pointed precisely at it.

Next up, an even more persistent problem; the excessive levels of spread and innaccuracy found in all 3 Halo games have been addressed. Unlike a normal Halo game where only the Pistol or Battle Rifle and a few power weapons are accurate enough to kill beyond a few meters, and everything else sucks, in this mod unnecessary shot spread has been removed from all weapons. The SMG has the most spread in the game next to the Shotgun, and it's still as accurate as the Halo 3 Assault Rifle, if not more so. Rather than having 50 crappy close range spam weapons and a couple that are effective out to ranges where skilled firefights actually occur, every weapon in the game is reasonably accurate and skilled, and most weapons fall into some variation of the mid-range category.

Lastly, a multitude of tweaks have been made to each individual weapon to improve combat. Virtually every weapon carries enough ammo in one magazine to kill 3 people, so you're never put in situations where it's impossible to kill a single enemy without unloading an entire clip into their head. The grenades have been tweaked with longer fuse times and larger blasts. The Needler has been reworked as a non-homing weapon which is both unique and skilled to use. The Battle Rifle is semi-automatic and functions almost identically to the Halo 1 Pistol...leaving the headshot spam of the old Battle Rifle and Carbine behind. The Rocket Launcher now functions more like that of Quake or UT, where the Rocket's blast is much smaller, but you get 4 rockets in a magazine and you actually have to engage in skilled firefights to kill with it.

Major changes since version 1.0:

- Dual-Weilding has been removed.

I tried to fix it in version 1.0 somewhat successfully. The weapons were all highly accurate when single-weilding, but dual-fire would increase spread heavily to the point that you'd barely hit anything beyond point-blank range. However, a few weapons could not be modded to follow that rule, and the whole thing was too much of a balance liability which wasn't worth the trouble. In the future an alternate version of the mod might be produced with DW enabled just so you can try it out, but for now it will stay nixed.

- Damage no longer optimized for "Extra Damage" option

In version 1.0, at the last minute I decided to design the weapons with the consideration for playing with both default damage, and with using the "Extra Damage" option in the gametype settings. The default damage would be more nerfed, for people who didn't like 3sk's on the BR, or didn't want to worry about overpowered Dual-wielding incidents. People who wanted full-on Halo CE-style heavy damage could use the "Extra Damage" and get settings tailored specifically for them. Unfortunately, since the Extra Damage setting just applied a flat 1.3x damage increase to everything, it was hard to get the exact values I wanted for each mode and too many compromises had to be made. Some weapons were underpowered in one mode, while overpowered in the other...

It was too much to work with. That idea has been scrapped and everything is now optimized for the default mode. As such, everything has been able to get exactly how I wanted it, and no real compromises were made either for Extra Damage or for Dual-Weilding or what not.

- New "Quake" style Rocket Launcher

This was an idea I had wanted to acheive since I first started experimenting with Halo mods, but because of the huge visual effect of the rocket explosions, it wasn't feasible to reduce blast damage to a level suitable for such an idea to work. You'd be engulfed in flame yet receiving chip damage. Then while working on this version I figured out I could change the effect for rocket explosions to be identical to that of the Brute Shot's. As a result, blasts could be reasonably shrunken to the proper levels, and now you have a Rocket Launcher which can be fired at a quick rate from a 4 round magazine and still be balanced; requiring skill to land hits.

- New "Railgun" style Beam Rifle

I'd been toying with this idea for a while but couldn't find a way to make it work. Then I realized that by making the Beam Rifle overheat with every shot, you'd have a good enough visual cue to explain why it took so long to fire another shot, and to know precisely when you could fire again. More importantly, I realized that the scope could be removed, which would ensure that killing in a single chest shot with the slow-firing Beam Rifle would be just as skilled as scoring a headshot with the rapid-firing, scope-capable Sniper Rifle. The end result is an intense, exciting, and very unique weapon. It's not just a purple reskin of the Sniper Rifle any more.

- Shotgun damage has been toned down

In version 1.0, I toned the Shotgun damage way up in order to compensate for the hard-coded donut spread pattern. I wanted to somehow acheive the same mid-range effectiveness as the Shotgun in my Halo 1 mod, which has a regular even spread pattern. However, damage had to be increased so much to acheive this, that it became heavily overpowered at close and close-mid range. Since then, I've reworked the pellet count and damage to acheive only 80% of the Shotgun's previous power, which strikes a better balance. Now it doesn't suck too bad beyond spitting distance, but it's not a veritable "win button" at close range either.

- SMG muzzle climb has been reduced

By reducing the SMG's rate of fire, the muzzle naturally lessens as well. I was going to increase damage to compensate, but the truth is that the SMG is already so effective with its tight spread and low muzzle climb that it's more balanced with less damage.

- Plasma Rifle, Carbine, and Plasma Pistol damage have been toned up

In version 1.0, these weapons were nerfed because of considerations with Dual Weilding and the "extra damage" option. Now that both of those features are left out, these weapons can come at full power again and are totally usefull. In particular, the Plasma Rifle and Plasma Pistol deserve greater damage, because they require leading to hit accurately and therefore are more skilled than their instant-hitting lead-based counterparts. The Carbine also has a 27 round magazine instead of only 18 rounds, so it's far more useful than before.

- Needler reworked, is now as effective as originally intended.

Because of the slow travel speed of the Needler's ordinance, it was difficult to make the weapon usefull. However, because that's the very feature which makes it unique, I didn't want to make it any faster. Instead, I increased damage, removed the delay between when the needles stick in you and when they detonate and actually hurt you, and expanded the Needler's magazine from 3x to 4x the amount needed for a single kill. Once this was done, the Needler suddenly became plenty effective.

- 2x Scopes added to the Plasma Rifle and Needler

It's always been intended in my Halo mods that the Plasma Rifle be limited only by the user's skill, and therefore accurate to as far a distance as the player can accurately lead and hit the target. Think of it more as an alien counterpart to the Assault Rifle than to the SMG. This is why the spread has been made almost non-existant, but to facilitate this concept, the scope was added.

The Needler's needles are too slow to be practical in most long-range situations, but the same philosphy applies. I want its effectiveness to be limited only by the player's aiming and leading ability. Therefore it got a scope too.

One side effect of these additions is that the tiny icon in the top right corner shows that you are using a Beam Rifle and a Carbine instead of a Plasma Rifle and Needler respectively. This is a result of the way the scopes were hacked in, but its very minor and negligible.

- The Magnum now carries 16 rounds per magazine

Originally I wanted to make the Magnum kill in 6 hits using half the 12 round magazine. However, then when I made the "Extra Damage" optimizations, it became an 8 shot kill. When I scrapped the Extra Damage opimization, I found that 6 hits was too powerful for default damage...so I increased the magazine size so you could still conceivably make 2 kills per magazine.

- Refire delay from Halo 3 added to the Sniper Rifle

Instead of the original 0.5 seconds, the new refire delay is 0.75 seconds, which prevents you from getting easy kills by spamming double body hits.

- General bug fixes and optimization

All in all, I was able to continually polish everything and get it coming together nearly perfectly. I got to put in a lot of hands-on play sessions with a friend of mine, and we were having a lot more fun that we ever had with regular Halo 2 or Halo 3.

Plans for Version 2:

This version was mainly about bringing the overall balance up to speed and making everything as even as possible. In some cases, some things may have become "too balanced" and that will be the focus of future work on the mod; establishing weapon heirarchy and addressing weapon and map control in a way which promotes strategy without making any weapons too nerfed or too overpowered.

In weapon terms, this means tweaking things up and down here and there. The SMG, being a spawn weapon and also being the easiest spray weapon in the game, will become a bit weaker. The Plasma Rifle and Needler, requiring you to search them out, and also that you lead and use more skill, will be concertedly more powerful. The Magnum will be exclusively geared as a hardcore weak spawn weapon, and will function essentially like an HCE pistol butwith an 8 headshot kill, as an optional starting weapon for those who really want to be forced to continually search out better weapons. There won't be a stark division of lots of crap weapons and a few decent ones...instead there will be a smooth heirarchical progression from "tier 1" to "tier 8" which keeps you moving across the map but never leaves you feeling stuck with an utterly crap weapon.

The biggest aspect though won't be changes to the weapons, but changes to the maps...reworking the item placement on maps to do more justice to the weapon characteristics that are allready present.

The former dual-weildable weapons are actually good now, so they don't have to be littered across the map by the multitudes like cheap trash. They'll be spaced out evenly so each has an individual "domain". Redundant copies of the same weapon will be removed or replaced.

Power weapons will be rearranged to promote better map flow and reflect the current new heiarchy of weapon power. The Sword is more of a niche weapon now being so short ranged, so it won't apear in "THE POWER WEAPON SPOT" anymore. In some cases, the Shotgun will take its place. In others, a truly powerful weapon like the Sniper Rifle or Rocket Launcher will be moved to its spot to space the power items out more.

Lastly, wherever possible I'd like to use some of the more unusual weapons a little more. When the map is big enough for multiple weapons of the same type, instead of having 2 BR's or 2 Snipers on the map, there'll be a BR and a Carbine...a Sniper Rifle and a Beam Rifle...even the Brute Shot should take on an increased role.

I've already got some ideas for what I'll do for each individual map, so I think it'll go well. I've got high hopes.

[Eaton]

Pictures would be nice.

[mr_penguin]

Judging by the description it seems good, I'll try it later when I have more time.

I think click16 may be able to fix the icon things on the needler. He's good with HUD.

[OwnZ joO]

Sounds sweet, maybe I'll give this a try if a bunch of people play it online or something.

[NotZachary82]

I think click16 may be able to fix the icon things on the needler. He's good with HUD.

BKDs are easy to edit

[SkgSkrillaka]

PPf's..

I suppose that's alrite considering each patch is around 3,000 bytes each

LOL at the needler

[UR MAST3R]

I like some of your ideas but 0 auto aim? Every FPS that I have ever played has auto aim. In my opinion it should have been reduced because the default auto aim was way too high. Like I said, I agree with most of the other stuff though.

[Aumaan Anubis]

This sounds cool, but 0 auto aim is incredibly difficult. Though some people are experts at team killing , try to hit your teammate easily. It's not easy.

[OwnZ joO]

This sounds cool, but 0 auto aim is incredibly difficult. Though some people are experts at team killing , try to hit your teammate easily. It's not easy.

It's not really that bad once you get used to it and it makes it a lot more competitive, I used to play halo 2 : Combat Evolved and it had 0 autoaim and 0 magnetism, and people got used to it.

[SkgSkrillaka]

magnetism and autoaim are the same things, im sure of it.

omg are you serious people?
0 autoaim makes no difference to me
makes you more skillfull in my opinion

[Aumaan Anubis]

magnetism and autoaim are the same things, im sure of it.

Nope.

[SkgSkrillaka]

magnetism and autoaim are the same things, im sure of it.

Nope.

explanation? possibly?
Edit: ah I see now

[GnaM]

I like some of your ideas but 0 auto aim? Every FPS that I have ever played has auto aim. In my opinion it should have been reduced because the default auto aim was way too high. Like I said, I agree with most of the other stuff though.

LOL, what FPS have you been playing? Every other hardcore multiplayer shooter out there has no auto-aim. Sure, sticks are harder to use than a mouse, but that's what the magnetism is for.

This sounds cool, but 0 auto aim is incredibly difficult. Though some people are experts at team killing , try to hit your teammate easily. It's not easy.

I've been playing campaign for both Halo 1 and Halo 2 for 2 years with no auto-aim, and my friend and I have been playing a lot of matches at this mod, and we can hit things just fine. The only difference is that you no longer hit targets when you shouldn't, for example... aiming at the air 3 inches next to the enemy's ear with the Sniper Rifle and making a headshots which happens all the time even in Halo 3 (which you can tell cause of Save Films).

magnetism and autoaim are the same things, im sure of it.

Auto-aim essentially makes bullets automatically shift course to hit your target even if your crosshair isn't on the target. For example, aiming a foot to the left of your enemy's head in Halo 2 and you get a headshot anyway.

Magnetism just makes your aim gravitate slightly towards the enemy once it's close, and makes it "stick" to the target a bit once the enemy is already in your crosshairs. The net effect is basically just that it lowers your sensitivity once you've already made the wide sweeping motions of turning to face the general direction of your enemy, since you only need to make fine adjustments at that point. Otherwise you would over-steer and your crosshair would constantly fly back and forth past the enemy.

[GnaM]

Oops double post, how do you delete posts?

[NotZachary82]

you report them. =/

[patchesreusch]

sounds aight

[GnaM]

My friend and I recorded some matches this weekend. There's lot's of footage to sort through, but here's what I got up so far:

BR vs Rockets vs Needler vs Magnum vs Sniper vs PP
Shows off all of these weapons fairly well. Single-shot BR 4sk's, Quake-style Rockets, non-homing power-hitting Needler, and the backup Magnum.

Plasma Rifle Beats BR at Mid Range
Due to the scope and lack of spread, the Plasma Rifle is now almost as effective as the BR at close range, provided you either lead very well or your target is sticking to an enclosed space with limited room to dodge.

Deathmatch on Ascension
Combat with Magnum, Sniper, Rockets, BR, PR, SMG, and Shotgun. Notice at the beginning of the vid that despite its 8 shot kill, the Magnum still gives you a serious chance to kill against powerful weapons, provided you play the situation right. A repeat of the BR vs PR fight is also conducted with the players' roles reversed, showing that regardless of the strengths and weaknesses of the weapons, player skill is still the main determiner of victory.

Pink and Purple Pansy Power Party
This match was played on Foundation with Covenant weapons on the map. To show the strengths and weaknesses of the Needler, we both attempted to kill each other with it at long range and gradually worked our way into close range combat. Pay very close attention at 1:40 to see just how damaging it is when you actually score hits.

Plasma Pistol Pwnage
By using headshots, the PP proceeds to beat the Sword, Needler, and Carbine at close range. Also notice at the beginning of the video, how weak the Magnum is as a primary weapon.

Railgun Duels
We played this match with Beam Rifle starts and rifles on the map. The railgunishness of the Beam Rifle should be highly evident.

Rifles on Burial Mounds
More rifle work, mostly showing the Carbine and Beam.

More to come....

Note: There are a few features shown in the videos not available in the just-released version 1.5 of the mod. I already started on version 2.0 so in WIP build was used on some maps. Here's the differences:

1) The Magnum shown in the vids on Ascension and Foundation fires slower and is more accurate than in version 1.5. It's virtually identical to the original HCE pistol in rate of fire and accuracy, the only difference being the 8-shot-kill. Beaver Creek is the only map in the videos showing the 1.5 version, which fires considerably faster, but is twice as inaccurate.

2) The weapon layout shown in Ascension is totally new and scheduled to debut in version 2.0, features no Banshee, no duplicate weapon spawns, and more spread-out re-arranged weapon locations.

[CaptainPoopface]

I like the railgun-style beam rifle. For a railgun and carbine duel, the carbine seems overpowered. Not sure about the rockets, since the rocket launcher is my favorite weapon and the stock version is actually half decent. The needler looks overpowered - the guy on top just sprays laterally without aiming in the Beaver Creek clip and does plenty of damage that way. I like the toned down battle rifle.

The players in these clips should do a better job of leeching off each other's screens to pounce when the other guy is reloading, find the enemy, zoom in with the scope on a nearby rock so the enemy can't figure out where you are based on what you're looking at, etc. But that's neither here nor there.

All in all, I think you're putting in a lot of work for not much payoff. Everyone will have his own individual reaction or preference about each weapon and the weapon placement. I don't think you'll find many people to play online, not just because of the dearth of modders these days, but because it's only a slight variation on the same game we've been playing for years, and now H3 is out. But if you have enough friends to make it worth your while, by all means keep at it, and thanks for sharing.

[G.I.R.]

I think this is actually pretty cool and adds a little bit more life to Halo 2. With a few more modifications/additions, it could make Outstanding for sure.

[GnaM]

I like the railgun-style beam rifle. For a railgun and carbine duel, the carbine seems overpowered. Not sure about the rockets, since the rocket launcher is my favorite weapon and the stock version is actually half decent. The needler looks overpowered - the guy on top just sprays laterally without aiming in the Beaver Creek clip and does plenty of damage that way. I like the toned down battle rifle.

Thanks, I like the new Beam Rifle too. I'm actually considering adding back a 2x scope because as it stands, in some cases the Beam Rifle is actually inferior to weapons like the BR at long range...especially on maps like Collosus with dim lighting where it's hard to see.

The Carbine might look overpowered but a lot of people actually have trouble using it. Technically it should be 12 shots to kill instead of 9 to be equal with the BR in terms of kill speed, but due to the fact that it's hard to fire at max rate 9 actually isn't too bad. I'm going to try bringing it back to 12 though.

On the Needler, I think the point you're missing is that the Needles travel slow as hell, and therefore they deserve to do more damage than other weapons. The other thing is that in every kill with the Needler on the Beaver Creek video, the victim had his shields downed with the Sniper Rifle first. At that point a player has such little health left that you could kill by spraying laterally with virtually anything, including the stock BR burst and SMG - which are instant-hitting point-and-click weapons. Considering the fact that the victim had plenty of time to dodge and avoid the needles, I think it's fine.

All in all, I think you're putting in a lot of work for not much payoff. Everyone will have his own individual reaction or preference about each weapon and the weapon placement. I don't think you'll find many people to play online, not just because of the dearth of modders these days, but because it's only a slight variation on the same game we've been playing for years, and now H3 is out. But if you have enough friends to make it worth your while, by all means keep at it, and thanks for sharing.

Honestly, just the satisfaction of seeing the game the way it should have been in the first place and exemplifying the solution to all the series' flaws is enough for me. On top of that, I've had much more fun playing this mod with my friend in the past few weeks than I ever had with Halo 3 and it's mediocre n00b-friendly game design. Just for LAN's I think it's worth it, which is fine because there's no games worth playing on XBL anyway.

I think this is actually pretty cool and adds a little bit more life to Halo 2. With a few more modifications/additions, it could make Outstanding for sure.

Thanks!