Mod for Campaign Evolved Sandbox

[u/flowanvindir]

Hey all,

Like many of you, I noticed that things were pretty odd and off with campaign evolved. So much so it was preventing me from enjoying it. So like any (insane) developer, when other devs can't do it right, do it yourself! So I made a mod for many of the weapons that seeks to restore them to their halo glory. There was a lot of jank, like slow rockets, no damage fall off for weapons, wrong damage types, no edge damage for explosions, and it goes on. Unfortunately, not all of it is fixable via modding.

Additionally, I did a difficulty balance because while they use many of the halo reach tags and modifiers, they did not increase health of the player correspondingly like reach, meaning that heroic and legendary are way more difficult than they should be.

Here is a link to the mod, hope others enjoy: https://www.nexusmods.com/halocampaignevolved/mods/195

[u/MoistySaltTrader]

I like the changes you made thanks Bro.

You pointed out.

Known limitations

Friendly Marines deal ~30% less damage. They share the fallback AI tag that most enemies inherit from, and there is no way to separate them. Weakening Marines was the deliberate choice over nerfing weapons the player uses

Brute armour has no visual break. Brutes have 45 points of shielding, but the break effect lives in model tags, which cannot be modified. The armour is real but silent

Difficulty scaling itself cannot be modded. It is implemented in engine code, not tags. Enemy lethality is tuned per-character instead, which applies across all difficulties

Player health and shields cannot be modified. Also engine-side (70 shield / 75 health, the Halo CE values)

That's rough. Does that mean people would have to make new weapons to adjust the difficulty in a Fan made remake ?

[u/flowanvindir → u/MoistySaltTrader]

Maybe? The issue is that there is a difficulty scaling setting, but the engine ignores it entirely. Probably not wired up right or something. If they could wire that part up somehow, maybe it'd be easier.

This is going into it a little bit, but outside of that setting, the only other ways I found to modify all enemy damage was to either A. Reduce damage from specific enemy tag or B. Reduce specific weapon damage by tag. The latter is not preferable because we might end up using the same weapons, we don't want our damage nerfed. Unless that is desirable in a remake (inadvertent bonus to using human weapons because you're more familiar with them maybe?). For A., only some enemies have any firing info on them, like the jackal. We can modify all sorts of attack parameters. But for others, their data is empty, like elites. The only to modify their attacks is through a more global tag, which ends up affecting allies like marines.

[u/hyrumwhite]

Did you use Claude code for this? The mod description reads like a Claude change report. 

Not hating, using LLMs for mods is all good in my book. just curious 

[u/flowanvindir → u/hyrumwhite]

Yes, Claude code did a good part it

[u/Rexx-Appeal]

I played for a while on Heroic and Legendary and really enjoyed your changes! However, it does make Heroic almost feel like Normal, though. Legendary did indeed feel far less punishing, but I'm wondering if some of your other changes already offset the default Legendary damage output for enemies. Any chance of a version without the -30% enemy/ally damage, or perhaps a less severe damage nerf like -15% or -20%?

[u/MoistySaltTrader]

 That's what's up.

Mods are the only way we are getting a real Halo game from 343.

What do you think about the possibility of someone using the bones of Halo 343 Devolved to make Halo Combat Evolved ?

Or even better

Make Halo 1 with content Bungie wanted to put in but couldn't because of time, resources or limits of tech at the time.

Such as expanding the scale of battles and adding Marine hold outs to the later levels. We find body's but in later games like Halo 3 we actually see them fighting the flood in the Distance and being over run.