Halo: Campaign Evolved's Secret Difficulty Modifiers

This blog post is part of a series on exploring the Halo: Campaign Evolved game API. After I got the debug menu up and running, I went looking for the next thing the game wasn’t telling me about out of the box - because, of course I would. It didn’t take too long, since I am writing this post so quickly after the previous one. As it turns out, there’s a bunch of customizations that are only partially exposed through the in-game UI, that you can set through some configuration *.ini files. Halo: Campaign Evolved has a Difficulty Modifiers screen when you start a campaign mission. It gives you a handful of dropdowns where you can customize damage resistance, shield regeneration, player damage output, melee damage, and ammo, among others. This is actually a really neat feature that allows the player to adjust the game to the level of difficulty they feel like playing under, and I wish more games had this. Your browser does not support the video tag. While the options in the UI are…