And this is exactly why Halo CE aims for reasonable weapon balance. If there was some weapon clearly "better" than others in general in campaign, weapon use would wind up boiling down to "use this cheap weapon in easy spots to save ammo, use the power weapon in hard spots." Which is of course not necessarily a bad thing; plenty of games pull it off extremely well, particularly in the realm of mid-90's shooters. But Bungie wanted to pull off something slightly different, and it seems to have worked quite well, at least in CE.Netrigan said:
Well, sort of. The pistol isn't quite the overpowered sniper rifle it's often made out to be; it is a little overpowered in multiplayer, but mostly the complaining comes from the combination of pistol aesthetic and rifle function. The BR/Carbine of Halo's 2 and 3 is used pretty much as much, and the DMR/Nerfle of Reach probably would be if more loadouts had them and power weapons weren't so ridiculously accessable.
It's also actually extremely hard to 3-bang someone with the pistol due to the reasonable hitboxes and low bullet magnetism on precision weapons. It also has less reticle magnetism than, say, the newer Halo games; it's a more noticeable algorithm, but let's just say that Reach's magnetism, when it locks on, froodlenutzskying locks on, to the point where people switching from Reach to Halo CE often feel that Halo CE feels "slippery".
They didn't make the pistol less powerful in the sequels so much as give it a rifle aesthetic and turn it into the BR; the magnums in Halo's 2 and 3 aren't successors of the M6D so much as odds and ends that don't seem to have any actual purpose in the game.
