- last post: 01.01.0001 12:00 AM PDT
Paraphrased from Vidoc Is Quisnam Protero Damno!
There was this thing we really didn't identify in Halo 2. That if you spawn everybody with a dual wieldable weapon like the SMG, it changed the game. people will stop stopped meleeing and people stopped grenading because when your dual wielding you can't do either of those... The Assault Rifle works really well with the golden three things of Halo - Weapons, Grenades, and Melees"
As one of my fellow B.net regulars posted earlier, play Halo 2 without the 1.1 patch and you will see how weak the melee is. The people at Bungie, and from what I gather from the Vidoc Is Quisnam Protero Damno!, when they released Halo 2 they erred with the SMG and made melee and grenades too weak. Halo 3 is a way of fixing that, but as a temporary fix, that is why Bungie released the 1.1 patch. However, the 1.1 patch opened the door for some of the infamous button glitches that have plagues Halo 2 for the last year and a half.
Now, melees are powerful because of the patch 1.1, but I think it was a way of trying to steer Halo 2 in the correct direction after it was released.