- Fatso
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- Exalted Legendary Member
http://electronics.howstuffworks.com/halo-rifle-pistol4.htm
"...in Halo 1 we had the assault rifle which was just a bullet hose and the pistol which was very accurate and did lots of damage in head shots. Around the office everybody uses the pistol because, especially in single player, it's really easy to kill the little grunt guys, and it's much more accurate in multiplayer.
"Then we, you know, unleashed [Halo:CE] on the world and everybody wanted to use the assault rifle because everybody wanted to use the big, powerful looking, you know, powerful sounding gun. So while we intended most people to use the pistol a lot and use the assault rifle sometimes, it ended up people played all the way through with the assault rifle.
"When we looked at what we wanted to do with the weapons in Halo 2, the first thing that we wanted to do was we wanted to make it so that the pistol was a lot more appealing to people. So we made it (the pistol) into the powerful looking battle rifle. Then we wanted to make the assault rifle more into a support weapon that people would use sometimes in the right situations when they need a bullet hose. We made that (the assault rifle) into the SMG. So really, the Halo 1 assault rifle and the Halo 1 pistol, we just used the exact same tags and data. We just changed the models and the sound, so people would want to use the one that we wanted them to use more... we literally just changed the models on the old tags."
The AR in Halo 2 is the SMG and the pistol became the BR because too many people basically equated the size of the weapon to mean it was more powerful.