If you've ever played the Halo games, something you'll quickly realize is how shit plasma guns are at actually killing things in comparison to their ballistic firearm equivalents. This is for numerous balancing reasons, between both the campaign and multiplayer. Instead their strength is primarily to weaken energy shields, whereas projectile weapons are much more effective at killing unshielded targets.

So for instance, you'll be playing the campaign and you'll see common marines take multiple plasma bolts to the face and shrug it off. This leads to the misconception that they're relatively underpowered as far as energy weapons go, and that energy shields are weak/weak against energy shields and will be quickly defeated by them.

The thing is, we have plenty of lore to go by that goes against this:

• Dismemberment

• Third degree burns through armor from a grazing shot

• Blowing through an armored target instantly

• Then you have overcharged bolts that can do this and this

• Even the official website outright says plasma vaporizes flesh

The game manual lists these numbers, but I couldn't tell you what they mean or even begin to quantify them.

I realize that discrepancies like this are common in transmedia franchises, where sometimes certain "EU" or supplementary pieces of media take egregious amounts of artistic liberty that can sometimes exaggerate elements of the core storyline in ways that are obviously without regard for the source material.

However, in the case of the Halo franchise, I don't believe this to be a problem largely due to the amount of internal involvement and oversight in non-video game projects that the core studios have/had.

The thing is though, this argument doesn't work in the first place. Often overlooked, Halo outright tells us the threat of the Covenant in it's first few minutes:

• Explosion

• Blasts open a door

• Another blast

• More explosions

• Last one for good measure

All of these are scripted to occur the same way every time, meaning they're put there intentionally. The developers are trying to convey the threat of the player's enemy by having them instantly kill NPCs along their way. This doesn't happen in other gameplay sections for the purposes of game balance.

There's also instances of them using their weapons to breach doors gradually, such as here and here. The former case is described here in the novelization.

At the very least, I think we can safely agree that the notion plasma weapons are as dangerous as they are in gameplay is inaccurate based on information both within the game and in the supplementary material.