Vanilla CE 2011 LASO refers to Halo CE on Legendary with the full roster of the 14 skulls active which originally shipped with Halo CEA; including Grunt Funeral, which was originally a preorder bonus.
The 14 skulls of Halo CE 2011 LASO are as follows.
Iron: Player death restarts the level in Solo, but reverts to checkpoint in Co-op.
Mythic: Enemy vitalities x2.
Foreign: Can't pick up Covenant guns nor Plasma Grenades.
Famine: Weapons dropped by AI have half ammo.
Bandanna: Player has unlimited ammo and grenades, but still has to reload.
Fog: Player radar disabled.
Malfunction: One HUD element is disabled, and it alternates each time you respawn.
Recession: Magazine depletion rate x2.
Black Eye: Player shield recharge disabled, but melee hitting an enemy or using a medkit restores shields to full.
Eye Patch: Aim assist & magnetism disabled.
Grunt Funeral: Dead Grunts explode like Plasma Grenades. Their detonation timers usually don't start if the player hasn't seen the Grunt.
Boom: All damage effects have x2 radius; including explosions, AI melee attacks, and environment flames.
Piñata: Enemies drop Plasma Grenades when hit by player melee, except Grunts if Grunt Funeral is enabled.
Grunt Birthday Party: Grunts that die from a shot to the head produce a Grunt cheer sound (and confetti in CEA).
PoA on 2011 LASO is easier than on Legendary, but is also incredibly volatile.
LASO is frankly a stupid enough concept for a difficulty setting as it is since the skulls almost always make the game worse and there's little consistency when it comes to the skull selection of each Halo game, but CE 2011 LASO is especially stupid since CE's gameplay complexity is almost entirely gone and you're left with a rather mindless and annoying minigame.
To be clear, my distaste towards LASO is mostly about how a lot of people in the Halo community treat it as the ultimate difficulty setting of Halo the same way that Ultra-Nightmare is the ultimate difficulty setting of New Doom, but the difference is that the LASO experience of each Halo game tends to vary from being a dumb party minigame to being a barely possible masochistic experience where the gameplay has been reduced to such a mountain of cheese that you'd think Sheogorath is involved.
This pattern with LASO is not really the fault of Halo devs for their skull selection though, as LASO was never supposed to be a difficulty mode in the first place. The 2004 H2 skulls were just secret party game style gameplay modifiers; which in H3 got split into Gold Skulls for party game style extra difficulty, and Silver Skulls for more neutral party game style modifiers. Such party game style modifiers should remain, but in lower categories than skulls which don't lower the game's quality; with outright cheat skulls being in the lowest category.
I would separate skulls into 4 separate categories.
Onyx Skulls: Extra difficulty modifiers that add score while not lowering the game design quality, such as Fog & Tough Luck.
Gold Skulls: Party game style extra difficulty modifiers that add score while lowering the game design quality, such as Catch & Ghost.
Silver Skulls: Party game style neutral modifiers that don't affect score, such as IWHBYD & Boom.
Bronze Skulls: Cheat modifiers that nullify score, such as Bandanna & Acrophobia.
These 4 skull categories would organize skulls more appropriately, while allowing for a Legendary All Onyx Skulls On difficulty setting to exist as a difficulty above Legendary which doesn't break the game's core combat design.
Now, the reason I picked the 2011 iteration of CE LASO is because CE has gotten more skulls added to it in MCC over time, including Acrophobia which is basically god mode in terms of movement, so in a way 2011 LASO feels like the purest form of CE LASO since it was the first set of CE skulls.
2011 LASO PoA gameplay basically boils down to just using your infinite Frag Grenades from a safe distance, plus occasionally some Magnum headshots and melee. The only thing you really need to worry about are Grunt bodies and chain reaction grenades.
This counts as part of the Legendary Deathless PoA video series because the L in LASO stands for Legendary, and the Iron skull makes the level a Deathless challenge on Solo, which works out since this is a Solo focused video series.
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Full list of this video series is in the description of the Vanilla CE video linked below, ordered there from top to bottom according to my personal ranking of specifically the Legendary PoA gameplay experience quality in each version of CE.
Vanilla CE: [ Ссылка ]
Vanilla CE [2011 LASO]: »You Are Here«
This is a video series where each video is a playthrough of the first level of Halo CE on Legendary difficulty without dying; showcasing a different version of CE each time.
The point of this is to have a place to easily compare the infantry combat game design of different versions of CE from a fairly skilled Halo player's perspective.
Vanilla CE [2011 LASO PoA]
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