- BattleRifle BR55
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- Exalted Mythic Member
In the beginning, Halo 2 was hated because prior to release, we were set up for something completely different. It was like Click, no one expected a sad, tear-jerking ending for a movie advertised as a typical Adam Sandler comedy.
You had all this talk about war on a futuristic Earth, with all these cool features, amazing events, epic confrontations, larger environments, the list goes on.
The announcement trailer showed Earth undergoing a huge war, with explosions all over earth. The graphics were amazing, featuring stencil shadows, real-time reflections, and awesome textures and animations.
E3 '03 showed us what the beginning of Master Chief's adventure on Earth would be like, with a gigantic sprawling metropolis, non-linear environments, Longswords that did more than stupidly get shot, and had such cool events. From defending a marine camp, to driving around the city, the game looked fun as hell. Unfortunately, Staten didn't show off the city enough, so we didn't get much of a look at what that gigantic spire of buildings and towers was like, besides the few glimpses you could catch when the Phantoms started showing up.
Then the final game came out, and barely anything made the cut. The art style, and the technological progression for New Mombasa had completely changed, leaving with us only a few remnants of the E3 demo, mostly the style of the roads at the end of Metropolis.
We were taken away from Earth very early on, and never returned to it, nor saw much more of what was going on, leading many to wonder just what Bungie had in store when they kept touting the tagline "Earth will never be the same."
Then things took a different turn of events when we became the Arbiter. It also didn't help that the first two of his levels did not add anything to the conflict between Humans and Covenant; they didn't even know an "Oracle" was there.
It was also incomplete in a lot of ways. Sure, loading times were cut, but pop-in was now completely horrible. Cutscenes looked unfinished, especially the intro for Outskirts. It had overlapping textures, gigantic missing portions of buildings, and just looked like a garbled mess.
If you had ever looked backwards while at the middle of the bridge in Metropolis, you would have seen how the buildings are too low, and you can see below the skybox. It also showcased that all those buildings you saw before you hopped on a vehicle were sitting atop a giant block. It broke the immersion.
Even this new Halo had some real huge issues. In either Delta Halo or Regret. You can see this "short" wall in the distance, with some protruding ornaments at the top of it. If you got out of the map, you could see just how low the skybox went. That short wall was actually really tall, and presumably was originally supposed to be showcased to its full potential, to give a nice sense of scale in distance.
The problem with this wall is that as soon as you kill Regret, Bungie completely changes the philosophy of this entire area. The next level has you playing as the Arbiter, and if you didn't know, you actually play in this wall. Now, as awesome as it is to know that you're playing in the wall you saw in the previous levels, you quickly learn that this wall must be thousands upon thousands of miles high, and possibly easily visible from space, because if you look down as soon as the level starts, you see the area where the Master Chief was fighting.
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However, what really made all this a problem was that Bungie was just too ambitious. What Halo 2 (and 3) ultimately are is still what Bungie generally had envisioned for Halo 2. There was a lot they had cut, but they always wanted the galactic romp. As much as I love the Arbiter as a character (in Halo 3 more so than 2) I really wish they didn't make him playable. If they had a better planned out schedule and more time to work, Halo 2 could have been closer to their original vision.
Halo 2 was always supposed to close the series, but in a way I'm glad it didn't, because I love Halo 3 and what it did for the story, and the gameplay.
This came out much longer than I expected, and strayed in some ways away from the original idea