Halo 2's Development Was a Gigantic Mess

As the plug is pulled on the avant-garde Xbox Live – and Halo 2, Bungie is feeling a trifle blunt: Not simply were Doughnut 2 and Halo 3 originally unitary game, but the famous Halo 2 E3 demo was "all skunk and mirrors."

This calendar week, Microsoft bequeath be pulling the plug on its Xbox Current service for the original Xbox – happening April 15th, to personify special – and with it dies the multiplayer for Anulus 2, still played by thousands. IT whitethorn be difficult to commemorate in a post-New War 2 human race, where millions play online on their Xbox 360s and PS3s (and the irregular Wii), but console online multiplayer utilised to be a dream at Charles Herbert Best – until the massive winner of Halo 2 cemented it A the right smart of the future.

There's a genuinely enchanting (if long) read over along Eurogamer with Bungie offering some insights into the development of Halo 2. Every bit IT turns out, calling the making of Halo 2 "troubled" would be an understatement: Bungie's reach exceeded its grasp in almost every possible way. While gamers were awestruck past the E3 2003 present, the game's engineering lead Chris Bungler said that aforesaid demo was all "smoke and mirrors."

"The artwork engine that we showed at E3 2003, driving approximately the Earth city… That entire art engine had to follow tangled away, because you could never ship a game on the Xbox with it," said Butcher. "Through putting ourselves through hell, we were able to do a five-minute demonstrate of IT, but afterwards we came back from E3 we had to admit that this art engine was ne'er going to work – it was ne'er loss to support the kind of environments that are real important for a Halo game. Sol we literally scrapped the entire graphics engine and started from scratch."

The level with the Flood in the quarantine was a mere 20% of a "gargantuan, sprawling level that was meticulously built and pass on-constructed, but that could never, ever have shipped in any engine," said Butcher – and those sorts of cutbacks were endemic of a troubled, broken, chaotic development bike in which entire features and levels had to embody tossed call at order to urgently make the ship date.

In fact, the game that in reality hit shelves was only half of what Bungie had unreal up. The other incomplete? Considerably, they took a bit more time on information technology with a much more organized go about this time around, and eventually released it As Halo 3. That's right – the annoying cliffhanger ending to Halo 2? IT wasn't supposed to be like that, in Bungie's original plan.

If you have the time, the whole interview is a really exciting read – all seven pages of it – just thither are besides some snippets particularization the gimpy's "brutal" crunch, among others.

Honestly, it's a testament to Bungie's skill as a developer that Halo 2 turned proscribed as good equally it did, despite the many, many troubles during the game's development. Flawed, yes, but also soundly.

https://www.escapistmagazine.com/halo-2s-development-was-a-gigantic-mess/

Source: https://www.escapistmagazine.com/halo-2s-development-was-a-gigantic-mess/