Halo 2: The Big Guy is Baaaaack!

[Anonymous]

http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/press/2002/aug02/08-08Halo02PR.asp

The screens so far look good. It looks like they were able to revamp the graphics engine to take advantage of all that DX8.1 stuff they weren't able to incorporate the first time around (bump-mapping, insane lighting and shadowing effects, etc, etc.)

[Anonymous]

Link to Bungie's announcement... screenshots can be found linked from there...

http://www.bungie.net/perlbin/blam.pl?file=/site/1/news/stories/halo_2_announced.html

[Lando]

Now, That is something I can get excited about!

:D

[Derek Smart [3000AD]]

/me raising hand!

I'm so there!! Man, this is great news!!! Halo is my fav XBox title!!

[Anonymous]

I take it back, the shots don't look good, they look pretty damn good.

They really upped the detail on everything... the Master Chief looks a lot better (notice the reflection of the hallway in his visor?), plus all the bump mapping and shading really added a lot more "texture". The hallways look a lot more detailed (on a Doom3/Unreal II-kinda level).

The major big plus is the shadows and lighting... imagine just how much creepier it will be having an alien just launch out of the shadow and into your face.

There's some other Bungie artwork released on the 'Net that has people speculating that this time the battle has moved to Earth. You can see what looks like Earth and the moon, and the planet's surface is just blazing with explosions and massive fires.

Bad guys will be the Covenant and a new race (so I guess no Flood), plus of course all the massively-multiplayer goodness you'd get out of Xbox Live (network coop, some kind of massively-multiplayer ring world with thousands of Master Chief's running around).

I was reading Dean Takahashi's Xbox book recently, and he said that when MS bought Bungie, Jason Jones and team realized that they didn't have enough time to implement what they wanted for multiplayer (a massively-multiplayer ring world with thousands of players on it at the same time), and so they instead focused on the single-player campaign for the system launch. It really looks like Halo2 is going to be more of what they wanted originally for Halo.

Of course, they're also adding that there will be another epic single-player campaign as well.

There are quotes from Jason Jones that were released today saying they totally rebuilt the graphics engine from scratch. That makes sense, because they were in the middle of building PC and Mac versions when MS bought them, so they didn't have time to totally rebuilt the code back then. Now they're going to have an engine with the knowledge that every system will have vertex and pixel shaders, and environmental bump mapping, and all those other goodies that a GeForce3-class graphics chip can give you.

[mtkafka]

Wow. Maybe this game will be released before Team Fortress 2 (or Half Life 2) and Duke Nukem Forever! :lol:

etc

[Greg Kasavin]

Any gun fetishists in the house? How come that new submachine gun the Chief is holding looks almost exactly like a FA-MAS? Who does Chief think he is, Solid Snake?

[Wholly Schmidt]

Chief? Chieeeeeeeeeeeeeeeef!!!

[Brooski]

Any gun fetishists in the house? How come that new submachine gun the Chief is holding looks almost exactly like a FA-MAS?

You mean the one in this pic?

http://www.bungie.net/images/site/halo/screenshots/scrn_115.jpg

That's not a FA MAS -- the FA MAS clip points forward, not back, and sits behind the trigger.

[wumpus]

The screens so far look good. It looks like they were able to revamp the graphics engine to take advantage of all that DX8.1 stuff they weren't able to incorporate the first time around (bump-mapping, insane lighting and shadowing effects, etc, etc.)
Wait a second. I thought that was the reason the game couldn't be quickly ported to the PC?

I can respect their marketing reasons to keep Halo exclusive to Xbox until the sequel hits, but don't bullshit us.

[Anonymous]

I think the arguement on that is that the hardware calls are different on Xbox than they are on a regular PC, however the feature sets are similiar. It's an Nvidia graphics chip, a close cousin of the GeForce 3/4 families, and the first Halo certainly didn't have much of the eye candy that it could have had...

The way the Xbox hardware interacts is completely different than the way PC hardware interacts, but that doesn't mean you can't have bump-mapping, vertex shading, and pixel shading in both.

[Gibreal]

Carnack predicts...tomorrow's PA talks about this announcement and they have something sarcastic to say about the first Halo.

[Wholly Schmidt]

PA? Sarcastic about the Xbox? Never!

[Gibreal]

I don't know how to cross-thread on this BBS, if you even can, but to go along with my controversial post on consoles going online...I'd be willing to be that when Halo 2 comes out you see it seeling yet another round of XBoxes and even more importantly XBox Live.

If you can get a game that rocks that hard, with the user-friendliness of a console system that competes with what you can get graphicly on a PC (albeit at lower resolution) then you've got a hit and something to validate (in my eyes at least) the whole consoles going online thingie.

TROLL ALERT: BTW, all you PC boys enjoy the original Halo while I'm trouncing some fools online with my broadband-only enabled Halo 2 with my voice-chat headset talkin' smack! :D

[Jason Becker]

"I think the arguement on that is that the hardware calls are different on Xbox than they are on a regular PC,"

So the guys who ported GTA3 in what 6 months(and I could name other games too) must be geniuses, since the PS2 is way a more propriatery design than the Xbox. Like Wumpus said its a load... Halo is coming in summer 2003 cause MS said thats when.


"BTW, all you PC boys enjoy the original Halo"

Nope I'll have been enjoying Unreal 2, UT 2003, NOLF 2, TRON 2.0 and maybe even DOOM III by then. Halo was a great game but FPS gamers know the PC is where its at. :lol:

[Kool Moe Dee]

"I think the arguement on that is that the hardware calls are different on Xbox than they are on a regular PC,"

So the guys who ported GTA3 in what 6 months(and I could name other games too) must be geniuses, since the PS2 is way a more propriatery design than the Xbox. Like Wumpus said its a load... Halo is coming in summer 2003 cause MS said thats when.


GTA3 used Renderware, a cross-platform 3D engine, as its rendering API. Needless to say, this helps tremendously when porting a game.

Please stop kicking around "the Halo conspiracy." It's getting about as tired as Dave Long's anti-Xbox rants.

[Murph]

Long's not anti-Xbox. He's a Gamecube fanboi, that's all. :)

[Rob O'Boston]

Murph, that is complete bull! Long is SO anti-X Box its nauseating. He only likes the Cube because he knows it irks Gates more when he loses a sale to Nintendo rather than Sony. :x :x :x :x

[bgumm]

the only game i stlil consistently play on xbox is halo. and i can't freakin' wait to get my hands on it. (next fall...[sigh])

[Jason Becker]

"Please stop kicking around "the Halo conspiracy." It's getting about as tired as Dave Long's anti-Xbox rants."

The bullshit explanations for Halo is getting old too. Halo could have been done much quicker. I don't know why people can't comprehend the fact MS may have had marketing behind their decision. Nope its about that funky memmory...

[Brad Grenz]

Totally, of the two possible explaniations the "conspiracy" theory is far more plausible. No one's saying it's an easy two week port, but a year is far longer than neccissary. And if MS was at all interested in getting the game out in a timely manner they could have had Gearbox working on it for a year and a half by now. Clearly they're not in a hurry, and it's absolutely a marketing decision.

[xahlt]

It's about as much of a theory as saying console exclusives are a huge conspiracy by mastermind corporations to "force" you to buy a specific console for one game. In other words, the fairly un-concealed truth and a reasonable business decision (that simply hurts PC gamers in this case).

[Kool Moe Dee]

Totally, of the two possible explaniations the "conspiracy" theory is far more plausible. No one's saying it's an easy two week port, but a year is far longer than neccissary. And if MS was at all interested in getting the game out in a timely manner they could have had Gearbox working on it for a year and a half by now. Clearly they're not in a hurry, and it's absolutely a marketing decision.

I love how everyone's an expert on how long it takes to write or port a game. Granted, there is certainly marketing weight in when the Halo port will be released. But it's not easy as pie, and it's not a case of Gearbox intentionally dragging their feet or being incompetent. It's a lot of work.

[Brad Grenz]

Kool Moe, this is kettle. You're black.

[Kool Moe Dee]

Kool Moe, this is kettle. You're black.

Have you read the "who are you and what do you do?" thread? Worth giving a look...

[Derek Smart [3000AD]]

Totally, of the two possible explaniations the "conspiracy" theory is far more plausible. No one's saying it's an easy two week port, but a year is far longer than neccissary. And if MS was at all interested in getting the game out in a timely manner they could have had Gearbox working on it for a year and a half by now. Clearly they're not in a hurry, and it's absolutely a marketing decision.

From my first hand information, you have no idea just how close to the truth you are.

Thats all I'm prepared to say at this point. The rest of you can carry on with the prerequisite acts of wanton speculation.

[Dave Long]

The game was initially being done on the PC and it looked pretty much like it did when it hit the Xbox before we knew it was going to be Xbox exclusive. As Derek seems to imply, Halo has probably been DONE for the PC for a year now and since it's the ONE game that can still sell the Xbox, Microsoft absolutely can't let it out the door until they can supplant it with another system seller.

--Dave

[Wholly Schmidt]

I heard 3DO's porting it to the Indrema, that's the hold-up.

[Jason Becker]

"Thats all I'm prepared to say at this point. The rest of you can carry on with the prerequisite acts of wanton speculation."

I don't call my points(and other similar ones) on Halo's release date 'wanton speculation'. I call it basic logic. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out why the game won't be out until summer 2003.

[Jason Cross]

The bullshit explanations for Halo is getting old too. Halo could have been done much quicker. I don't know why people can't comprehend the fact MS may have had marketing behind their decision. Nope its about that funky memmory...

The only "bullshit explanations" that have been made so far are the speculations of gamers like us. Neither Microsoft nor Bungie (nor Gearbox for that matter) has given any indication at all why the game is taking so long.

[Jason Cross]

From a fan Q&A on Bungie's own site:

http://www.bungie.net/perlbin/blam.pl?file=/site/1/news/stories/jason_jones_interviewed_by_you.html

"I'm proud of what we accomplished, but much was left undone: so many ideas that never made it into the AI, so much artwork for weapons or characters we never got a chance to put into the game, so many ways to tell the story better. The environments in particular were hard, because they couldn't be started until we'd finished the new XBox engine but they had to be done early enough for the designers to populate them. " (emphasis mine)

From a Halo level designer's developer diary on PlanetXbox:

http://www.planetxbox.com/features/diary/halo/051401/

"The decision to move to Microsoft and work on the Xbox lead to one more decision, to focus more on the solo-player campaign than we had previously planned. This change, however, is simply a pragmatic one. As much as we want to help shape the newly forming Xbox community, we have to recognize that it is a console community. Online multi-player may be the future of console gaming, but it is not the present, so we knew we would have to have an incredible solo-player campaign to reach the audience on the same level that Marathon did. We're not abandoning multi-player by any means, we are pushing it farther than anyone expects us to, but Halo lends itself to epic and dramatic storytelling, so that is what we intend to provide."

From an interview with Bungie's Alexander Seropian (Bungie's CEO) at Inside Mac Games:

http://www.insidemacgames.com/features/view.php?ID=93

"When we got here and began to focus on Xbox, we basically had to start over. It was tough compressing all the 'making game' part of the project into the last 6 months - which is essentially what happened. We really had to take the approach of how do we make this fun on a console, sitting 10 feet away with a controller. We also got to do things we've never had the chance to do before, like full-on cinematics and surround sound. All that was hard."

I know I've read more specific mention of the changes when Halo moved to Xbox, but my Google-fu is weak today and I can't find it. Or maybe it was all in print publications and not online. :(