Halo 2 was severely, severely, downgraded
New Mombasa, Delta Halo, Quarantine Zone, High Charity were reduced to 40% of what they once were.
Joseph Staten: "This process began with the end of Halo and realizing all the stuff that we had left out, and Jason, and I, and Jamie, and a few other people, sitting down and thinking really hard about, 'Wow, what did we really want to tell?' And then Jason locked himself in a room for a while and organized his core ideas and then came to me and said, 'Hey, these are my thoughts about a story for Halo 2. What do you think?'
Joseph Staten: (holds up script) "This is the copy of the script—the cinematic script for Halo. This document needs to talk to programmers, and artists, and animators, and everybody. This is 160 pages worth of cinematic. That's kind of crazy if you just think about it on its own. But when you look at a game which is 15 levels long, and with a couple of protagonists, and a fairly complex story arc, we need to drive the player's experience for 20 hours of game play, say. 120 minutes of cinematic doesn't really seem that out of proportion. But just to look at it prima facie, it's pretty daunting. You think, 'My God, you're making a feature film.'"
Jason Jones: "It's not about making it complex, and it's not about playing movies for 2 hours between every 5 minutes of game play, but the more you can make somebody believe that they're in this cool place, that they're on Halo fighting the Covenant, instead of... whatever, sitting in their living room at two in the morning, trying to finish some stupid video game."
Joseph Staten: "Of all the people on the team, Tyson and I are probably the people who are most frightening for Jason and the programmers. We are the most crazy-scripting, crack-smoking, 'This would be so cool. Damn the frame rate! Let's pound the code and make these crazy things happen!'"
>tfw Joe didn't care about the fps, he just wanted to make a fun game
Please understand.
