Were Halo 2's stencil shadows impressive for 2004?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=luhXojiSVC0

Not really. It wasn’t even as impressive as the first halo game. It ran at a shit framerate and didn’t look nearly as good on a CRT as you might think it did. In hindsight it was impressive that they had lighting like that on maps that large, but keep in mind splinter cell came out two years before, Doom 3 that year, and half life 2 as well. All 3 of those games had better graphics. I always thought halo 2 lo oked bland af when I saw people playing it. Granted half life 2 didn’t look that good on the original Xbox. Most people didn’t have PCs good enough to run it the way it was meant to be played until 2006ish, so halo 2 wasn’t bad looking for its time, but it wasn’t great either

>>11814201 (OP)
Bot thread (notice as well the OP never ever interacts with the thread).

>>11814350
Not him but I thought the bump maping was alright, especially for console. But like you said, Halo CE had a superior artstyle and looked more appealing, even with fewer polygons. Halo 2 was just sort of brown and blocky for most of the missions.

>>11814368
I genuinely think there is some kind of LLM scraping happening on this board to get opinions that you won't find on Reddit. It's insidious. I don't want to fuel AI YouTube essay slop.

>>11814603
100% is, happens so frequently as well I'm surprised a lot of people aren't recognising it instantly.

>>11814350
It looks better than halo 1 for sure.

>>11814201 (OP)
Normal mapping was the MVP in Halo and XBox games in general

>>11814769
Halo 1 gives off a good illusion of every surface being physically solid, alien and metallic, and the world is sufficiently stylised. Halo 2 is soldiers from the Iraq war in space and everything now looks rubbery. It looks better than I remember it being, but compared to the original it still pales.

>>11814771
I disagree. Halo 1s repetitive environments fail it after a time. It doesn't even take particularly long because by the third mission you're navigating samey covenant corridors interspersed with large and mostly empty ship bays. It's a fine looking game and for its year the best looking game at release but Halo 2s grandiose and lively skyboxes, excellent use of billboards and humanized locales communicate scale in an improved sense over the first showing Bungies growth. Halo 1 has simpler and cleaner visuals but does far less with them with the most common complaint being the repetition. Had a game that looked identical to Halo 1 shipped instead of what we got in Halo 2 the game would have been torn to shreds. The simple polygonal environments were already looking a generation out of date.

>>11814771
> and everything now looks rubbery
Dat early specular mapping

>>11814201 (OP)
>E3 2002 announcement trailer
uhm asksusally that trailer was not released at E3, it was released at X02 in august of that year.

>>11814672
It always opens threads with some inane question, pretty easy to spot.

>>11814368
>>11814603
>>11814672
>>11815156
less post makey, more meds takey

>>11815175
>>>/reddit/

>>11815228
>noooo stop calling out my schizo delusions that i've hallucinated from being on here 14 hours/day
kys immediately

>>11815365
He’s right tho, also there have been those overly aggressive posts against any sexuality from women in gaming on this board and any argument against is responded w “you want girls in gaming because u like tits!” Also didn’t the leak reveal a huge percentage of posts are bot generated?

>>11815394
>He’s right tho
he's not samefag. meds NOW.

>>11815520
Everyone who disagrees w u is a samefag… now who needs meds?

>>11815520
You're acting weird and insufferable. Just chill out.

>>11815520
Lol loser

>>11815594 (You)
>>11815597 (You)
>>11815632 (You)