Thread 11945837

How bad was the Halo 2 crunch and development? Can anyone fill me in?

>>11945837 (OP)
who gives a fuck about some overpaid developer

Nobody answer him. Instead let's talk about playing Halo 2.
I remember LANning it up with the boys every weekend for months when it came out. truly some good times.
Favorite map? I liked Zanzibar.

They spent the first year of development trying to make the sexiest Cortana model, they were using technology so powerful that it wouldn’t run on a normal Xbox. Even the dev kits were having frame rate problems with it. We’re talking pubes and everything. they wasted a full year of dev time on this before scrapping the entire engine which they made from the ground up for this singular purpose. The pubes were supposed to have stencil shading. Halo 2 Cortana is still good of course but the rumor is that there are 1000s of scrapped Cortana models that went unused we will never see.

>>11945842
I still play on Insignia every week.

>>11945842
>Nobody answer him
You're not the boss of me

>>11946091
yet you obeyed. curious

>>11945837 (OP)
If I remember correctly the E3 demo was almost entirely scripted and made for the show.
Tons of levels were cut. Halo 3 was basically the stuff they wanted to have at the end of 2 but stretched out.
More content in the Quarantine Zone like the "Forerunner Tank" which was a big forerunner factory/war machine if I remember the concept right. They talk a lot about it in the commentary. Great video.
https://youtu.be/TAW2F6oPYMc?si=Bdlgq4WD9w_zwZMj
The sad part is Halo 3 even had to have some big cuts. Some highlights being a forest area on the Ark with unique "Guardian" enemies (this is what the Guardian multiplayer level comes from). "Cortana" was pieced together from what was part of the latter part of Floodgate, inside the crashed ship. What was originally Cortana was more fleshed out and was meant to have setpieces like a battle in the Mausoleum of the Arbiter against infected former Arbiters and a boss fight against Gravemind.

>>11945837 (OP)
According to the Behind the Scenes Vidoc that came with the Limited Edition, they scrapped the previous campaign and started over 8 months before release. They weren't happy with how the game was going since they had too much ambition + limited hardware + the game play was in rough shape.
The E3 demo that you originally saw was impossible for them to do at the time and was an extremely linear segment of smoke and mirrors.
It's honestly pretty impressive that the game still came out as good as it did.

Some guys restored alpha moon to whatever degree of accuracy they accomplished if you guys want to look that up. That’s the cutting edge of current halo 2 knowledge. Fucked up e3 tech demo is surface level of the glacier shit.

>>11946107
What's the source on the Halo 3 scrapped levels? This is the first I've heard of those things.

>>11945842
For 1v1s, 2v2s, 4v4s - Lockout and Turf
For BTB - Headlong and Terminal
My buddies and I would load up Elongation and stand next to the window where you could see Earth and just talk about random stuff all the time.

What's the point of this thread? You could just read on the internet yourself. It's not like some Ex Bungie employee is going to enter here and clue you in on the subject, and it's not our job to explain it to a retard who can't read.
Hell, you could just ask Chatgpt or grok this now.