The most fantastic part of Halo 2 never came to Halo 2. If you’re a fan of the series, you know exactly what I’m talking about: the “Earthcity” demo, shown during Microsoft’s E3 presentation in 2003. level never reached the full release of Halo 2, but almost two decades later, work is underway on a playable build, 343 Industries announced today in a blog post.
Just to give you an idea of how great this is, here is my real-time reaction to the news, copied directly from Kotaku’s Slack channel:
just wait
no fucking way
no
shit
way
gemr2cmt4p4t3p2m8mp2340u9[m[0m19t[m[0m19t[m[0m19t[m[0m19t
sry sry
my face fell on my keyboard
In the cold light of today’s fidelity weapons race, you may not have that impression by looking at the low fidelity images in the clip, but it’s hard to overstate the extent to which it was the 2003 E3 2003 demo of Halo 2. Two years earlier, Halo: Combat Evolved, and needless to say, redefined the first-person shooter. But that game was set completely off the planet, in an annular world called Halo. The “Earthcity” demo showed a look at a broader Halo canon: the primordial sweat of a sci-fi universe that has spanned decades of games, spin-offs, comics, novels, a movie. canceled movie and a recently revamped TV series.
The general scenario of “Earthcity” (a human metropolis is being attacked, you have to protect it) is played more or less during the second and third level of Halo 2. And some gameplay elements shown in the demonstration, such as the ability to wield two weapons at once, were also included in the full game. But the details of the plot diverged. Near the end of the demonstration, Master Chief gets on board a ghost, a typical ground vehicle of the alliance, Halo’s main antagonistic force. The tear at full speed down a road. It crashes and then the show goes from real-time gameplay (spectacularly impressive for the time) to a previously rendered cinematography. A series of glasses of alliance fall from orbit, emerge the elites with energy swords and surround Chief. Take out a plasma grenade.
“Betcha can’t stick it,” says Cortana, the head’s AI companion.
“You’re activated,” he says.
In Halo: Combat Evolved, the elites with energy swords were arguably the toughest enemy unit. Facing one or two was usually hard enough. But seven? Near? The demonstration could not have ended on a more precipitous cliff. As a player, you knew the danger of the Boss, and you needed to know how he, like you, would fight to get out of it.
Screenshot: 343 Industries
Although there is no release date, 343 Industries plans to make the stage playable in PC versions of “modern retail Halo 2”. (Halo 2 was released as a remastered version in 2014, which is also included as part of Halo: The Master Chief Collection.) The possibility that it can be played on the console is totally up in the air, partly in due to high technical obstacles. for this effort.
“Originally we didn’t have many assets for the previous analysis map of filtered and similar compilations,” wrote General_101, a modder who worked with 343 on this project. “Only the source JMS files for the BSP and some landscape objects. However, once the source map files appeared, it was only a matter of time before we had all the data we needed.”
Beyond the 2003 Halo 2 E3 demo, 343 is working with modders to add a lot of cropped content to Halo: Master Chief Collection. For long-time Halo fans, there are plenty of other fascinating things in the pipeline, including the original elite models and a host of other performances that never made it to the final cut. You can read it all here.