Slashdot Mirror
Halo 2 Confirmed For Fall 2004
Jeremy Parish writes "Bungie has finally announced that Halo 2 will ship this Fall for Xbox, as relayed via 1UP. But to make up for this semi-distant release date, they've released the first Halo 2 multiplayer screen!" Over at Halo.bungie.org, they point out a Bungie development update noting the new screenshot is "...entirely representative of the lighting, polygon counts, bump-mapping and particle effects", and also refer to the original Bungie.net announcement, clarifying: "A number of people have been confused by the title of this news item. The game is NOT named 'Halo 2: In Reach of Fall'. This is just a reference to the title of novel The Fall of Reach.)"
To be fair, Frank O'Connor did say, in the larger development update:
"The resolution is a little sharper thanks to the way screens are dumped from the frame buffer."
There just wasn't room to include that fact in the above Slashdot under-150-words synopsis.
"I'm sorry but I have a bad feeling that the game is going to get pushed back again. It always does, we get closes to the release date then bam, pushed back another 4 months."
Where have you been? This is the delay. Originally, it was going to be out last Christmas. On the main page at halo.bungie.net is this choice quote:
"So remember last year when we told you we don't announce release dates until we're confident well meet our deadline? Well now were confident. Halo 2 will ship in Fall, 2004. Please make a note of it."
Sounds like they're pretty sure this will be it...
Wort Wort Wort!
Umm...because it is not competing against the PC, the Xbox is competing against the PS2 (and Gamecube).
In which case, it really does have 'amazing gaphics'.
No reason to lie.
Not necessarily. It's almost certainly rendered on the XBox, just not output on the display hardware. We do a similar thing for our PS2 game. One method is to render multiple viewports (either as tiles, or by pixel-fraction offset) of the scene, and then stitch them back together as a post-process.
It's still a reasonable indicator of the lighting, effects, and the detail in the models. Just not what you'd actually see during gameplay. However if you don't do this, then you get a million fanboys crying about "anti-aliasing".