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.)"

Comments

Its going to get pushed back, you know it.

[Cap-America]

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.

On another note, I'm really not to impress by the screen shots It does look a lot like Halo 1. The big deal with Halo 2 for me was Xbox Live. But now with Halo for PC I'm finding myself careing less and less about Halo 2. I have everything I wanted for Halo on my PC and I don't have to pay for Xbox Live.

Whats the point of Halo 2 now that we ahve the PC version?

Nine month slippage?

[*weasel]

This is starting to feel an awful lot like Crimson Skies. Hoopla, playtesting, major rework, Hoopla, playtesting, major rework.

At least you know Bungie's not just rushing out anything wrapped in the Halo logo to capitalize on the buzz. And they're not blaming it on some half-baked code-leak or anything. (Really, what would Valve have to recode due the leak? the network encryption? That shouldn't take 6 months...)

Well, Crimson Skies turned out to be a damn fun game. So if they're holding Halo2 back to similarly refine the gameplay experience, good on em - I'd rather wait than have a glorified expansion sully the franchise.

I'm just hoping the (xbl) multiplayer is up to snuff, and they hit that 24/server xbl target.

Translation

[Anonymous Coward]

"...entirely representative of the lighting, polygon counts, bump-mapping and particle effects"

That statement screams "doctored picture". And on closer inspection there are a lot of things that don't make sense about that image:

(1) This is not a 1st person perspective picture. It's not representative of a 1st person shooter. The viewpoint is too low and there's no HUD. You will never see screens like this when you own the game.
(2) It's a bit too well composed. Almost like they paused the game, then moved the camera around to try and get the best picture. Or used photoshop.
(3) The blue player on the left appears to be shooting at the blue player on the right (with the shield effect). This is indicative of clueless compositing, unless all the players were completely incompetent.
(4) Note the faint motion blur on the ejected machinegun shell that's rotating in mid-air. Um.. motion blur? This suggests badly repaired interlaced video capture, not direct digital framebuffer capture.
(5) Odd stairstepping in places. Check out the antenna on the rear of the car. Why is it so blocky? Also look at the edge of the canyon wall on the right side of the picture - it's clear this image has been resampled. And resampled up - not down. This is most odd.

This picture definitely has some fishy elements to it - motion-blur and antialiasing at 1600x1200 not withstanding. The very early trailer video they released of Halo2 Xbox (which I believe was in-game since all the movies in the 1st game were) was basicly 640x480 with no antialiasing.

Halo 2 and production values

[MBraynard]

In determining the quality of Halo 2, Exhibit A is the original Halo. However, just playing the game for most people can only give a partial picture about the production values of the game.

The official Xbox magazine has a demo disc and, for several months, this featured a series of discussions with the Bungie development team discussing in detail various aspects of what they went through in making Halo, giving a far greater appreciation for there work and revealig production values that I had not noticed, despite beating the game on highest difficulty.

They go into great detail about things I never would have noticed - like the way a wall and floor looks with the player's headlight turned on versus off and how ther are three layers of passthrough transparency.

I'm not sure how long we are going to have to wait, but the example Bungie set with Halo makes me anticipate another 'game of the year.'

Re:half-truths

[fredrikj]

In which case, it really does have 'amazing gaphics'.

Super Mario World has amazing graphics too. Better than Halo 2's if you ask me.