So you played Reach with the audio problems? Man, I’m so sorry. That made it so much worse. The audio mix was just painfully terrible.
Glad to hear you liked them all so far. I’ve never played the remaster of Halo 2. I know they improved a lot of things over the original, including doing CG cutscenes that are reportedly amazing. The original Halo 2 had absolutely terrible in-game cutscenes where textures and geometry were constantly popping into the screen while the cutscenes were playing. It was really distracting and painful to watch.
I’m surprised you liked the gameplay in it. Maybe we played it on too high a difficulty. (Legendary). Getting constantly sniped by snipers throughout the campaign, and having to inch one pixel at a time to get the sniper before they got us was what I remember most about the Halo 2 campaign.
I was thinking the same, but I usually didn’t have much fun on Normal difficulty. I had to play on at least Heroic for the gameplay to be fun, because you’re forced to use melee/grenades, etc. On Normal difficulty you can just shoot everything and get through with no problems. It just starts feeling very rote.
Yeah the audio sucked. But frankly rest of the game wasn’t all that great either anyway, better audio wouldn’t have improved it much for me, I just found the level design to be kinda bland visually and gameplay-wise.
I play all of them on regular, not legendary. I mostly just want to enjoy the story and soundtracks, I dont play these for the challenge.
As of Halo 3 the Elites are in a full-on civil war with the Brutes (and by extension the rest of the Covenant), due to the events of Halo 2. The Prophets had the Elites’ Council killed by the Brutes, and the Arbiter learned the “Great Journey” was a lie (first from the Gravemind, and later from 343 Guilty Spark). Thus, some of the Elites are now working with humanity to stop the rings from firing - led by the Arbiter.
The only other switch in allegiance I can think of, would be the Flood briefly working with Chief and Arby to stop Truth from firing the halos - but there was nothing convoluted or confusing about that; It was simple self-preservation. Only a human can start or terminate the firing protocols as they are the Reclaimers, thus Gravemind needed Chief to deactivate the halo array. So, the Flood help clear a path, Chief succeeds, and then the Flood immediately turn on them again. Simple.
Game ends with Admiral Hood telling Arby he can’t forgive them for what they did in the war, but thanks him for fighting alongside Master Chief to the end. Elites peacefully leave to go back to their homeworld, with the remaining Covenant now leaderless and in tatters.
Its just hilarious that I played through Halo1-3 back in the day and never understood WTF was going on and quickly just ignored all the convoluted story exposition stuff to get to the shooty bits.
Yeah, they tied it to the new version of DirectX. Kinda hilarious given how outdated the game looked. Lest we forget: the PC version of Halo 2 got released the same year as Crysis.
If you signed up for the Halo Insider Program, ODST invites are going out now so definitely check out your account to see if you’ve been selected. I’m currently downloading a 15GB update and excited to dive in. :)
