Online multiplayer on console requires Xbox subscription sold separately. All-new, Action-packed Story — The heroes of Halo Wars awake to find themselves - and the galaxy - in more danger than ever. Following the events of Halo 5, the all-new story is told in action-packed missions set on the legendary Halo destination known as the Ark.
Players will command overwhelming firepower in large-scale battles against a terrifying threat facing the UNSC and all of humanity. Build Your Halo Army — Construct your bases, prepare your vehicles and amass your troops.
Lead them into huge battles across campaign skirmish matches against the AI, and with and against friends in up to 3v3 matches on Xbox Live. Learn new strategies as you play as different leaders across Blitz and Multiplayer game modes. They offer him the honored position of Arbiter so that he can continue to fight for the Covenant.
On his first mission to kill a heretic leader, the Arbiter discovers Guilty Spark, who the Covenant calls an 'oracle', and brings him back to High Charity. Bombarded from space, the Chief falls into a lake and is dragged by a mysterious tentacled creature. Regret's death triggers discord among the races of the Covenant, as the Hierarchs have given the Brutes the Elites' traditional job of protecting them in the wake of his death. The Arbiter is sent to find Halo's Index and retrieves it, subduing Johnson and Keyes in the process before being confronted by Tartarus.
He reveals to the Arbiter that the Prophets have ordered the annihilation of the Elites, and sends the Arbiter falling down a deep chasm. The Arbiter is saved by the tentacled creature and meets the Master Chief in the bowels of the installation.
The creature, Gravemind, is the leader of the Flood on Installation The Gravemind reveals to the Arbiter that the Great Journey would destroy the Flood, humans, and Covenant altogether, and sends both the Arbiter and Master Chief to different places to stop Halo's activation. As the parasite overruns the city, the Prophet of Mercy is consumed, and the Prophet of Truth orders Tartarus to take Keyes, Johnson, and Guilty Spark to Halo's control room and activate the ring.
The Master Chief follows Truth aboard a Forerunner ship leaving the city; Cortana remains behind to destroy High Charity and Halo if Tartarus succeeds in activating the ring. The Arbiter is sent to the surface of Halo, where, with the help of Johnson, he confronts Tartarus in Halo's control room.
When the Arbiter tries to convince Tartarus that the Prophets have betrayed them both, Tartarus angrily activates the ring, and a battle ensues. Instead of shutting down the ring entirely, a system wide fail-safe protocol is triggered, putting Installation 05 and all the other Halo rings on standby for activation from a remote location, which Guilty Spark refers to as 'the Ark'. The Chief replies, 'Sir, finishing this fight. In a post-credits scene, Gravemind is seen arriving on High Charity , where Cortana agrees to answer the Flood Hivemind's questions.
Halo had never been planned as a trilogy, but with the critical and commercial success of Combat Evolved , a sequel was expected. Bungie writer and cinematic director Joseph Staten recalled that during Combat Evolved ' s development, Bungie 'certainly had strong ideas for extending the story and gameplay experience that we knew we couldn't fit into one game'. The added publisher support for a sequel allowed greater leeway and the ability to return to more ambitious ideas lost during Combat Evolved ' s development.
An important feature for Halo 2 was multiplayer. Multiplayer in Combat Evolved was accomplished via System Link, and only came together weeks before the game was released. Most players never played large maps, while a subset greatly enjoyed player action via four networked consoles.
That would be something really special, really unique. The story for Halo 2 grew out of all the elements that were not seen in Halo: Combat Evolved. Jason Jones organized his core ideas for the sequel's story and approached Staten for input.
According to Staten, among the elements that did not make it to the finished game was a 'horrible scene of betrayal' where Miranda Keyes straps a bomb to the Master Chief's back and throws him into a hole; 'Jason was going through a rather difficult breakup at the time and I think that had something to do with it,' he said.
A real-time gameplay video was shown at E3 , which was the first actual gameplay seen by the public; it showcased new features such as dual-wielding and improved graphics. Many elements of the trailer, however, were not game-ready; the entire graphics engine used in the footage had to be discarded, and the trailer's environment never appeared in the final game due to limitations on how big the game environments could be.
The restructuring of the engine meant that there was no playable build of Halo 2 for nearly a year, and assets and environments produced by art and design teams could not be prototyped. In order to ship the game, Bungie began paring back their ambitions for the single- and multiplayer parts of the game. Going from having no Internet multiplayer to developing a completely new online model was a big challenge to tackle all at once, and as a result we had to leave a lot of things undone in order to meet the ship date commitment that we made to our fans.
While this was a deliberate decision by Microsoft to push sales of Vista, the game could be enabled to play on Windows XP through an unauthorized third-party patch. As one of the launch titles of Games for Windows — Live, the game offered Live features not available in the Xbox version, such as guide support and achievements.
The Windows port also added two exclusive multiplayer maps and a map editor. Halo 2 for Windows Vista [20] was originally scheduled for release on May 8, , but the release was pushed back to May 31 on the discovery of partial nudity in the game's map editor — a photograph of a man mooning the camera was presented as part of the '. A common complaint regarding Halo 2 's online play was widespread cheating, which began occurring almost immediately after the game's release. Users exploited bugs in the game and vulnerabilities of the network to win ranked games and thus increase their matchmaking rank.
Some players used 'standbying' to cheat, in which the player hosting the game intentionally presses the standby button on his or her modem; this results in all players except the cheaters freezing in place.
This way, the cheater would be given time to accomplish an objective in the game. Cheating also includes softmodding, in which a player uses devices such as Action Replay and computer programs to gain unfair advantages, and bridging, which uses computer programs to give a player 'host' status, and therefore the ability to disconnect other players from the game session.
A game exploitation called 'superbouncing' or 'superjumping' is labeled cheating by many in the Xbox Live community, and Bungie employees have described it as cheating when used in matchmaking. Bungie released several map packs for Halo 2 , both over Xbox Live and on game discs.
The Multiplayer Map Pack is an expansion pack intended to make Xbox Live content and updates available to offline players, and was released on July 5, The disk contains the game's software update, all nine new multiplayer maps, a documentary about the making of the maps, and a bonus cinematic called 'Another Day on the Beach', among other features.
Master Chief can still carry only two weapons at a time. He still possesses superhuman strength. He still has a rechargeable force-field shield and flashlight. His armor has been upgraded this time around, but he's still pretty much the same green guy from the first game. But we'll definitely give him augmentations. He'll have some tools. Bungie didn't clue us in on what those "tools" might be yet, but we did glimpse a few of Chief's enhanced skills see page for a complete rundown.
He's can now peer around corners and lean forward over ledges to check out a scene before he dives into it. He won't be able to shoot or lob grenades, but the enemy A. The Chief's melee attack is beefed-up, too. Time your button presses right and he'll string together a combo of up to three skull-crunching smacks with his gun.
But the Bungie guys are saving most of their tweaks for the Master Chief's alien enemies and marine allies. We're not just talking about their look, although Covenant and marine character models come in a much greater variety this time.
Different types of marines, for example, will haul around their own special backpacks and wear unique body armor. The bigger deal here is the A. We need a bunch of new secrets!
What they've settled on is a scheme that makes all computer-controlled characters more flexible in any situation.
They'll have a larger variety of behaviors and interact more realistically with each other. They'll really watch each other's back and coordinate their actions for maximum effect. Such defensive moves won't be part of a pre-planned script--the troopers will actually think to do this.
Marines pinned down by enemy fire might call for a Warthog to save their bacon. Marines will point out a sniper for an ally to grenade. Any of these scenarios can and will happen in Halo 2.
Your A. Bungie is building on the first game's marine-conversation system, making it so your fellow soldiers will have more to say to you and each other. Let's rewind to the big shield ship battle at this article's outset for an example. Say that, instead of following the main attack force away from the ship, you mosey up on a hill and stumble upon one of the snipers.
We really want to have that level of detail that you may or may never see. Of course, lifelike brainy marines deserve lifelike brainy opponents, so Bungie has souped up the Covenant's I. You've got guys climbing. You've got guys ducking under objects or jumping over them.
The Elite soldiers will be more lithe and leopard-like, jackals will behave more like birds. Life will be anything but a day at the zoo for Master Chief and his marine allies. Enemies know to switch on their flashlights and hunt for you in darkness.
They'll understand how to fight in low-gravity environments. They'll talk to each other more and most of them will speak English this time and coordinate attacks.
As tenacious as the first game's bad guys were, Halo 2's enemies will make you fight even harder for every inch of ground. Bump mapping--the rendering hocus pocus powering much of Halo 2's advanced new visual vibe--is a magic word with Bungie, because it's letting the team achieve an astonishing level of detail in the sequel's environments and on its characters and objects. Bump mapping's tech-nerd definition is that it's an Xbox-friendly rendering process that overlays a map of three-dimensional details--treads on a tire, buckles on gear, gouges on body armor--onto a polygonal model's flat skin.
If you think of a 3D model such as a vehicle or character as a simple shape hacked out of wood, then bump mapping is the process of sculpting out all the fine details. Bungie's artists are sculpting everything with bump maps in Halo 2, and it works beautifully. Just look at the screens and watch the trailer.
Everything in the game, including marines, weapons and retouched Halo 1 models, will be sculpted for maximum visual impact. It's much more believable. And the whole point here is that such believability doesn't come at the expense of the game's performance. The bump mapping helps us make the game look so much better while not demanding anything more of the Xbox.
Many Bungie guys we talked to guesstimate that Halo 2's visuals are an order of magnitude better than the first game. That boost isn't just from the bump mapping's pumped-up detail: Half the pizazz comes from the sequel's advanced new real-time engine for creating light and shadow, which reacts more realistically to bump maps than to ordinary textures. Watch Master Chief descend in a wire-mesh elevator and you'll see shadows dance around everything in the scene as he passes each floor.
When the hangar airlock doors rumble open in the trailer, you see harsh sunlight, reflected from the Earth outside, bathe the scene and wash out weaker light sources. Bungie calls such splashes of overpowering light the "bloom effect. Bungie's artists are creating textures with this new lighting model in mind, whereas in Halo 1 the lighting engine came in fits and starts, and the artists never really got the hang of it. Now it's letting them achieve the subtlest of details, such as the way every model in the game casts shadows on itself as well as its surroundings.
It's so subtle, but it's so cool. You don't really appreciate the sequel's lighting effects until the lights go out completely. It's a situation you could find yourself in frequently, since that Master Chief has the ability to shoot out lights and skulk in the shadows this time. Imagine hearing a bump in the dark, cutting loose with your battle rifle and seeing a dozen Covenant enemies strobe-lit by your muzzle flash, their shadows writhing on the walls as they scurry for cover.
By no means will most of Master Chief's new haunts be dim and creepy. Halo 2 is still alt about fighting and shooting and killing. But, yeah, players have this great resource of being able to hide in the shadows now, and we're going to use it in some interesting ways.
Halo 1 was the first Bungie game in five years that didn't have Internet play. You can tell the team hates that--they hate it with all their might--especially because the game was originally designed for online.
Microsoft's gaming network just wasn't ready when Halo launched in late , so players had to settle for split-screen or linked-system multiplayer play. It was still ludicrously fun, just not the kind of experience Bungie wanted.
Fast forward to Halo 2's launch a year from now. Xbox Live, Microsoft's broadband-gaming network, will be a year old with its kinks ironed out. Bungie will be able to stop drooling and we can start: Halo 2 will feature online battles between Master Chief characters on one side and Covenant Elite soldiers on the other. The plan is for online to support at least 12 to 16 players. It'll be nothing less than the total online war Bungie originally envisioned.
Bungie has other big plans for Halo 2 multiplayer that they're just not ready to chat about. They know they want to enhance the cooperative mode of the main campaign game, but they probably won't make it playable over the 'Net "That's really hard to do," Jones says.
And they've heard all your gripes about the first game's lack of computer-controlled 'bot opponents for multiplayer. We want to do something for them, but I don't know what it's going to be.
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