Did Halo 2 look bad for 2004?

[Akboris]

I would say in general Halo has been ahead of the curve graphically.

Halo 1, 3, 4 were definitely remarked as having good graphics at the time but from what I saw back then and reading up now is that Halo 2 was actually pretty ugly for 2004.

When I was a 9 year old playing Halo 3, Halo 2 looked dated to me even way back then.

Wondering if anyone else sees this, my assumption is that its using the same hardware as CE, and also rushed development.

[Daenoxiis]

The things I can recall that made Halo 2 catch some fire were:

1.) Dual-Wielding was kind of broken and unbalanced.

2.) LASO is actually a legitimate challenge...as one of the conditions of it being that you die at all, you restart the entire level from the beginning, no checkpoints. I did indeed do this challenge when I was in my teens. I completed it exactly once on the original Xbox, and then never again with that sh!t after. Probably could not come anywhere close to that at my current age.

3.) Half of the game being played as the Arbiter were like "who tf is this??"

4.) I forget the name of the mission but it's when you're the Arbiter and have to fight through hordes of the Flood, that part is really hard, and long.

5.) Brutes live up to their name. I feel like they got noticeably nerfed in Halo 3 due to how hard they were in Halo 2.

Admittedly I never played Halo 4.
And I only got about half way through Reach.

Once Microsoft took it over under 343 Studios and Bungie was out, I, lost interest.
Similarly, I never really got back into the Devil May Cry series either, after Capcom yoinked that from the original creator of it, either...nor did I ever get into either Destiny nor Bayonetta, the respective spiritual successors.

I have a tendency to leave good things where they lie once they've been killed off, it's an old practice of mine for psychological reasons.

[Ȼħⱥꞥꞥēł8753452]

Originally posted by Akboris:

I would say in general Halo has been ahead of the curve graphically.

Halo 1, 3, 4 were definitely remarked as having good graphics at the time but from what I saw back then and reading up now is that Halo 2 was actually pretty ugly for 2004.

When I was a 9 year old playing Halo 3, Halo 2 looked dated to me even way back then.

Wondering if anyone else sees this, my assumption is that its using the same hardware as CE, and also rushed development.

Thought it looked pretty good at the time.

Had a lot of fun with split screen multiplayer and coop.

[Midnight Sky ✨🌙✨]

If you played Halo 2 when 3 was a thing then yeah it's natural that it's going to look outdated. It's an original Xbox game being compared to a Xbox 360 game. I think Halo 2 looked fantastic when it released.

[abcd]

character models got a lot of extra polygons, but environments were mostly the same. a few more atmospherics. it was kind of jarring, even if master chief's arms looked real sexy holding smgs.

[Midnight Sky ✨🌙✨]

Originally posted by abcd:

character models got a lot of extra polygons, but environments were mostly the same. a few more atmospherics. it was kind of jarring, even if master chief's arms looked real sexy holding smgs.

That's a good point if you mean going from CE to 2. CE got done really dirty by gearbox because they broke a lot of graphical effects and literally every other release of CE was based on that botched port. Though I heard 343 apparently fixed the MCC version so it looks like the Xbox version.

[abcd]

i dunno, mcc looks cell-shaded. it's kind of weird.

I mean comparing both on xbox.

[Sigma957]

No. I saw the original (not seen in the actual final release) game play demo in 1600x1200 on a CRT monitor. It looked amazing back then.

[Bind0fGod]

It looked okay. I always thought Halo 2 had odd graphics style compared to 1

[talemore]

Halo 2 was one of the best games, perhaps very linear but that was 9 of 10 games.

Dual wielding was only broken when using spike guns since they were faster than the sword animation.

Battle rifle was always a joke in the lore. And perhaps fun to use. The biggest concept of halo was to be a looter shooter where you picked up junk on the ground.

Halo 2 was refined for console with the release on xbox.

[Sitrueis]

I was grinding UT 2004 but ye it was.

[harley]

It looked and looks great. A lot of old games do. Resident Evil 4, for example, still looks incredible.

I will say, I didn't like how it looked compared to Halo CE. Other than that, it was fine.