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By Nick P. Years of playing Doom and Quake games had made me close-minded. So, upon my decision to try something new, how fortunate was I to come across Halo. In days when little innovations seems to come abroad, Halo brought more innovation to the shooter genre than all of the games released five years before it combined. With all the best points from previous shooters, along with a complex and immersive story and thorough use of vehicles, the game was a fresh outlook on how games should be done. This contributed to the game's popularity, which was, without questions, also boosted by the fact that Halo was the first decent shooter to come out for the Xbox. In today's world, success is not left to bask in its glory and remain still in time. What I'm trying to say in an overly-complex way is, a sequel was natural to follow. In Halo, the newly-created mostly-human, genetically engineered super-soldier Master Chief (sounds cheesy on paper, I know) was pitted against the Covenant, a group of alien races against which humanity had been fighting a holy war. As the game progressed, the story took a turning point (which I will not reveal here. For all of you who have played the game, you know what I'm talking about. For all of you who haven't, go play it!) when a force that the Covenant had been trying to keep contained was set loose. With its open ending, it was clear from the start that a sequel would follow (as if sales profits hadn't told you enough already) and so comes Halo 2, a continuation of the epic story. Very little, if anything, has been released about the sequel's story. What is known is that the Covenant have set their sights on Earth with minds set to succeed rather than fail as they did in the first chapter. So, it is clear that Master Chief will find himself again fighting the Covenant, with help from Cortana, along with various other forces, but with higher stakes this time. And Halo being a story-driven game, it is likely we will know very little plot-wise until a bit prior or after the game's release this November (for Xbox, and possibly Xbox only). So let us not linger in unmapped territory. Here's what we know so far: 
The engine has been revamped and will push the Xbox to its limits. New, higher-polygon count models and much higher-quality textures come into play, with programmable shaders making many surfaces shiny, packed with real-time reflections and rich detail. Chris Butcher, one of the leading programmer engineers, stated that Halo 2 "...squeezes every drop of power out of the Xbox," This means real-time, fully dynamic per-pixel lighting and shadows rendering open environments as never seen before. Technology is not limited there, however. "The graphical features we're using are so advanced we don't even have buzzwords for them yet." Chris admits. |
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