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Then everything happens at once. Enemy Grunts, Jackals and Elites--the various races of the troublemaking alien alliance known as the Covenant--pour from their bunker and begin blasting at the marines. Some marines dash headlong into the fight. Others cover their compadres from behind trees and rocks.
Explosions erupt. Glowing volleys from rapid-fire energy weapons criss-cross the terrain. The snipers on the hillsides take beads on targets. Everyone works together. It's like a bona-fide military attack force. Don't worry--he'll show up eventually, once the level is fully designed. But anyone who's played the original game's Silent Cartographer beach battle think Saving Private Ryan with rayguns and supersonic troop characters knows that the battleground we just described is Master Chief's ultimate playground.
And it's the kind of big-scale, teamwork-oriented commotion that Bungie plans to evolve for Halo 2's single-player experience. And now I'm not talking about ordering your squad around or anything like that, but you're going to be fighting alongside marines and against organized aliens a lot more than in Halo 2. The shield-ship skirmish we just watched is actually a Bungie test level that'll wind up highly modified in the final Halo 2 product.
We dunno where the battle fits into Halo 2's overall plot. And even if we did, we wouldn't tell you. Why spoil the story of a game that's still more than a year away? But if you've seen Halo 2's wowie-zowie teaser trailer and if you haven't, go to www.
That's where Halo 2 kicks off, although the trailer isn't the game's opening cinema. A brief period has passed since Halo i's finale, in which we saw Master Chief obliterate the enigmatic Halo ring-world. He had just crushed a Covenant force and an army of mushball space mutants known as The Flood. Now he's returned to Earth with Cortana--the chatty female A. The Covenant have wiped out every last human-colony world.
Earth is all that's left. Master Chief and Cortana's mission is clear: Hightail it planetside to back up Earth's forces and repel the alien blitz.
Sounds like more than enough mission for one game, right? Well, that ain't the half of it. So far, we've seen concepts for a level set in a hydroponic plant; on an orbiting space outpost; and on a mining station floating in the upper wisps of a gas giant, where hurricane-force gales make it tough just to walk, let alone massacre Covenant bad guys.
One mission's set on a moon we're not sure if it's Earth's or another world's , complete with weak gravity that drops the game's hyper-realistic physics into slow-mo. We watched Master Chief leap three times his height to reach a secret door to the Covenant's moon base.
The kick from his rifle even slowed his descent when he fired downward while falling. Bungie is working on moon-buggy-style vehicles, which'll take stratospheric jumps in the low lunar gravity. And just think of all the low-G tricks you'll be able to try in multiplayer But we'll get to network play later. At some point in Halo 2, the Covenant's assault on our home planet comes to a close. Just don't expect the end-game credits to roll when it happens. Instead, Master Chief and Cortana will zip deep into the heart of Covenant territory, attacking the source of the enemy's power.
The climactic battle that follows will bring a measure of closure to the Halo saga, something that was missing from the first game.
Ultimately, humanity was in the same place as when the game started. We do know Halo 2 will reveal a lot more about the aliens and the motives behind their intergalactic assault and battery on humanity. Jones says, "or they just came across as the stupid cliche of an alien race that ruthlessly attacks mankind. Nobody knew about their social structure or anything, but I had hoped people would give us credit and realize there's more to the Covenant than what we showed.
We're really expanding on them in Halo 2. There's a whole bunch of the story we still have left to tell, and that's going to be a lot of fun. Some revelations will even come from the original Halo--at least once the sequel shows you what to look for. He's referring to the first game's mysterious little details, such as the scattered symbols on Halo and the funky history lessons from Guilty Spark. Chat with Jason Jones about sequels--any kind of sequels, even the movie variety--and he'll tell you exactly how not to do them.
And that's what you don't want to do. Likewise, we don't want to make a different game. Why eliminate the reasons people played our first game?
That's why Bungie isn't fiddling with Halo's fundamentals. 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.
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