"What were they doing for 3 years?" has been an all too common question popping up on Halo 2 boards around the net. When people see the glitches, the cheats, the lack of multiplayer maps, the shortness of the single-player campaign, and the horrible "ending," they cannot help but wonder if the copy they hold in their hands is truly the result of 3 years of hard work.
Amazingly enough, Bungie released a Limited Edition DVD that gives a fairly complete picture of what exactly was happening all this time -- and it isn't pretty. It is the tale of blunders, mismanagement at top levels, and an artificially rushed deadline to get the game out the door. (All quotes are taken from the DVD.)
THE TEASER TRAILER
Remember the original trailer for Halo 2? Remember how wonderful its graphics were, how titillating was its suggested storyline, how exciting was the prospect of fighting in the "god-damned apocalypse"? Do you recall how proud Bungie was as they boasted that the trailer was completely done using nothing but the game's new engine? Clearly, the Halo 2 that was finally released came nowhere close to the advanced graphics and physics sported in that first trailer, and Bungie has been nice enough to explain why.
After they finished work on the teaser, Bungie was able to actually get around to implementing the new graphics and physics into some basic level designs. But they quickly ran into a really big problem: the current Xbox is just too wimpy to handle, to any large extent, all the advanced effects shown off in the first trailer. It was impossible for the first-generation console to pull off the bump-mapping, dynamic lighting, particle effects, destructible surfaces, etc., over an entire level.
So Bungie at this point seemed to be faced with a clear choice. They had to either (i) postpone Halo 2 until the next Xbox came out or (ii) use the graphics and physics engine that they already had from Halo CE, and reserve the new engine for later. As it turned out, Bungie did neither. Rather, they made the fateful decision to try and half-**** Halo 2 onto the current Xbox.
This, I believe, was the first major blunder in the development of the game. The logic here is pretty simple: Why bother to go through with an all-new engine when, because of console limitations, it will have little improvement over the engine you've already got??? When you compare the final release version to the original Halo CE, you cannot help but notice that it doesn't really look that much better than it did 3 years ago. So why spend so much time working on a new engine when you knew it wouldn't deliver much more than what you already have?
As it turned out, the costs simply outweighed the benefits in the end. Bungie's bad decision early on forced them to spend way too much time in coding the new engine, instead of working on what the game desperately needed: a solid storyline backed up by Halo's unique gameplay. Almost all the problems that came later on can be traced back to this bad tumble out of the starting gate.
THE E3 NEW MOMBASA DEMO
21 months before release day, Bungie showed off the E3 demo trailer to the excitement of Halo fans everywhere. What we got to glimpse was an epic battle taking place inside a mega-city. Whether advertently or inadvertently, we were suddenly all under the impression that work on Halo 2 was coming along wonderfully. After all, if what they're showing us now is so good, then just imagine how good is all the stuff they're not showing us, right? But this was far, far from the truth.
On their DVD, Bungie admits that the E3 demo was the ONLY thing that they actually had in their hands up until that point. After a year-and-a-half of work, they had nothing else to show but what we saw at E3:
Quote from DVD
"We came back from E3 with actually less than we wanted to. We came back from E3 with a demo. We did not come back from E3 with a playable part of a level. That was really bad, actually."
Quote from DVD
"What E3 gave us was the sense that we still didn't have the target we were aiming at. So after E3, instead of being able to jump into all of our levels and go right to it, we're still trying to figure out where we're going."
Quote from DVD
We got fifty, sixty guys now on the Halo 2 team. They're waiting to be told, "Hey, what do we do? ... Tell us, we want to do it."
These admissions on the part of the Bungie crew are astounding. Halfway through Halo 2's development time, they were still trying to figure out what exactly they're supposed to be doing with the game.
CRUNCH TIME: PUSHING AN ARTIFICIAL DEADLINE
Then came another fateful decision. The DVD, weekly updates, and post-release interviews with Bungie employees are all very careful in withholding the details, but somebody somewhere came up with November 9th as the non-negotiable deadline for when Halo 2 had to be released. In all likelihood, this was something that someone in Microsoft told Bungie that they had to do -- and that heads would roll if it didn't happen.
It's not hard to reconstruct why Nov 9th was selected. If Microsoft had given Bungie the time they desperately needed, it would have meant Halo 2 would be released about the same time as Xbox 2 first goes on sale. This is unthinkable from a purely business standpoint, for it would turn the first Xbox into the biggest competitor against Xbox 2. A proper launch date for Halo 2 could actually end up destroying Xbox 2's chances. So in order to keep this from happening, Halo 2 just had to be released a lot earlier than the next Xbox.
And judging from Bungie's comments, this business decision sorely cut into the quality of their final product. Tons and tons of stuff had to be left out from what they really wanted Halo 2 to be -- and even then Bungie came frighteningly close to not reaching the deadline.
Quote from DVD
"Right about at the moment [10 months before release day] Pandora's Box was opened and decisions which were engraved in stone were re-thought."
Quote from DVD
"We messed up. We didn't have the design down. We didn't have the story down. Once we actually started to see how long the missions were taking to produce and how long they were taking to design and script, it just wasn't gonna work."
It is downright amazing to realize that Bungie didn't seriously get to work on Halo 2 until less than a year before the game was finally released. And they had to spend so much time to still code the new engine that the DVD admits the game was only half done a mere 5 MONTHS before release. Here's what one programmer said about the game's progress at that point:
Quote from DVD
"I'm so scared shyt right now, to be honest with you. We've got a huge mountain of work to do in a very, very compressed time period. That's scary. These guys ... everybody here is scared."
Bungie used to say in their official Halo 2 FAQ that "it'll be done when it's done." But now they talked about the game "kinda" being done whenever the deadline rolled around:
Quote from DVD
It's really great to have this deadline met. We can't move at all because it forces us to kinda finish it. When the producers [i.e. Microsoft Game Studios] come over and pry our hands from the keyboard and say, "Okay, you can't touch it anymore. We've got to start manufacturing these discs," I think that's the point where we're gonna have to stop and that's going to be the end of it.
Nevertheless, people at Bungie openly wish they could work passed the Nov 9th deadline. Indeed, in one of Frankie's weekly updates, a Bungie programmer said he wanted 6 more months to finish the game. And the DVD has a guy who bluntly says, "Yeah, we could use a lot more time."
CONCLUSION
So this is the sordid story behind Halo 2. It leaves only one possible conclusion: Because of bad decisions from start to finish, Halo 2 became a half-baked rushjob -- and it shows. It shows in the short single-player campaign, one that's ridden with lots of plot holes. It shows in the many glitches and cheats that were so easily found shortly after release day. It shows in the bad gameplay balance in multiplayer as well as the overall lack of maps to play in. And it definitely shows in the awful "ending" to the game.
Now, there are rumors floating around that the real Halo 2 is going to be released as a launch title for the next Xbox. "Halo 2.5" is said to have everything that was supposed to be in Halo 2. If this is indeed what's gonna happen, then the Halo 2 we all bought will go down in history not as Game of the Year, but as Most Half-Assed Game of All Time.
