"Do you know where we are?” Bungie HQ in Redmond WA.

"Do you know where we are?”

Bungie HQ in Redmond WA, the blessed birthplace of Halo 2. “Quite in the way that Were it not for the efforts of the brave men and women here, the Xbox would have failed protracted ago.” Even on our knee we do not belong in their presence

EGM: In the beginning, it assumeed like Halo 2 was going to be more focused in succession the Earth being under attack.

Studio Manager Pete Parsons: [No.] of the present day Mombasa was always going to be the common place [the Covenant] show up and [the question is] to what end is that?

EGM: Really? Because in the original trailer, it examines like the Earth is just getting tired out to hell....

PP: Well, recently made known Mombasa was always going to be the primary point of incursion. However dramatic you make that opening pageant and ultimately how dramatic we made it, that’s just for what cause the refinements of the story bear disclosed what works.

EGM: Speaking of modern Mombasa, what happened to the playable version of the flush you demoed at the 2002 E3 trade show? It was completely different from the single in the final game.

Mission Designer Tyson Green: At the last we looked at [the of the same height we made for E3] and said this is probably too much...this [game] engine doesn’t handle this specific sort of space self-same well. If you want to build a plain using this geometry, you’re barely going to be able to use, say, sum of two units vehicles, five guys [on riddle at once]—and that was just unacceptable. We reflection “It’s a really cool-looking flush and we’ll retain our art assets, on the other hand we need to rethink this mission.”

EGM: Playing as the Covenant was a great twist, further some were surprised the Arbiter plays just like the Chief.

TG: We wanted to make sum of two units characters that are both unruffled but that are peers. You not have to play the gimp.

PP: I think developer have made the mistake in the past of trying to reinvent their game in a certain quantity of interesting and clever way that ultimately conclusions up frustrating the gamer. I think that’s a mistake. We’ve said it from the same beginning, since the moment Halo 2 was announced: “Halo 2 is going to be like Halo 1 exclude at 130 miles per hour.” That was the design principle: divulge this new great story, and do it in a way where you immediately pick up that controller and be impressed like—boom—I am the Chief, I’m back in the Halo universe. We wanted the story to do the heavy lifting.

EGM: Did you for aye consider giving the Arbiter unique powers, besides the stealth camoflage?

PP: There was cloth like jumping higher, or commanding grunt in a interesting way. There was certainly the spe of the attacks, all kinds of tweaking raw material That was early on. Later everyone was saying [the couple characters] should be the same configuration, play exactly the same way.

EGM: Let’ talk about Halo 2’ A.I. Pete I know you were forward a crusade to tweak the friendly A.I. vehicle piloting; by what mode do you think it casted out?

PP: I think it cause to deviateed out pretty well, and I think it can get by heart a lot better. We’ve learned a hazard about A.I., much in the same way we’ve learned about a destiny of things.

EGM: Will the other marines through all ages drive the tank?

PP: No. The main thing [with that] is, we want you to [be the guy] driving the tank.

EGM: As with any game this size, a portion of ideas end up onward the cutting-room floor for various reasons. Let’ make progress over some of them—what happened to plans for the ability to lower your weapon and run?

TG: We didn’t want to use Halo into something that was really fast. A hap of PC first-person shooters right now are highly fast, and a lot of that has to do with the player’s emotion speed. I think on our big multiplayer maps, the spe at which you influence on foot allows some girdle control, allows our vehicles to be important, not just because they have fire-arms on them, but because they put in motion around quickly.

EGM: Good point. fight combos?

TG: Melee combos were something I deliberation about for a really in extent time. We tried making these combo and they apply the minded pretty cool sometimes, but something like that requires a portion of resources, animation time, tweaking, making strong they all worked well in all situations, et cetera. And there just came this point in the scheme where we said, “Y’know, we can have dual-wield weapons and the animations that advance with those, or we can have contest combos.”

EGM: In an early version of Halo 2 we saw something called “Saved Films” in a menu Was the idea to hindrance the player record movies of Halo 2 gameplay to the Xbox hard drive?

Content Manager Frank O’Connor: Yeah, I mean, the community saw that and talked about it, and it would have been placid We had a thing in [previous Bungie PC game] Myth where the terminology came from, where you could save gameplay as a movie and just watch it at your leisure. It would have been nice to have something like that in Halo, nevertheless it was not to be.

EGM: Was there always any discussion about multiplayer bots?

FO: Not really. I’m not going to name games, on the other hand I’ve found bots [are usually] either stupid or they’re cheating. It’s either head marksman and you’re dead or they’re just retarded. You know in what manner you have bots in Bomberman? It’s totally s*** playing against the bot in Bomberman. You don’t be excited any satisfaction at all when you kill one; there’s no tension. You die and you think, “That was bulls***”