Go to tryfum.com/HIDDENXPERIA or scan the QR code and use code HIDDENXPERIA to get your free FÜM Base when you order your Journey Pack today #ad Today, we take a look at the Halo 2 Campaign we ALMOST got...
You cleared up an inconsistency that was on my mind, where at two points in Halo 3 it was hinted that the Humans are the Forerunners' "children": (mainly where Gravemind says something like "I will not forgive you, the child inherits the parents' sins" (which is evil). I thought of saying, "the humans aren't the Forerunners' children."
Small tid bit about alpha moon but general kidd ages made a video about the room we find the gravemind in in his cutscene and it's a retuxtured version of the alpha halo control room. Considering quarantine zone uses many of those alpha moon assets it's possible that room was a reused asset from the level.
@@lyrimetacurl0yes they are. They are their reclaimers. And genetic kin…besides, how can humanity be the Forerunners and their children at the same time?
You can say that for almost any product. If only they had 2 more years. Then after those years, if only they had 1 more year (I create software and this is very common)
@@SupaSpartanGaming I thought of some interesting ideas of what the alternate Halo 3 would have it this did happen. Like what if Mendicant Bias was back? Or what if humanity gets its hands on a ton of forerunner technology thanks to a forerunner key (Spartan Ops)? Or the humanity and the covenant all finally working together just like in Halo Legends. Would the Didact be a human? Would he still be a villain who has a narcissistic view on all other alien races & uses aliens to compose them into ‘Promethean Knights’ and humanity is split on this and the Master Chief now has to kill one of his kind, making the franchise go full circle.
Another thing about the original plan for alpha moon was that the heretics were going to be hunters. Joe Staten talks about this in the Halo 2 Developer commentary. I assume it was cut as fighting only hunters for a whole mission won't be too fun but it's a cool idea!
The human-as-forerunner storyline is the entire reason Halo makes sense in the first place. It speaks to the deep sense that humans are uniquely divine (halo, holy, etc) compared to any other species. Bungie created a masterpiece of storytelling for the modern era.
The Heretic leader didn't think the Arbiter was too far gone. As he said himself before the Monitor interjected, dying at the Arbiter's hands was better than living in disgrace--if he managed to get that far in a single Seraph.
@@dillanspec4 There's just one slight thing I forgot to mention. The mining platform they were on was falling into the heart of a gas giant, to be crushed by the tremendous atmospheric pressure. They didn't have the time.
THANK YOU for acknowleding that humans were forerunners in bungie's canon. been seeing so many people trying to deny it was a retcon and it drives me crazy.
this video is proof why i believe 343's halo is seprate from bungie's mainly 16:26 because i just finished playing halo reach 1 2 3 4 and 5, all in order, and suddenly none of the forerunner stuff made any sense by halo 4
For real. *ALL* other sources say that Forerunner *ARE* human *EXCEPT* for *ONE* source of dubious canonicity that was written by an office assistant (that wasn't double checked) because the writers wanted to be nice. *NORMALLY* in things like science, statistics, etc... outliers are *EXCLUDED,* yet some people act like the *ONE* source invalidates *ALL* the others that say contrary. It's honestly mind-breaking mental gymnastics. Edit* Just to clarify, I mean BUNGIE era sources, not any 343 era sources. Just for clarification.
@@tjpprojects7192 it doesn't help that people like Paul Russell have gone on record on Twitter saying that the intent was for them to be separate species. I don't understand why. Maybe he is misremembering stuff?
Humans being the Forerunners always made more sense from everything said originally in the trilogy before it was retconned leaving a bunch of out of place dialogue in the original trilogy.
It still baffles me how back then, games that had a year-long time crunch still led to amazing results, like with Halo 2 and Kotor 2. But nowadays, games that are given way more time end up a huge failure, like with Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League, which had over 7 years of development.
God I must have watched that 2003 e3 demo a hundred times back when it dropped. Finally getting to play halo 2 only to discover that the dynamic lighting had been cut and the game looked nothing like the demo did was the first gut punch. Slogging through the campaign and having it dawn on me that the glorious, 'wide linear' combat sandbox semi-freeform structure of the first game had been dumped in favour of a sequence of tightly linear corridors and small rooms was the second. Comparing campaign to campaign halo 2 was a real disappointment.
@@manydirt2600 Oh god that was such a shame, the devs talk about it in the halo 2 dev commentary. It was something they simply couldn't fix because of hardware limitations (crazy to remember the OG xbox only had 64 MB of memory).
i didnt even notice lol :D I had given up on Halo but it seems that modders bring back the vibes (they mostly do no matter what game lol). Modern games are too much of political correctness and wokeness.
Halo 2 has been and will always be the best halo game to me Also for the cut content of satchel charges, and the gate/doors the hunters bust through, you were right xperia, cause Johnson says over comms "someone get a satchel on the gate". So clearly you were supposed to interact with the gate, or a marine does
Took you a few years to find that out... but hey I am still impressed that 343 took Frank O'Connor's fantasy for gold and based all their games on 3 of the terminals Franky wrote himself in Halo 3 while ignoring everything that is not made by Franky...
Yup... Better late than never I suppose! I can only hope xperia names and shames him, as responsible for the lore "Drift" that occurs in halo 4 onwards.
the 18:57 image of HiddenX pointing is my new favorite image to ever come out of one of these videos great video as always, just wanted to drop this timecode in case folks needed a new reaction image also the sporadic returns of the "turok mentioned" meme will always make me chuckle. good shit
My favorite bit of the Burial Mounds H2 MP Map is that the debris in the field are chunks from Installation 04's Forerunner structures of The Silent Cartographer Island, easiest find was the Security Room, The "Disk" like shape is easy to spot.
Halo 2 will always stand as one of the GREATEST gaming success stories of all time, and yet also serves to show the dangers of deadlines and crunchtime in game development.
The cool Jackal shield weapon actually exists in the Destiny games: The Aegis is a shield made by a guardian called Kabr that got stuck in the Vault of Glass. Before he was unwritten from time, his last act was to combine his Light & the bodies of dead Vex into a shield to protect others from the Vault’s effects.
Somebody might've mentioned this already, but the original jackal shield sounds exactly like the shield in Destiny 1 and 2, in the Vault of Glass raid. It can shoot a projectile, it can create a bubble around the user, and i think it can do a ground pound iirc.
The original ending of Halo 2 would make the Halo Legends Episode: Origin Part II make much more sense with how it stated that "the Covenant" and humanity would join forces together to take down the Flood. Considering the og Halo 2 ending seem to imply the Flood will continue build up their army some where far away to one day return and take over everything once more. The old Halo 2 ending would fit more in-line with that than the story we have now.
1:32 Fun fact, this whole level is a reference to a similarly cut down sequence in Marathon Infinity: the episode 2 map Naw Man, He's Close was supposed to begin with Marcus Jones (the security officer as hinted in one of the secret levels & his first name given in the fan WAD based on a scrapped Halo 1 story, Marathon Eternal) space jumping to Durandal's stolen Pfhor ship Boomer (from the first game), land on the hull and climb a tower surrounded by a pool of the strange pink jelly used as fuel (liquid thundrillium crystals from the 2011 Thundercats anime?) and enter the ship via a hull breach Tycho & the pfhor made for you. This ended up being cut when the map was reworked and the level now starts with Marcus simply entering via that same hull breach and the vacuum tag for the map was removed. The level name was a referring to the space jump at the start which was a reference to someone bungie jumping or something during the bridge scene in Apocalypse Now (I've seen that far in the movie but you don't see anyone on a wire, just hear them). Covenant Ship was meant to be Bungie's chance to finally include that set piece now they had the technology.
3:33 I always chalked that up to being a reference to RvB when we saw them do it there, but THIS is amazing to see Halo did have a plan for this type of shot! Crazy to think about how that ended up happening in RvB, makes me wonder if they knew of this storyboard as well
If they had a few more years on Halo 2, the entire Halo 3 Campaign would have been made with the Halo 2 engine, no maps would have been cut out, including campaign and multiplayer maps, and all of the cut content would be playable in Halo 2, so 10 years later for the MCC launch, all of those maps and assest would be playable in the Halo 2 Anniversary graphics!
Cut content is always a given, it’s almost vital. Sometimes devs come up with things that dont mesh very well with the gameplay so it has to be cut. Also, it’s very likely Bungie would have updated Halo 2’s engine for Halo 3 for better graphics and performance.
@@mmfood97 Very true but I feel like if they had more time to work on Halo 2, they might have been able to find some way to not cut certain things out or even give it to us for custom games and make some fun game types or something.
I agree with how much you enjoy the original twist of the Halo 2 ending. I also think that it makes the narrative so much sweeter. I wasnt aware that Halo 2 was supposed to be the end, however. That’s is a little odd. I would have loved a Halo 3 all about the humans and elites/the Covenant who left the group teaming up to take down the Flood. You have a three part trilogy that just feels so satisfying. The Covenant who was built on the worship of the Forerunners end up helping their descendants- the humans- take down an enemy that the Forerunners themselves could not in the past. The sacrifice of the Forerunners would also feel very satisfying to us knowing that they did the right thing.
Literally 12 seconds after the upload! WHAA?? But I'll be honest, every single content about Halo's dev. cycle is always amazing! I sure will love to watch this!
Tartarus loved Arbiter so much he masked his feelings through sassiness as he tried to genocide Arbiter’s entire species, honestly whenever Tartarus brought his massive hammer down on Arbiter’s body that made me cry tears of joy.
I hope one day that a team of modders make a campaign mod that uses cut levels and story. I'd die a happy Halo fan if that were to happen in my lifetime.
That bit about Jackal shields firing energy blasts reminds me of the Taken Phalanxes from Destiny 2, AKA the bane of my existence in Heroic Nightfall strikes. Maybe someone from Bungie carried over the idea when they moved on?
I actually like the original Halo 2 ending. It sets up 3 to be an all or nothing face off with the flood alongside the elites as allys, and you could still have covenant holdouts, as well as the arc with chief and cortana coming together and her being corrupted/rampant/logic plagued. Hell it would even reinforce the need for them to use the rings willingly. Idk i think it still works
I have been playing halo and watching videos on halo, some of my favorites being videos about cut content, thought i knew almost everything there was to know about halos cut content, but im glad to have learned about new stuff that didn't make.
I have to say. Why couldn't the Halo TV show have taken this route. The story that never came to be, as opposed to creating an alternate story only partially inspired by the canon. It feels like a really missed opportunity.
I think we need to see some ancient human worlds. If they split humans and forerunners apart but there was still ancient humans then we should get to see something more about them someday.
There was probably only 5 flares in the storyboard because installation 04 was destroyed and installation 05 had already been flared, assuming that still happened in the OG campaign.
it was as Arbiter just got back from 05 finishing Tartarus there, not sure why Hidden didn't think that 05 mere hours ago was disarmed wouldn't be firing from the Ark's fire command
I think I'd rather see the original team create a reboot with ALL the cut content ideas they had. Make it as big and badass as possible. Include all cut stories and levels. Do all the things they wanted to do and do it In just one massive game
Hey Luc, Just want to thank you fromthe bottom of my heart for still producing great vids I know its difficult with the content drought we're dealing with, just wanted to thank you again !
in marathon, the hulk and bobs were my most remembered. the hulk was scary bc it moved slow, its body blocked entire hallways, so it could slowly walk towards you... then wap... you for instant death. you had to actually count your Ammo and study your area on where to run away that's a wide area, and if you had enough ammo to kill a hulk... Before exploring a new area. they were scary, slow, insta koers
We need a halo director edition in unreal engine 5…. No stutters, high optimization and amazing textures/ lighting. Something that could be ran on even future hardware
R'tas's backstory on the infinite Saccor really puts into perspective his opening line from Halo 2. "You are the arbiter, the will of the prophets. These are my elites. Their lives matter to me, yours does not."
5:57 Slight issue there, the Heretic Leader probably DIDN'T HAVE another minute or two because the entire station was plummeting towards the core of a Gas Giant... even if the Forerunner mine had countermeasures similar to the one from Defender of the Storm, there's no way the Seraph would have managed to survive if the station fell beyond a certain point.
What do you mean “never before revealed secret that the forerunners were human” they literally had both mendicant bias and guilty spark say it outright
Bungie's "humans are forerunner" concept was a better story, I definitely agree with that, but it would have ended the Halo franchise. It would have left fewer rocks to turn over. The forerunner mystery would have been solved. 343's direction of "humans aren't forerunner" opened many more doors. There have been more directions to stretch out the franchise. It was the more profitable decision.
The funny thing is the 'humans aren't forerunner' only opens up doors because it preserves the mystery of the Forerunners... and stretch the franchise by undoing H3's Forerunner reveal. 343 in their marvelstarwars 'expanded universe' brainrot decided to remove all the mystery by ltierally detailing all aspects of Forerunner society and even reveal their faces...
@@AimlessJourneyGreg Bear’s novels were shit because of the Forerunner reveal and undid even the mystery of the Flood, now originating from space baby powder that failed to reform properly like wtf is that shit?
@@AimlessJourneyI love how you try to use marvel and Star Wars as insults, but they have bigger fandoms then Halo, are more successful, and 100% actually having mysteries pay off rather than relying on mystery boxes is better.
You forgot to mention melee combos and the duel smgs that were going to be their own weapon. Why cant i keep my duel weilding weapons? It not fair cant even melee while duel weilding to.
I’m devastated to hear that The Arbiter and Master Chief’s original meeting was cut as I’ve always wanted to see Master Chief and Thel Vadame’s Arbiter to throw down in battle, especially after playing Halo Reach and finding out that Thel was responsible for it. In Halo, even after all of these years after the fact, Chief still doesn’t know that it was Thel who killed so many of Chief’s fellow Spartans, especially fellow Spartan 2s, and I’m disappointed that 343 never capitalized on this by either bringing back someone like Noble Six to lead his own faction of Banished like Insurrectionists/Rebels that want to destroy all of the species that were apart of the covenant, or Chief finding out about Thel’s past atrocities he committed and decided on whether to forgive him or avenge everyone Thel had killed or harmed during the war.
Go watch C3 SABERTOOTHS ''WE WERE FORERUNNERS" Best video ive seen in years and makes me so angry at 343 for just how badly they decimated the halo lore and everything bungie created
I was about to mention that video as well. For the longest time I thought that Bungie couldn’t make up their mind about whether or not they wanted humans to be Forerunners because various TH-camrs told me that was the case, I hadn’t read the books at the time, and just like C3Sabertooth said in his video so many definitions for various words changed and NOBODY would naturally assume that Bungie’s vision was COMPLETELY DIFFERENT from what we’d get under 343. I had NO IDEA just how broken 343’s lore is. That video was truly eye opening.
@Xeno-The-Wanderer really not a fan of his animated character or the persona he portrays but the facts, evidence, research and animated storyboards are top tier
God I wish Bungie kept more of Halo 2's original ending for Halo 3's story. It would've been so much cooler to have that reveal that Forerunners are humans, and that Truth's plan was to influence the entire path of the galaxy's development instead of being yet another prophet that drank too much of their own kool aid.
flood don't gain everything when infecting someone, they have to sift through the knowledge so the knowledge is probably in the body until everything can be sent and stored to a central inteligence possibly put into whatever keeps the gravemind's memories of everything. Remember that the flood didn't get info out of Keyes immediately
*Halo Infinite was supposed to get a Banished creature called the Crusher. It had huge horns and claws. It could turn on the Banished if the control device was destroyed.*
If you bought the special edition halo 2 when the OG game was released you wouldve had the dvd where it details the process of how they ended up with the current halo 2 story…short story they had a different story but scrapped that last minute and basically had about 6 months to come up with the eventual story that was released
Honestly I would have loved to see and use those vehicle variants and the cut weapons too, it's just sad 😿 that none of them made into halo 2 and not to mention it would be awesome to drive the shadow and it would really be awesome if we got to use the scarab as well.
people seem to forget that all the way back in halo 2, the level sacred icon depicts a forerunner hand with 6 fingers, not 5. It's at the part when you defeat the sentinel enforcer and you disable the quarantine shield. If you don't believe me, look it up or play the level your selves.
if you simply place your left hand to your right hand you got a hand with 6 fingers with two thumbs. that’s how simple that explanation is lol. it’s either you use your left or right hand lol
Paul Russle one of the visual artists for Halo said the reason he did that was because it took up less memory to just mirror the image. He also said it could be viewed as the Forerunners making their machinery user friendly to both left and right handed people. The whole motivation for the Human Covenant War only works if humans are Forerunners. Contact Harvest written by Joseph Staten one of the lead guys for Halo’s story has Mendicant Bias outright tell the future Prophets that humans are the children of their gods who would Reclaim(er) what was left behind. This revelation had to be covered up through a war of extermination because our existence invalidated the Covenant’s claim to be the true inheritors of the Forerunner’s technology/legacy, and the fact we were Forerunners who were “left behind” disproved their belief in the Great Journey where all would ascend to godhood after activating the Array. Also, outside of the few things Frank O’Conner wrote in 3 the main story clearly points to humans being Forerunner. Truth and the Gravemind both allude to humanity’s Forerunner ancestry, Guilty Spark outright says “YOU ARE FORERUNNER!”, and whenever you activate the terminals reversed speech plays with the messages occasionally saying stuff like “welcome child” or “lineage confirmed”. Watch C3Sabertooth’s We Were Forerunner video where he goes over this and illiterates just how fundamentally broken 343’s canon is.
@@shreksnow1918funny thing about the “u r 4 runner” line, if you listen to literally any of Guilty Sparks lines after that, it’s clear he’s gone rampant so he can’t be taken literally lol “Welcome *child” *”Lineage* confirmed” “You are the *child* of my makers.” But yeah humans are literally the exact same species as forerunners.
@@jakespacepiratee3740 you quoted 343GS “…child of MY MAKERS” to those 343 shill lore defenders… His makers were the Forerunners and that John-117 is a child of them - a Human, which confirms the Forerunners are Human. Not those noseless bastards in Halo 4, John-117 should have no nose bridge when his helmet was taken off in Halo 4 then. well i re-read the comment, you did agree. However, he was telling the truth, not because he was rampant and was losing his mind. He was only rampant because HIS ring is in danger again, it was his programming to protect it that’s why he was colored red.
The Halo 2 Artifacts four part podcast contradicts your info on the mongoose and why it didn't make it into the finished game. It was down to lack of dev time, but they really wanted it in. Was never cut per se.
I’m looking forward to that video on the forerunners as I’ve always preferred them being separate as a more compelling story and seeing the other side of the fence is always interesting, but considering my halo fan card as been revoked for only liking the shadow I guess that make sense lol.
Go to tryfum.com/HIDDENXPERIA or scan the QR code and use code HIDDENXPERIA to get your free FÜM Base when you order your Journey Pack today #ad
Today, we take a look at the Halo 2 Campaign we ALMOST got...
Did you know halo tv show canceled what your opinion on it please tell me please
You cleared up an inconsistency that was on my mind, where at two points in Halo 3 it was hinted that the Humans are the Forerunners' "children": (mainly where Gravemind says something like "I will not forgive you, the child inherits the parents' sins" (which is evil). I thought of saying, "the humans aren't the Forerunners' children."
Small tid bit about alpha moon but general kidd ages made a video about the room we find the gravemind in in his cutscene and it's a retuxtured version of the alpha halo control room. Considering quarantine zone uses many of those alpha moon assets it's possible that room was a reused asset from the level.
ruby of blue and vengeful vadam aswell as halo modders, take big notes, see if you could expand the story/gameplay of halo 2 revamped
@@lyrimetacurl0yes they are. They are their reclaimers. And genetic kin…besides, how can humanity be the Forerunners and their children at the same time?
Just imagine if they spent like a couple more years on halo 2
Even just an extra 6 months would still have given us a very different game.
Imagine if it was a 360 launch title...
@@BigTylt if it was 360 launch they would have been able to keep their original lighting engine
You can say that for almost any product. If only they had 2 more years. Then after those years, if only they had 1 more year (I create software and this is very common)
Were it so easy
So I just heard that the end of Halo 2 was just the end of the human-covenant war. While Halo 3 was a full scale galactic war against the flood
That would make a lot of sense with the ending of Origins from Halo Legends!
@@SupaSpartanGaming I thought of some interesting ideas of what the alternate Halo 3 would have it this did happen. Like what if Mendicant Bias was back? Or what if humanity gets its hands on a ton of forerunner technology thanks to a forerunner key (Spartan Ops)? Or the humanity and the covenant all finally working together just like in Halo Legends. Would the Didact be a human? Would he still be a villain who has a narcissistic view on all other alien races & uses aliens to compose them into ‘Promethean Knights’ and humanity is split on this and the Master Chief now has to kill one of his kind, making the franchise go full circle.
@@andydufresnefromshawshank5866Reminder that stuff like the Janus Key and Prometheans were 343’s ideas, not Bungie
@@andydufresnefromshawshank5866 Full Halo
@@SupaSpartanGaming origins was after halo 3
Someday I'll animate that original ending
Bro where u been we need some more videos
Yo Pip, you good man? What happened to the discord man?
That'd be pretty cool😎
Tomorrow?
@@akramhaouam9943 I'm working on a game now jeje
Another thing about the original plan for alpha moon was that the heretics were going to be hunters. Joe Staten talks about this in the Halo 2 Developer commentary. I assume it was cut as fighting only hunters for a whole mission won't be too fun but it's a cool idea!
Slugmen return!
I'd end up with my controller turned to dust.
The human-as-forerunner storyline is the entire reason Halo makes sense in the first place. It speaks to the deep sense that humans are uniquely divine (halo, holy, etc) compared to any other species. Bungie created a masterpiece of storytelling for the modern era.
The Heretic leader didn't think the Arbiter was too far gone. As he said himself before the Monitor interjected, dying at the Arbiter's hands was better than living in disgrace--if he managed to get that far in a single Seraph.
always pisses me off how Arbiter seemed like he was genuinely listening and was hearing bro out, then he starts shooting him instead of explaining
@@dillanspec4 There's just one slight thing I forgot to mention. The mining platform they were on was falling into the heart of a gas giant, to be crushed by the tremendous atmospheric pressure. They didn't have the time.
i guess thats a good point
Sesa opened fire because Arbiter was starting to lower his weapon. A detail that wasn’t in the remaster. Perhaps Sesa thought he was going to fire
THANK YOU for acknowleding that humans were forerunners in bungie's canon. been seeing so many people trying to deny it was a retcon and it drives me crazy.
Bungie canon…? Theres Halo canon and Frank O connors fan fiction as someone else pointed out.
@@2fangz296 vouch
Except it was Bungie that finally decided humans and forerunners are different things with the terminals in three....
@@comandercarnis idk much about H3 its prob my least fav in the trilogy. But frank o connor wrote those terminals apparently and thats… not Bungie
@@2fangz296 a team wrote the terminals not just frank
this video is proof why i believe 343's halo is seprate from bungie's
mainly 16:26 because i just finished playing halo reach 1 2 3 4 and 5, all in order, and suddenly none of the forerunner stuff made any sense by halo 4
dont let the 343 fans on twitter see this lol
They objectively are two seperate stories. They changed the main twist, the main theme, the underlying mystery that tied the whole story together.
It's crazy that there are people that still argue that the forerunners and humans being the same species was not the original intent.
For real. *ALL* other sources say that Forerunner *ARE* human *EXCEPT* for *ONE* source of dubious canonicity that was written by an office assistant (that wasn't double checked) because the writers wanted to be nice. *NORMALLY* in things like science, statistics, etc... outliers are *EXCLUDED,* yet some people act like the *ONE* source invalidates *ALL* the others that say contrary. It's honestly mind-breaking mental gymnastics.
Edit* Just to clarify, I mean BUNGIE era sources, not any 343 era sources. Just for clarification.
_Contact_ _Harvest_ made that pretty clear.
@@StrikeAxlMarty and Jaime told people on twitter that it was pretty obvious.
@@tjpprojects7192 it doesn't help that people like Paul Russell have gone on record on Twitter saying that the intent was for them to be separate species. I don't understand why. Maybe he is misremembering stuff?
@@StrikeAxl Frankie O' Connerd seems pretty anal about Forerunners not being human. Maybe Paul was trying to get industry brownie points?
Humans being the Forerunners always made more sense from everything said originally in the trilogy before it was retconned leaving a bunch of out of place dialogue in the original trilogy.
It also never made sense the Forerunners wouldn't preserve their own species to survive the Halo fireing.
Oh, except for one deranged lunatic hell bent on destroying humanity.
343 just loves arbitrarily changing things for fun
“You ARE forerunner! But this ring is mine!”
@@ThlormbyWith this line I always took it as meaning for all intentions and purposes, he was, or rather humanity is Forerunner.
It still baffles me how back then, games that had a year-long time crunch still led to amazing results, like with Halo 2 and Kotor 2. But nowadays, games that are given way more time end up a huge failure, like with Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League, which had over 7 years of development.
Difference of leadership and passion between devs
The fact that they wrote a poem to the part they cut from the game says a lot about their passion at that time.
I remember being disappointed when I noticed the graphics didn't live up to Halo 2's first trailer
Same when I read the game reviews and saw there was graphical pop in.
@@bcboy87the texture pop in back at release was the worst I'd ever seen.
God I must have watched that 2003 e3 demo a hundred times back when it dropped. Finally getting to play halo 2 only to discover that the dynamic lighting had been cut and the game looked nothing like the demo did was the first gut punch. Slogging through the campaign and having it dawn on me that the glorious, 'wide linear' combat sandbox semi-freeform structure of the first game had been dumped in favour of a sequence of tightly linear corridors and small rooms was the second.
Comparing campaign to campaign halo 2 was a real disappointment.
Yeah the e3 trailer.
@@manydirt2600 Oh god that was such a shame, the devs talk about it in the halo 2 dev commentary. It was something they simply couldn't fix because of hardware limitations (crazy to remember the OG xbox only had 64 MB of memory).
Happy to see Uncut continue to get more recognition! Thank you, brother ❤
Salutations
Anytime king! Very deserving :)
i didnt even notice lol :D I had given up on Halo but it seems that modders bring back the vibes (they mostly do no matter what game lol). Modern games are too much of political correctness and wokeness.
I would love to see that cutscene of Chief falling to the planet and walking out of the smoke in an upcoming halo game, would be so bad ass
Halo 2 has been and will always be the best halo game to me
Also for the cut content of satchel charges, and the gate/doors the hunters bust through, you were right xperia, cause Johnson says over comms "someone get a satchel on the gate". So clearly you were supposed to interact with the gate, or a marine does
Took you a few years to find that out... but hey I am still impressed that 343 took Frank O'Connor's fantasy for gold and based all their games on 3 of the terminals Franky wrote himself in Halo 3 while ignoring everything that is not made by Franky...
Well said
Frank o Connor is the Antichrist
Yup... Better late than never I suppose!
I can only hope xperia names and shames him, as responsible for the lore "Drift" that occurs in halo 4 onwards.
@@Mostima115 Frank o Connor isn’t the Antichrist.
@@jakespacepiratee3740 Yet.
the 18:57 image of HiddenX pointing is my new favorite image to ever come out of one of these videos
great video as always, just wanted to drop this timecode in case folks needed a new reaction image
also the sporadic returns of the "turok mentioned" meme will always make me chuckle. good shit
My favorite bit of the Burial Mounds H2 MP Map is that the debris in the field are chunks from Installation 04's Forerunner structures of The Silent Cartographer Island, easiest find was the Security Room, The "Disk" like shape is easy to spot.
Halo 2 will always stand as one of the GREATEST gaming success stories of all time, and yet also serves to show the dangers of deadlines and crunchtime in game development.
Its a shame that devs get time pressure cause you already could see what happens with that (Cyberpunk).
@@Hunter-jo8ud Exactly.
The cool Jackal shield weapon actually exists in the Destiny games: The Aegis is a shield made by a guardian called Kabr that got stuck in the Vault of Glass. Before he was unwritten from time, his last act was to combine his Light & the bodies of dead Vex into a shield to protect others from the Vault’s effects.
Suddenly "Someone get a Satchel on the gate!" Makes a LOT more sense
Happy 20th Anniversary Halo 2, and Happy 10th Anniversary Halo: Master Chief Collection
Somebody might've mentioned this already, but the original jackal shield sounds exactly like the shield in Destiny 1 and 2, in the Vault of Glass raid. It can shoot a projectile, it can create a bubble around the user, and i think it can do a ground pound iirc.
Halo 2 was Bungie’s most ambitious game. Sad we never got to see it to its full potential
The original ending of Halo 2 would make the Halo Legends Episode: Origin Part II make much more sense with how it stated that "the Covenant" and humanity would join forces together to take down the Flood.
Considering the og Halo 2 ending seem to imply the Flood will continue build up their army some where far away to one day return and take over everything once more. The old Halo 2 ending would fit more in-line with that than the story we have now.
We have the technology. We can make it happen now. Give us the Halo 2 Bungie Cut!!
1:32 Fun fact, this whole level is a reference to a similarly cut down sequence in Marathon Infinity: the episode 2 map Naw Man, He's Close was supposed to begin with Marcus Jones (the security officer as hinted in one of the secret levels & his first name given in the fan WAD based on a scrapped Halo 1 story, Marathon Eternal) space jumping to Durandal's stolen Pfhor ship Boomer (from the first game), land on the hull and climb a tower surrounded by a pool of the strange pink jelly used as fuel (liquid thundrillium crystals from the 2011 Thundercats anime?) and enter the ship via a hull breach Tycho & the pfhor made for you.
This ended up being cut when the map was reworked and the level now starts with Marcus simply entering via that same hull breach and the vacuum tag for the map was removed. The level name was a referring to the space jump at the start which was a reference to someone bungie jumping or something during the bridge scene in Apocalypse Now (I've seen that far in the movie but you don't see anyone on a wire, just hear them).
Covenant Ship was meant to be Bungie's chance to finally include that set piece now they had the technology.
3:33 I always chalked that up to being a reference to RvB when we saw them do it there, but THIS is amazing to see Halo did have a plan for this type of shot! Crazy to think about how that ended up happening in RvB, makes me wonder if they knew of this storyboard as well
If they had a few more years on Halo 2, the entire Halo 3 Campaign would have been made with the Halo 2 engine, no maps would have been cut out, including campaign and multiplayer maps, and all of the cut content would be playable in Halo 2, so 10 years later for the MCC launch, all of those maps and assest would be playable in the Halo 2 Anniversary graphics!
Cut content is always a given, it’s almost vital. Sometimes devs come up with things that dont mesh very well with the gameplay so it has to be cut. Also, it’s very likely Bungie would have updated Halo 2’s engine for Halo 3 for better graphics and performance.
and it would've been released on the 360 with the graphics they intended to use for halo 2
@@mmfood97 Very true but I feel like if they had more time to work on Halo 2, they might have been able to find some way to not cut certain things out or even give it to us for custom games and make some fun game types or something.
@@marranin007 That is very true and halo 2 would have been complete story wise and we would have had other cut features in the final release!
It never made sense to me why they only gave them 3 years
I agree with how much you enjoy the original twist of the Halo 2 ending.
I also think that it makes the narrative so much sweeter. I wasnt aware that Halo 2 was supposed to be the end, however. That’s is a little odd. I would have loved a Halo 3 all about the humans and elites/the Covenant who left the group teaming up to take down the Flood.
You have a three part trilogy that just feels so satisfying. The Covenant who was built on the worship of the Forerunners end up helping their descendants- the humans- take down an enemy that the Forerunners themselves could not in the past.
The sacrifice of the Forerunners would also feel very satisfying to us knowing that they did the right thing.
Literally 12 seconds after the upload! WHAA??
But I'll be honest, every single content about Halo's dev. cycle is always amazing! I sure will love to watch this!
"Sir they're loosing how do we assist the defense?."
"Glass them."😂 14:12
Tartarus loved Arbiter so much he masked his feelings through sassiness as he tried to genocide Arbiter’s entire species, honestly whenever Tartarus brought his massive hammer down on Arbiter’s body that made me cry tears of joy.
Yes Chief, this one over here...
wut
Huh
hello???
what if his name was freakarus and
Would be cool if they did a fracture universe where the original story did play out. If the spartans can be samurai then humans can be forerunners.
I hope that Ruby of Blue know all of this
I hope one day that a team of modders make a campaign mod that uses cut levels and story. I'd die a happy Halo fan if that were to happen in my lifetime.
HiddenXperia: *posts a Halo 2 cut campaign content video*
Ruby of Blue: Write that down, write that down!
Remember when Halo 2 was originally supposed to have sprint, and when reach came out ppl thought they were copying CoD? Lmao
That bit about Jackal shields firing energy blasts reminds me of the Taken Phalanxes from Destiny 2, AKA the bane of my existence in Heroic Nightfall strikes.
Maybe someone from Bungie carried over the idea when they moved on?
As for Halo 2’s original ending, Humanity is still the Forerunners. Everything else is just Frank O’Connor’s fan fiction.
I personally find what we have now bein way cooler. Also leaves more room for stuff, like
How couldn't you like the mystery the Ancient Humans bring?
@@jaroken117i think you just despise halo 4 fr
@@ryan_1099yeah plus the ancient humans are literally what Bungie was doing….but after halo 4 it was more fleshed out
@@jaroken117 They didn't understand the original story with _Halo_ _Reach_ .
@@redslate Halo reach was made by bungie though? 343 took ownership of updating it late into it's life cycle, rebranded everything it could.
Blow me away
Freaky
"Only the strongest will survive"
I actually like the original Halo 2 ending. It sets up 3 to be an all or nothing face off with the flood alongside the elites as allys, and you could still have covenant holdouts, as well as the arc with chief and cortana coming together and her being corrupted/rampant/logic plagued. Hell it would even reinforce the need for them to use the rings willingly. Idk i think it still works
5:48 In the OG Halo 2 the Arbiter was the main character, but that story changed too. So could be that was a remnant of it.
I have been playing halo and watching videos on halo, some of my favorites being videos about cut content, thought i knew almost everything there was to know about halos cut content, but im glad to have learned about new stuff that didn't make.
I would love to see 343 implement some of the cut content into the MCC collection on XBOX! Jeez I feel like a broken record saying that…
Jump ship from the dying platform that is Xbox and get a pc.
They should do a remaster with the e3 trailer mission (as second level) with all cut content (even improved).
Imagine a universe where Halo 2 released as it was supposed to and the story ended. People would be left waiting for Half Life 3 as well as Halo 3
Halo 2 first announcement trailer and halo 3 starry night trailer makes a lot more sense when watching this video
I have to say. Why couldn't the Halo TV show have taken this route. The story that never came to be, as opposed to creating an alternate story only partially inspired by the canon. It feels like a really missed opportunity.
Because wokeness is more important to them...
Underrated comment
someone cooked here
I think we need to see some ancient human worlds. If they split humans and forerunners apart but there was still ancient humans then we should get to see something more about them someday.
I would even settle for an ancient human wrecked ship, if 343 does continue down the route of ancient humans NOT being forerunner.
*cough rubys rebalanced mod trailer halo 2 cough cough*
There was probably only 5 flares in the storyboard because installation 04 was destroyed and installation 05 had already been flared, assuming that still happened in the OG campaign.
it was as Arbiter just got back from 05 finishing Tartarus there, not sure why Hidden didn't think that 05 mere hours ago was disarmed wouldn't be firing from the Ark's fire command
I think I'd rather see the original team create a reboot with ALL the cut content ideas they had. Make it as big and badass as possible. Include all cut stories and levels. Do all the things they wanted to do and do it In just one massive game
Hey Luc, Just want to thank you fromthe bottom of my heart for still producing great vids I know its difficult with the content drought we're dealing with, just wanted to thank you again !
appreciate it chief, I just do it for the love of the game
in marathon, the hulk and bobs were my most remembered. the hulk was scary bc it moved slow, its body blocked entire hallways, so it could slowly walk towards you... then wap... you for instant death. you had to actually count your Ammo and study your area on where to run away that's a wide area, and if you had enough ammo to kill a hulk... Before exploring a new area. they were scary, slow, insta koers
We need a halo director edition in unreal engine 5…. No stutters, high optimization and amazing textures/ lighting. Something that could be ran on even future hardware
R'tas's backstory on the infinite Saccor really puts into perspective his opening line from Halo 2. "You are the arbiter, the will of the prophets. These are my elites. Their lives matter to me, yours does not."
Do a horror series how they would ruin these games today with battle passes and updates required ect
5:57 Slight issue there, the Heretic Leader probably DIDN'T HAVE another minute or two because the entire station was plummeting towards the core of a Gas Giant... even if the Forerunner mine had countermeasures similar to the one from Defender of the Storm, there's no way the Seraph would have managed to survive if the station fell beyond a certain point.
I am actually really glad we got the story we got, sad we got so much content cut.
I have heard this story a thousand a one times, yet your retelling breaths new life
That Jackal shield concept sounds exactly like the Aegis in Destiny. Interesting to see that Bungie did finally use those early ideas.
I always imagined if there were civilian warthogs, they’d use those vertical open/close doors like the arctic hog
HiddenXperia, this is the third time you've made a video about what Halo 2 could've been!
It's the Simpsons meme I love you really
What do you mean “never before revealed secret that the forerunners were human” they literally had both mendicant bias and guilty spark say it outright
Plus the novels...
@@redslate I was referring to contact harvest when talking about mendicant
@@gub4941 Admittedly, I thought you were referring to the _Halo_ _3_ Terminals, but I was nonetheless in agreement with you.
@@redslate ah real
Not covering the halo show was a chad move
Bungie's "humans are forerunner" concept was a better story, I definitely agree with that, but it would have ended the Halo franchise. It would have left fewer rocks to turn over. The forerunner mystery would have been solved.
343's direction of "humans aren't forerunner" opened many more doors. There have been more directions to stretch out the franchise. It was the more profitable decision.
Bungie intended to end Halo at 3 so unlike 343 they had no intention of future profits they had a solid story and a solid ending. Then 343 got greedy
The funny thing is the 'humans aren't forerunner' only opens up doors because it preserves the mystery of the Forerunners... and stretch the franchise by undoing H3's Forerunner reveal.
343 in their marvelstarwars 'expanded universe' brainrot decided to remove all the mystery by ltierally detailing all aspects of Forerunner society and even reveal their faces...
@@AimlessJourneyGreg Bear’s novels were shit because of the Forerunner reveal and undid even the mystery of the Flood, now originating from space baby powder that failed to reform properly like wtf is that shit?
@@AimlessJourneyI love how you try to use marvel and Star Wars as insults, but they have bigger fandoms then Halo, are more successful, and 100% actually having mysteries pay off rather than relying on mystery boxes is better.
@@jairusdeleon8915just say “books hurt brain”
You forgot to mention melee combos and the duel smgs that were going to be their own weapon. Why cant i keep my duel weilding weapons? It not fair cant even melee while duel weilding to.
I’m devastated to hear that The Arbiter and Master Chief’s original meeting was cut as I’ve always wanted to see Master Chief and Thel Vadame’s Arbiter to throw down in battle, especially after playing Halo Reach and finding out that Thel was responsible for it. In Halo, even after all of these years after the fact, Chief still doesn’t know that it was Thel who killed so many of Chief’s fellow Spartans, especially fellow Spartan 2s, and I’m disappointed that 343 never capitalized on this by either bringing back someone like Noble Six to lead his own faction of Banished like Insurrectionists/Rebels that want to destroy all of the species that were apart of the covenant, or Chief finding out about Thel’s past atrocities he committed and decided on whether to forgive him or avenge everyone Thel had killed or harmed during the war.
Great to know what halo 2 could've been. Really wish they kept joe for halo 3
The campaign is already a masterpiece
You missed the tropic hog having different tires, likely for the looser tropical ground
Right off the bat, Sharqoi appearance.
Go watch C3 SABERTOOTHS ''WE WERE FORERUNNERS"
Best video ive seen in years and makes me so angry at 343 for just how badly they decimated the halo lore and everything bungie created
I was about to mention that video as well. For the longest time I thought that Bungie couldn’t make up their mind about whether or not they wanted humans to be Forerunners because various TH-camrs told me that was the case, I hadn’t read the books at the time, and just like C3Sabertooth said in his video so many definitions for various words changed and NOBODY would naturally assume that Bungie’s vision was COMPLETELY DIFFERENT from what we’d get under 343. I had NO IDEA just how broken 343’s lore is. That video was truly eye opening.
@shreksnow1918 never liked anything 343 have ever worked on and that video just confirmed my dislike for them
it's a good video but it's a bit too emotionally charged for my taste
@Xeno-The-Wanderer really not a fan of his animated character or the persona he portrays but the facts, evidence, research and animated storyboards are top tier
God I wish Bungie kept more of Halo 2's original ending for Halo 3's story. It would've been so much cooler to have that reveal that Forerunners are humans, and that Truth's plan was to influence the entire path of the galaxy's development instead of being yet another prophet that drank too much of their own kool aid.
I just finished contact harvest for the first time and it was easily my favorite book
23:46 thats sounds a lot like a mix between the new (the void aspect "unbreakable") titan ability and the titan exotic glaive from destiny 2
i am confused. that great swordsman you mentioned around 8:00 , wouldnt his knowledge make all flood forms with swords crazy strong?
Almost, but Rtas killed him and blew up that ship. The knowledge probably didn't spread very far
flood don't gain everything when infecting someone, they have to sift through the knowledge so the knowledge is probably in the body until everything can be sent and stored to a central inteligence possibly put into whatever keeps the gravemind's memories of everything. Remember that the flood didn't get info out of Keyes immediately
man i got goosebumps when the elite ships turned up and glassed the brutes
*Halo Infinite was supposed to get a Banished creature called the Crusher. It had huge horns and claws. It could turn on the Banished if the control device was destroyed.*
Nice upholstery on the grunt transport version of the Shadow
we used to laugh at people paying for bottled water, now there's flavored air
"I know that stench. I've smelled it before."
I think the plasma mortar would probably act like the Halo 3 rocket turret did when it didn't have tracking.
If you bought the special edition halo 2 when the OG game was released you wouldve had the dvd where it details the process of how they ended up with the current halo 2 story…short story they had a different story but scrapped that last minute and basically had about 6 months to come up with the eventual story that was released
I always imagined Second Movement of The Odyssey would play during something like Forerunner Tank.
I'm sure there's a ton of cut ideas and content that we still don't know about. Maybe one day we can get a hold on that original build of the game.
Honestly I would have loved to see and use those vehicle variants and the cut weapons too, it's just sad 😿 that none of them made into halo 2 and not to mention it would be awesome to drive the shadow and it would really be awesome if we got to use the scarab as well.
I knew that cutscene from halo infinite seemed like peak halo 343 stole that idea of falling into the pelican
What a great time to be alive. If they put the half effort into this new game, it would be something totally different.
I’m interested in seeing what the original story for halo 4, and 5 were going to be (five more so)
I agree with the humans being forerunners was what they should have stuck with. I always got that impression, and then 343 had to fuck it up.
people seem to forget that all the way back in halo 2, the level sacred icon depicts a forerunner hand with 6 fingers, not 5. It's at the part when you defeat the sentinel enforcer and you disable the quarantine shield. If you don't believe me, look it up or play the level your selves.
if you simply place your left hand to your right hand
you got a hand with 6 fingers with two thumbs. that’s how simple that explanation is lol. it’s either you use your left or right hand lol
Paul Russle one of the visual artists for Halo said the reason he did that was because it took up less memory to just mirror the image. He also said it could be viewed as the Forerunners making their machinery user friendly to both left and right handed people.
The whole motivation for the Human Covenant War only works if humans are Forerunners. Contact Harvest written by Joseph Staten one of the lead guys for Halo’s story has Mendicant Bias outright tell the future Prophets that humans are the children of their gods who would Reclaim(er) what was left behind. This revelation had to be covered up through a war of extermination because our existence invalidated the Covenant’s claim to be the true inheritors of the Forerunner’s technology/legacy, and the fact we were Forerunners who were “left behind” disproved their belief in the Great Journey where all would ascend to godhood after activating the Array. Also, outside of the few things Frank O’Conner wrote in 3 the main story clearly points to humans being Forerunner. Truth and the Gravemind both allude to humanity’s Forerunner ancestry, Guilty Spark outright says “YOU ARE FORERUNNER!”, and whenever you activate the terminals reversed speech plays with the messages occasionally saying stuff like “welcome child” or “lineage confirmed”. Watch C3Sabertooth’s We Were Forerunner video where he goes over this and illiterates just how fundamentally broken 343’s canon is.
@@shreksnow1918funny thing about the “u r 4 runner” line, if you listen to literally any of Guilty Sparks lines after that, it’s clear he’s gone rampant so he can’t be taken literally lol
“Welcome *child” *”Lineage* confirmed” “You are the *child* of my makers.” But yeah humans are literally the exact same species as forerunners.
@jakespacepiratee3740 are you the same species as your parents?
@@jakespacepiratee3740
you quoted 343GS “…child of MY MAKERS”
to those 343 shill lore defenders…
His makers were the Forerunners and that John-117 is a child of them - a Human, which confirms the Forerunners are Human. Not those noseless bastards in Halo 4, John-117 should have no nose bridge when his helmet was taken off in Halo 4 then.
well i re-read the comment, you did agree. However, he was telling the truth, not because he was rampant and was losing his mind. He was only rampant because HIS ring is in danger again, it was his programming to protect it that’s why he was colored red.
33:45 I remember that from a magazine. I forgety which one.
Thanks for making this! Halo 2 since 2004 is still my favorite halo game!
We used to have this kind of story writing. Now we’ve got 343i….. I cri
The Halo 2 Artifacts four part podcast contradicts your info on the mongoose and why it didn't make it into the finished game. It was down to lack of dev time, but they really wanted it in. Was never cut per se.
Wish we got an update on Halo Reborn, Its been nearly 2 years since the original gameplay was shown off.
I’m looking forward to that video on the forerunners as I’ve always preferred them being separate as a more compelling story and seeing the other side of the fence is always interesting, but considering my halo fan card as been revoked for only liking the shadow I guess that make sense lol.
It doesn't really make sense for them to be separate as humans being Forerunners is the reason the Human-Covenant War started.