Halo 2’s iconic E3 2003 demo, a lot of which didn’t seem within the remaining sport when it launched a 12 months later, will lastly be playable subsequent week through a Steam Workshop mod for Halo: The Grasp Chief Assortment on PC, simply in time for Halo 2’s 20th anniversary.
The mod can be out there at no cost and can launch November 9, the identical day Halo 2 launched in 2004. Within the demo, Grasp Chief rides in a Pelican to the Earth metropolis of New Mombasa, the place he meets up with embattled UNSC Marines and battles his approach by way of town streets. After boarding and hijacking an enemy Ghost (a brand new gameplay function added in Halo 2), Chief escapes from a pursuing Phantom dropship, solely to seek out himself surrounded by Covenant drop pods full of Vitality Sword-wielding Elites. As he pulls out a plasma grenade, Cortana tells Chief “Wager you’ll be able to’t stick it,” to which Chief replies, “You are on” earlier than throwing himself on the Elites because the display screen fades to white. All of the whereas Martin O’Donnell’s immediately recognizable rating performs.
It made a strong impression again within the day. In an Xbox Wire blog post, Halo group director Brian Jarrard, who beforehand labored at Halo 2 developer Bungie, mentioned the stakes and vitality going into E3 2003 had been off the charts.
“The response to the demo at E3 was electrical, and almost each Halo fan remembers that demo and the place they had been once they had been first blinded by its majesty,” Jarrard mentioned. “Better of all, none of us ever would have anticipated that 20 plus years later, a bunch of passionate group modders would convey this demo to life as a full-fledged mission.”
However making the demo absolutely playable wasn’t straightforward. As famous within the weblog, the unique demo was constructed on a model of the Halo engine that now not exists and is not appropriate with different variations of Halo 2. Halo senior franchise author Kenneth Peters mentioned the unique construct of the demo required an authentic Xbox developer package as well, one thing “in more and more brief provide even inside the studio.”
The work to convey the demo again to life was beforehand introduced in a Halo Waypoint blog from 2022, the place first particulars on how developer 343 Industries (now rebranded to Halo Studios) and a bunch of group modders known as the Digsite staff had been engaged on restoring previous lower content material from Halo and Halo 2, together with the E3 2003 demo. On the time, 343 made no guarantees the demo would ever turn out to be absolutely playable.
One Digsite member mentioned some elements of the demo had been simply smoke and mirrors, with the staff having to make some elements of the demo “actual” by utilizing belongings from the shipped model of Halo 2. The demo, Peters mentioned, was by no means made to be performed off-script with out breaking. That offered a novel problem, together with having to make sense of “barely documented” code “initially written underneath an insane time crunch” 20 years in the past.
“This was NOT a trivial course of, and we must always in all probability layer on an entire web page of caveats that include taking a demo map for an engine that now not exists and getting it to not blow up the present lightmapper (amongst different points that come from letting folks go into areas that had been by no means meant to be seen).”
The Halo 2 E3 2003 demo is not the one approach Halo Studios is celebrating Halo 2’s 20th anniversary. A particular Halo 2 playlist in Halo Infinite, that includes Halo 2 maps remade in Forge and gameplay adjustments made to imitate the 2004 shooter, will go reside November 5.