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Why does Halo 2 look worse than Halo 1? The shadows. Or well, the lack of them (www.youtube.com)

submitted 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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[–] [email protected] 7 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (1 children)

This is a really interesting video. My first question would be why this issue wasn't caught early by the devs. The Id Tech 4 engine at the time was considered absolutely cutting edge stuff, and (as the video identifies) even it had to be constrained to interior environments. Halo 2 was using an iteration off of Halo:CE's engine, so unlike Doom the engine wasn't specifically built to do those shadow tricks. Who thought that they could rework an existing engine to do shadows like this, get it to work better than Id Tech 4 at doing outdoor spaces, and then get it optimized enough that not high end computers but X-Boxes could run it? And do all of that on top of actually just making the game itself inside of a market driven timeline?

Laid out like that, it looks like a crazy idea. I wonder if the art style was developer or management pushed, and who allowed it to get far enough that models were made with it in mind.

[–] altima_neo 3 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (2 children)

I think The Chronicles of Riddick on Xbox was running on idTech doing all them effects on the OG xbox. It looked fantastic.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xu5BH4j0K1A

[–] [email protected] 5 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)

Apparently the games that did use that technique, like idtech games and splinter cell, generally all had small environments that were within the limitations of the hardware, where as halo 2 had massive environments that stressed it too far with the lighting active.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 months ago

That's great, though it doesn't really address the questions. I suspect only higher up people in the Halo 2 development could answer them.