Why does Halo 2 look worse than Halo 1? 

Stop saying thick and black in the same phrase

Halo 2 is one of those weird cases of surviving multiple apocalyptic level development upsets and somehow coming out fairly stable and almost content complete.

So what I'm gathering from this is... The modding community has some work to do.

*"THICK, BLACK shadows."* *"THROBBING, THICK old man veins."* Very **ahem** informative video, LNG. Much appreciated👍

That title's some fighting words. Edit: Nvm. I see what you mean now. What the hell, we were robbed of greatness 😭

its insane how much good some lighting can do, to the point some of this H2 footage with the dynamic lighting could pass for early halo 3 screenshots probably one of the reasons halo 3's graphics still hold up so well today, it's the lighting

Theres a mod on the workshop thats attempting to fix this issue!

All these years I thought it was just me; can’t wait to see what’s up

I always knew H2's story and gameplay was ahead of its time, but turns out even its lighting was also too far ahead of its time. Every day I think we all get reminded just how lucky we are that this game was even released at all

The brutes look straight up scary with proper lighting.

I think like Halo 3 it was planning to rely a lot more on the lighting and shaders to look "impressive" (Halo 3 has shockingly low-poly models and low-res textures, but the great rendering and lighting makes it look impressive even to this day) but since last second they couldn't get it to run on OG Xbox, they were just left with the low-poly models and low-res textures with the same basic rendering. EDIT: Yep, basically predicted your exact point(s) in the video LOL

It's crazy to think how different the artistic direction of the franchise would've gone with just a simple change to lighting, I'd love to see a newer game play with starker moodier lighting

the way those halo 2 models TRANSFORMED after the light was cast, they looked immediately more similar to halo 3. Halo 3s lighting surely was them finally getting it to LOOK how they wanted it to even if it wasn't quite the same / made with more advanced and powerful tech.

To be fair, it’s a miracle Halo 2 even released, let alone as a masterpiece. I’m not bothered by some bad textures, especially after the anniversary edition fixed most of it

It looked bad the day it came out. I remember my brother and I seeing Johnson and Lord Hood at the start of the game after getting home from the midnight release and were dumbfounded at how bad they looked. Them (and many other things of course) just looked so much worse than Halo 1. Edit: Oh my god those characters under Dynamic Lights look straight out of Halo 3. That's absolutely phenomenal. We need a mod that impliments dynamic lighting across the game to finally give us the true version of Halo 2 that Bungie always intended.

The Return of Early Morning Gaming. In all seriousness, glad to see you're back at it again.

While it is a shame, Halo 2 being released on the original Xbox did mean that was it was accessible to a wider audience meaning more people could play it. Still wouldve been nice to have like a separate version for PC and 360 with the better lighting but Halo 2 was pretty rushed as u may know, lots of cut content and whatnot. It's both nice and tragic to think about what could have been.

now i want a mod that returns the lighting to the whole game

Funnily enough, there’s already a mod that brings back the stencil shadow effects. It’s called Halo 2 Restored Lighting by Mr.PirateFox

Chief shooting himself in the foot at <a href="#" class="seekto" data-time="77">1:17</a> and then looking at the camera like "oh crap was this on?" is great

Chief having a panic attack at the end is so funny, omg! 😂

The Rubys rebalanced mod needs to see this

holy shit, Arbiter's armor looks *AMAZING* with that dynamic light! I always knew something huge was missing with this game

thanks for vindicating me 20 years later. i remember arguing with folks on halo mods about these exact points.

Sometimes i wonder if Bungie would have been better off just waiting a year and launching Halo 2 as the killer app for the X360.

Interesting! i too thought Halo2 looked flat in places, but assumed that was a general result of the rushed and messy development, rather than the omission of specific technical features.

man, the E3 trailers are still so beautiful. If retail Halo 2 looked like that it honestly would have probably ended up being the best looking halo game of the series. Stencil shadows may not be realistic but games that relied heavily on them ended up being some of the best aging games ever made. Doom 3 still looks flawless to this day and the per pixel perfect nature of the shadows means it scales perfectly to higher resolutions. As excited as I am for the digsite team to port the E3 new mombasa level into the mcc version of halo 2, It just won't look quite the same without the next level rendering techniques that the stencil engine showcased all those years ago.

1: It's great seeing doom 3 get some love 2: I always thought it was weird that the halo's on the original xbox didn't age as well visually compared to, say, Metroid Prime 3: I think it would be really neat if we could use modern technology to implement raytracing into some of the older halo's.

Wow, thanks for explaining Stencil shadows, because I LOVED the look of them in Doom 3, FEAR and Prey 2006.

I see what you mean. However, 9 year old me, when I got Halo 2 for Christmas, over the years I played it every single day with my dad, the graphics were beautiful to me. They had its own charm, it’s Halo 2. Of course, now 20 years later I’m nearing 30 years old and looking back i can agree with your points. But again, 9 year old me remembers Halo 2 fondly and picturing gameplay from memory includes those flat textures and I wouldn’t have it any other way.

When I was a kid playing these games I always set the contrast higher and the brightness slightly below halfway for the best look

Interestingly I believe the Spartan armor also originally had glowing lights in some places like they did in CE and 3. Had the stencil shadows been there, I can imagine seeing multiplayer maps bathed in darkness but then seeing a bunch of little lights moving around giving a really cool effect. In the final game there’s places where you can see what should be lights on them below the shoulder and knee pads, but instead of a light it’s just a black slot. In the E3 trailer with Chief you can see them active, which has a really cool effect.

While we may have gotten an incomplete Halo 2, at least most of the cut features they intended would eventually come back and make for a perfect Halo 3.

There's currently a Workshop mod that shows off dynamic lighting for 2 Campaign levels, definitely should take a look 👍

I THOUGHT I WAS THE ONLY ONE WHO SAW THAT H1 WAS BETTER LOOKING THAN H2! This'll be a great watch

If modders can bring back the OG dynamic lighting to Halo 2 I don't think I'd ever find myself switching to remastered graphics. The dynamic lighting really gives Halo 2 the same kind of aesthetic endurance CE has.

This is actually super cool to learn about I wish we could be in the alternate universe where halo 2 came out the way the developers wanted it to be because Halo 2 with Doom 3 shading would’ve been so good and also all the other cut stuff ig lol

I’m kind of glad you made this video, I thought it was just my goofy little brain who thought the graphics in Halo 2 looked worse than Combat Evolved.

Halo 2 looks almost comparable to 3 with the intended lighting. Halo 2 is already my fav in the franchise but imagine how much of a visual and gameplay masterpiece the game would be if bungie had more time and less hardware / software limitations to make it with!

*angry Lord Hoode noises*

Back in 2007, when Halo 3 was released. I saw that Halo 3 have some dynamic lighting that cast shadows which made me envious for halo 2. I try to find them in halo 2 but i found only some parts has it. Either a small lamp, side lamps, or street lamps. Most of the lighting in Halo 2 are baked sadly. Yeah, when the light cast onto the models, it really shines!

I'll be honest, while I was always a sucker for Halo 1's artstyle and themes of deep space exploration, wonder, and horror, I also appreciated the artstyle of Halo 2. I always thought Halo 2 was looking flat because it was supposed to feel gritty and worn down because the war had been going on too long. I can see what you're talking about from an objective perspective, and I think the artstyle would really shine through even better if stencil shadows had made it in. Here's to hoping that the modders can throw 20 years of computer hardware evolution at the problem to brute-force stencil shadow rendering in some horribly inefficient yet sufficient effort to make the game look great again.

I was literally rewatching one of your streams before I saw that you uploaded! Nice vid!

This video made me get a whole new appreciation for lighting and now I hope we can get a mod that can give us the cut stencil shadows

Oh my god this was like experience h2 again.

Hey, LNG. Just needed you to know I read the description, and it is amazing.

Short answer and to save time, Halo 2’s final build was actually developed after the 2003 E3 demo. Bungie spent more time working on the E3 Demo than the Commercial game at that point. So they really spent less than two years producing the game and didn’t have the luxury of experimenting the Havoc engine.

After 20 years Bungie keeps amazing us, they were so ahead of their time. H2 was a big, what if?, my favorite Halo campaign until this day.

Compared to Bungie's original plans, the Halo 2 we got was a completely bare bones failure and it STILL blew the world away

Halo 2 still looks great and levels still feel more expansive than most games today. Games either funnel you down corridors nowadays or have endless copy paste grass textures for "open worlds."

Great video LNG, I love the broll you captured for this! Top quality stuff

4 months. Worth the wait! But still can’t wait for the evolution of the jackals 😊

Would be an interesting RTX remix project

”Lord Hood’s.... Lord Hood” dont wrorry x) we all got it too

Actually a super well made and informative video. Thanks for putting it together dude

I've seen a few mods pop up lately that try to emulate the cut shadow system. Hopefully we can see 2s full potential soon.

Oh good. I’m not the only one who thought this back in 2004.

Take care LNG! What you say is heresy!

After seeing the 2002 E3 trailer, I speculated that Halo 2 would be the 360’s launch game, just like how Halo CE was the launch game for the original Xbox. When I heard they were releasing for the original Xbox instead, I knew they were making a mistake and should’ve just pushed it off a little further, even as bad as I wanted to play it at the time. Thank you for explaining in better detail why I felt that way and why that would have been a better plan. Probably could have kept the original content too instead of cutting so much… 😭😅

CE has some really great particle effects compared to modern games. Those sparks when shooting at the floor, they fly so high up, spread pretty wide, bounce and collide beautifully with the environment.

I'd like to point out that the character shadows in Halo 1 *are* technically dynamic shadows even if they don't follow the rules of the environment. They're called "Render To Texture" (RTT) shadows in the Source engine, and they draw the character model (most likely a lower quality version of it to save performance) at a certain angle in a render texture. These then get projected onto the ground like a decal. -The reason why they don't change direction against lights in the scene is because they don't account for light sources or surface lights in parts of the game world. Source has the same limitation but there's a community patch on the VDC wiki that makes the shadow choose the closest dynamic light to cast from.- @HaloTupolev explained this better in their reply. The light direction used for the angle that shadows render from is based on data stored in the world vertices the character is standing on, in Halo 1 and 2. This can be inaccurate for smaller light sources that don't span the whole triangle, or if the map geometry isn't split up for it, which causes the shadows to render the wrong direction. They're a bit limited in appearance and only cast onto the terrain, but that was most likely done for performance, and/or was a limitation of the engine. Great video though. I wish we could've gotten a version of Halo 2 with stencil shadows.

Thought I was the only one

I only just found that spot on foundation while playing multiplayer the other day and spent so long just testing out guns and bodies under the light, god I wish the game looked like that all the time

I’ve never heard of someone saying halo 2 looks worse than 1. It looks infinitely better. It’s arguably the most graphically intensive game on the original Xbox. The polygon count, the texture resolution and quality, the lighting and world geometry is massively larger and more impressive than halo 1

Glad to see more people realize Halo 2 look like shit.

Is this why Halo 3 was so aggressive with the lighting system? Like an overcompensation to what they couldn't do in Halo 2?

I always found it interesting that while graphical fidelity, 2 is worse in a few areas, it’s the artistic evolution that makes it seem like the newer game. Goes to show a great art direction can carry even sub par graphics. (Other examples, persona 5, made for the ps3 but still looks great on 4. And shin megami tensei 5 vengeance. Fidelity isn’t very high, but it’s execution of its aesthetic is so good, that the only big difference between the switch (og) and ps5 port is resolution and fps).

They should have waited Halo 2 to be on the X360 with the ambition they had.

Super cool looking into this I wonder if modders would be able to restore that same stencil shadow style into MCC Halo 2 For like the full game 🤔

Man I missed your videos. Glad to have you back.

<a href="#" class="seekto" data-time="45">0:45</a> "imagine what developers were up against" Homie doing the worm on the floor

Seeing Thel vadam under the dynamic light was mind blowing he looks insane

Coming back to your channel, and it's awesome to see the improvements. I've been wondering for a bit, have you ever considered doing an evolution video on any of the Doom weapons? It would be pretty neat to see how their sandbox roles changed over time.

I love Halo 2, but we were robbed. Stencil shadows would've been awesome!

My first thought was what that one Elite said in Halo Wars “HERESY, REMOVE THIS FILTH” but now I see the prophets lies clouded my vision…

Funnily enough, there’s a mod out on the steam workshop for Halo 2 that tries to bring back the stencil shadow effects.

Fantastic video man!

I never really noticed it before and never really though about it. And now I can’t unsee it lol. Nice video, man! I’d love to see if it’s possible to ‘fix’ this with the mod tools. Playing the campaign how it should have been in that way would be great.

i was watching red vs blue and the switch to halo 2 made me realize that halo 2 anniversary was a blessing.

That and the textures loading a second after the camera is on something. The sixth gen was a fun experimental time for a lot of visual techniques. Don't get too much of that anymore; building whole levels/characters to flex visual spectacle.

Immediately gets that 2000s/Doom 3 feeling under this lighting. Man I wish we could have had this

Loving the cinematography and editing. Great commentary too. Whoever you have editing your videos if it isn't you, pay them more. If it is you... pay them more. Lol. Really happy to see a TCOR shout-out as well. Fantastic video, reminds me a ton of Ahoy.

I wonder if this is possible to implement with mods, now that our systems are much more powerful. Or at least regular dynamic lighting in levels, if stencils aren't possible in the current graphics engine.

Really interesting topic and great editing. Good to see you posting again!

I always wonder why some of the dlc maps look so much better than the original maps

Crazy I was literally looking up stuff about this yesterday Great upload timing :p

This was so in-depth and about something I felt but never had been able to fully realise. Thanks for this. Learning about H2 cut content goes remarkably deep and this did it well

Ive worked with some game engined and most of them now come with something called "hybrid lightning" which basically bakes every single shadow into the game textures but transitions to a dynamic light source as soon as the player (or other entities if you program it that way) come close to the source, which results in pretty awesome performance and looks. Even modern hardware would struggle if every light source on a game was dynamic, so this is a cool middle ground. Would have loved to see Halo 2 with something like that.

Does anyone know what the track is called at the end of the video? I heard it a looong time ago and could never find it.

Thanks for showing us those dynamic lighting examples. I’d be so curious to see the environments with the intended lighting one day. Hopefully we see a mod or even just a showcase one day.

I remember they’re being a cinematic for halo two and the halo two multiplayer map pack game and apparently That have finished textures and finish writing and give us a glimpse of what could’ve been with more development time

This are the kinds of videos i use to explain lighting in the courses i teach. Now there's one about halo. Thank you!

This is a really well done video. Nice job dude

Now we need a mod to fix this in HMCC... Also I wonder how they'll look under RTX shadows?

Good to have you back goat. Hope you and Rebecca have been doing well

Lighting makes such a huge difference. Still want a Halo 3 high res remaster with that amazing lighting engine

I'm not into modding much but is it possible to extract the original models and put them in Unreal or other softwares with a render engine? Maybe not animated but you can animate the lights.

can anyone name the track at <a href="#" class="seekto" data-time="31">0:31</a> ? been searching for it on my playlist but cant find it

Imagine if 343 added ray tracing option to halo 2 classic in mcc, this would give us the option to see halo 2 how it was intended or to experience it how we all remember

LNG's best videos are the ones where I see the notification and say, "What is my man cooking?" but then once I've watched it I go, "What the hell was I cooking???" Great vid, man! Very unique and I appreciate the short but nonetheless very interesting content