Why does Halo 2 look worse than Halo 1?

“Look at that throbbing thick old man” - Late Night Gaming 2024

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.

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

The brutes look straight up scary with proper lighting.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

Stop saying thick and black in the same phrase

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.

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

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.

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

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 1:17 and then looking at the camera like "oh crap was this on?" is great