Halo 2 Anniversary Will Contain Extra Story That Connects To Halo 5

At Comic-Con today, 343 Industries and Microsoft discussed Halo: The Master Chief Collection, a compilation of the four Halo games for Xbox One. Naturally, there was a focus on Halo 2, but 343 discussed other aspects of the collection, too. Here are some of the points that stood out to us.

Playlists:

343 have created playlists for each game, comprising of different missions that you can play back-to-back. The interesting thing is that they’ve even created playlists that go between games. These are some of the cross-game playlists we spotted:

Epic Battles

Flooded

Final Four (this contained all four escape scenes from each game, back-to-back)

Tanks, Tanks, Tanks

Master Chief Saga (the entire story spanning all four games)

343 said that, following the game’s launch, they’ll watch for feedback from fans and create additional missions for The Master Chief collection accordingly.

Multiplayer:

Players can choose a game mode and then vote on which engine they want to use to play with. So, for example, you could select Deathmatch and then vote for the Halo 3 engine or the Halo 2 Anniversary’s engine.

Halo 2 Anniversary plays identically to Halo 2. The Anniversary version actually uses the code from Halo 2 on Xbox with two rendering engine. You’ll be able to switch between the two versions on-the-fly and this won’t involve a fade to black like it did in Halo 1 Anniversary.

On that note, the Halo 2 Anniversary’s multiplayer was developed in consultation with Max Oberman, who designed the multiplayer for Halo 2. Oberman also created six remastered maps for Halo 2 Anniversary. You can choose between these maps or the original versions.

Extra scenes:

Finally, 343 also revealed that Halo 2 Anniversary has hidden terminals with extra story scenes. These contain motion comic videos and in many cases will connect to Halo 5: Guardians. The scenes focus on the Arbiter, who was introduced in Halo 2.