Halo 2's playable E3 2003 demo is an astounding feat of preservation, and everything great about PC gaming
Something very special happened in our hobby this weekend. The Digsite team, a group of Halo modders who've been working with Halo Studios (formerly 343 Industries) to restore lost artifacts of Halo history, delivered a mother lode: A playable version of the legendary Halo 2 «Earth City» demo.
The mission, originally played live on stage at E3 2003, was the world's first look at the sequel. With a runtime just under nine minutes, the demo was a vertical slice created to introduce the Covenant's invasion of Earth and showcase features that would go on to make Halo 2 one of the most beloved (and criticized) chapters in the series 20 years later. Just listen to that crowd roar as they watch Master Chief dual-wield SMGs, ghost-jack a Brute, and fire the battle rifle for the first time (which at that point was a single-shot rifle like Reach's DMR). The Earth City mission was cut from the final campaign and left unseen for two decades, until now.
The (H2) E3 2003 Demo, as it's officially called, was uploaded to The Master Chief Collection Steam workshop by the Digsite team on November 9, Halo 2's 20th birthday. In a blog post on Halo Waypoint, community writer Alex Wakeford said it took lots of work to reconstruct the demo from a version of the Halo 2 engine that doesn't exist anymore, and that the intrepid modders had to tweak the scripting of the demo so that it wouldn't constantly break.
«Massive improvements have been made to the visual quality and overall stability of this experience, as the original demo required the player to hit specific individual triggers in order to ensure it did not break,» the post reads. «Players will see that nav markers help to guide them through each beat of this mission from the moment they step off the Pelican all the way up to boarding the Ghost and escaping into the highway tunnel at the end.»
Being mostly unfamiliar with this demo (I wasn't cool enough to watch E3 trailers at the age of seven), but having a handful of Halo 2
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