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    Halo 2

    Game » consists of 16 releases. Released Nov 09, 2004

    The sequel to Halo: Combat Evolved continues the epic story of humanity's last and best hope: the super-soldier Master Chief, as he defends Earth from a Covenant invasion and fights to prevent the activation of another Halo ring.

    Why do people hate the campaign?

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    themangalist

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    #1  Edited By themangalist

    I'm thinking of getting it on the pc, and i care little about the multiplayer, but can someone just tell me why everyone seemed to hate Halo 2's campaign most? I found Halo:CE's level design rather boring... is Halo 2 and different?

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    NekuCTR

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    #2  Edited By NekuCTR

    Halo 2 starts out good with urban landscapes and such, but once you get back to the Halo (Spoilers) its same old, same old. Plus people hate the ending. But if you liked the game play of the first one this is pretty much the same.

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    shorap

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    #3  Edited By shorap

    I think Halo 2's campaign also garnered hate because it humanized  the Covenant, elevating them from the typical cannon-fodder to the point where half the campaign is told from their perspective.  I also think the cliffhanger ending really torked some off as well.
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    Diamond

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    #4  Edited By Diamond
    @Haru48:  The similarities to Halo 1 weren't why I disliked Halo 2 at all.  It's hard to put my finger on the disappointing factors of 2, it's been years since I played it at all...
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    Driadon

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    #5  Edited By Driadon

    Talking prophetic Flood plant. Made me want to stab a fool. 
     
    But the level design was well done, at least. 

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    NekuCTR

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    #6  Edited By NekuCTR

    Holy crap, I totally forgot that you spent half that game as a covenant. Wow, epic brain lapse.

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    august

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    #7  Edited By august

    I wish they'd had the balls to let you kill the totally generic space marines as The Arbiter.

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    CrazedMaverick

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    #8  Edited By CrazedMaverick

    Whenever I did go back to Halo 2's campaign I always played the first half. The last half is very halo. or as Jeff would say halo-ass halo.

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    Venatio

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    #9  Edited By Venatio

    I loved that campaign, playing as the arbiter on the covenant side was awesome, you got to see a a whole new different perspective on the conflict. I don't understand the hate either man
     
    And I loved the ending seeing as I played it for the first time three weeks before Halo 3 came out

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    Alexander

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    #10  Edited By Alexander

         
    Because this never happened.
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    Afroman269

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    #11  Edited By Afroman269

    Maybe most people wanted to play the game as the Master Chief and not most of it as the Arbiter. Playing as him annoyed me and mostly involved fighting flood which just added more to the hate. Also of course the lovable cliffhanger ending. Didn't piss me off as much since I didn't get the game at launch and didn't have to wait for a long time for Halo 3 like the other people did who bought it at launch.

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    shorap

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    #12  Edited By shorap
    @Alexander:
    That's why there's CoD, for people who want heavily scripted and linear campaigns.
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    gamer_152

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    #13  Edited By gamer_152  Moderator

    There seems to be a lot of hate for it in this thread but personally I really liked it.

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    AhmadMetallic

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    #14  Edited By AhmadMetallic

    i played a couple of levels, found it EXACTLY like CE, which is a game i love but dont need more of, so i stopped

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    plop1920

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    #15  Edited By plop1920

    I actually liked halo 2's campaign more than halo 3's. I didnt mind playing as the arbiter, I thought it was kinda cool. The ending was pretty lame though

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    Jack268

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    #16  Edited By Jack268

    I didn't have that much of a problem with it. I didn't like playing as the arbiter (I dunno why actually), but the rest of the campaign was really cool, especially the first parts where you're fighting in that city environment. 
     
    What does annoy me is people who were butthurt over the ending. I loved the ending, it was an awesome setup for Halo 3 and I could never understand why people were so mad about it.

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    Lemoncookie01

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    #17  Edited By Lemoncookie01

    The ending made me smash my halo 2 case.

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    ShaneDev

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    #18  Edited By ShaneDev

    I loved the game and still do and I never played online during its heyday either. A lot of people didnt like the changes they made and the ending but really the game was much better for them except maybe changing the pistol and removing the AR and putting in the SMG plus the ending wouldn't be so bad now that Halo 3 is out. Oh and people didnt like the Covenant side of things but I quite liked it and we got Keith David as the Arbiter from it.

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    PrivateIronTFU

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    #19  Edited By PrivateIronTFU
    @Haru48: Because gamers are insatiable sometimes.
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    vidiot

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    #20  Edited By vidiot

    It's not bad, and in many way's specifically with the way it handled it's plot, I found it to be a step up...if only slightly. Although personally I don't think they felt comfortable with addressing their lore in their stories until ODST, but that's just me. 
     
    There's a few problems with Halo 2's campaign. 

    • Arbiter was a bit off-putting to some. Making the Covenant something more than just target's to shoot was also a bit much for some, although necessary.
    • Gravemind? Lack of context to what was going on with said major plot-point.
    • The plot in general lagged too much.
    • Halo's level design throughout the franchise is all over the place. The most annoying is when in both Halo 1 and 2 they had to resort to freaking arrows on the ground to point you where to go.
    • The Halo 2 demo showed a tempo that's not apparent in the final game. Each scene is represented one-way or another, but not as epic nor as interesting.
    • The ending is laughable. The entire pre-release hype was that you were going to do the big battle on Earth, which only appeared within the first few levels. The last level was actually cut due to making it's release date, creating not a cliffhanger, but an awkward abrupt stop to the plot. "Finishing this Fight!" is probably the most groan inducing statement ever.
    • Brutes. Or, the "giant furry sponge that takes waaaay to long to kill."
    • Too many interviews with dev's prior to release talking about things that never made it into the game, in some cases including full-blown unused art assets and models. (Fun fact: Many of them would actually be incorporated in future releases.)
    • Hey. Maybe it's not a bad idea to have minor load times...if I'm watching the textures...and bump-maps...still load on the characters during cut-scenes.
     
    I find it the weakest in there series, but, it did give me a reason to play Xbox Live. It also was leaps and bounds over other console shooters that were trying to ride the coat-tails of Halo's original success. 
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    Djeffers03

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    #21  Edited By Djeffers03

    I liked the first few levels but then got bored of it. I didn't like fighting the flood or playing as the Arbiter.

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    KennyPowers

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    #22  Edited By KennyPowers

    Because of the WOW factor of Halo CE.  People wanted to feel the same way they did when they played the first one (when it first came out, it was frickin amazing), and when they didnt get the same high, they complained. 
     
    Its more Halo, better and different Halo, but its not revolutionary.  Thus, complaints

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    TheGreatGuero

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    #23  Edited By TheGreatGuero

    Honestly, I've always felt the Halo 2 campaign was dull, repetitive, had too many cheap enemies, and just totally lacked the awesomeness and high level of polish the first game's campaign had. Not to mention I found the story to be pretty darn uninteresting.

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    august

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    #24  Edited By august

    Yeah who could forget the level of polish of CE's missions where you fight your way down a corridor for twenty minutes then turn around and fight your way down the same corridor for another twenty minutes.

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    wolf_blitzer85

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    #25  Edited By wolf_blitzer85
    @august said:
    " Yeah who could forget the level of polish of CE's missions where you fight your way down a corridor for twenty minutes then turn around and fight your way down the same corridor for another twenty minutes. "
     But they were shiny corridors.
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    deactivated-61665c8292280

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    I think everyone saying the Covenant's humanization in and of itself caused the backlash is missing the point. It's not that we experienced the Covenant's side of the war, it's how we experienced it. The Arbiter levels were mostly bland, uninteresting, and poorly paced. The Flood were even less enjoyable to fight in Halo 2's campaign than they were in the original--their character models took uneven amounts of damage to bring down, many times for no explicable reason--and playing as the Arbiter almost always meant slogging through a mission mostly devoted to fighting Flood, especially since they were reintroduced so early in the game's campaign.  
     
    The Arbiter, on paper, is a really interesting character. And his active camo mechanic really separated him from the Master Chief. But the environments the Arbiter had to go through weren't at all engaging, and the amount of the Arbiter's backstory totally eclipsed the Master Chief's narrative.  
     
    Also, the game was hyped as some cataclysmic assault on planet Earth. Instead, there were two relatively good levels of Earth combat, followed by several hours of Arbiter-on-Covenant-on-Flood tedium, followed by barely an hour with the Master Chief, before another lengthy and tiresome mission with the Arbiter. (That said, the Arbiter's last mission before the final boss fight with Tartarus, the one where he is trying to regroup with the Elites after the Brute and Prophet betrayal, is one of the game's coolest missions.) 
     
    To add on to the game's bewildering structural choices, the moment the pace finally got on course and the action got truly interesting--that is, once the Master Chief began his hunt for the Prophet of Truth--the game stopped. It wasn't a cliffhanger, as cliffhangers are designed to introduce some new, shocking element to propel the audience's interest in the next installment. No, Halo 2's narrative just fucking stopped. The ending was unearned and felt extremely cheap. Especially when the game was marketed as the climactic battle between Covenant and Human forces.  
     
    --- 
     
    tl;dr -- It's an interesting game to read about, what with its philosophical slant. But it is a mess, structurally, on a general design level. 

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    GunstarRed

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    #27  Edited By GunstarRed

    I have always liked 2 more than 1, I found the story to be very interesting and enjoyed the parts with The Arbiter more the Master Chief parts. I Came very late to the Halo games as I never owned an original Xbox  so the hype for them was never there.  I don't mind the flood , I Liked the plant at the end that talks about  flesh and faith and machine and wire or whatever. I wanted more of it in Halo 3 but instead we got Master Chief (uninteresting) and Player 2 (The Arbiter)  I can think of a ton of memorable parts from 2 but all I remember from the first game are the First level and the  Library sections.
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    SethPhotopoulos

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    #28  Edited By SethPhotopoulos
    @themangalist: I hated the AI for my allies and the enemy.  I thought they were the dumbest things out there.  Never touched Halo since. 
     
    I also don't like games that depend on online.
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    schizogony

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    #29  Edited By schizogony

    I never look to Halo for story.  I can't even pay attention to the cut scenes they're so dull.  I play Halo games for incredible sandbox-like shooter experiences.  I just want to go from one play are to the next, shooting bad guys and trying not to die.  That's all the single player is to me in a Halo game.  That's all I need it to be. 
     
    That said, I've only played Halo 1, 3 and Reach.

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    themangalist

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    #30  Edited By themangalist
    @Sir_Ragnarok: Thanks, i read it, and you made a good point about the so-called "cliffhanger". Not that the story would bum me out, but...
     

    @august

    said:

    " Yeah who could forget the level of polish of CE's missions where you fight your way down a corridor for twenty minutes then turn around and fight your way down the same corridor for another twenty minutes. "


    This. I got a freakin' headache from playing Halo 1 because it seems like i was walking the same corridor on this one level, not to mention they ALWAYS wind to the right. This really bummed me out. A rather similar game in atmosphere, Republic Commando, at least had variation within a level to make you feel like you're actually progressing through the level, but Halo CE blatantly used the same textures and models within one level. Even worse was when the huge environments come in, sorry to all those who liked it, but this only confused me further as everything looked the same. Lazy developers? I really wish they had improved in the second game in terms of level design, since i haven't touched any halo game since 1.
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    Hashbrowns

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    #31  Edited By Hashbrowns

    Not only was the entire Covenant rendered into a dull Star Wars Prequel-ish collection of ponderous dialogue dispensers, but there was no gameplay impact of playing as the Arbiter whatsoever.  Even as an Elite, you are STILL FIGHTING THE COVENANT.  Not only that, the heretics the Arbiter is tasked with killing are actually in the right and know more about the nature of Halo installations and humanity than the Arbiter does.  The player knows they're right, yet we're expected to continue blowing the heretics away. 
     
    The Flood is perhaps the absolute worst aspect of the Halo franchise, and they are front and center in Halo 2 far too much.  Zombies with guns are not fun enemies to fight, and we end up fighting them down endless dark purple corridors. 
     
    The writing in Halo 2 is atrocious compared the first game, and this is largely Joseph Staten's fault.  His dialogue is abysmal, and the story has no real arc, even for a two-parter.  And it was not an intentional, well-planned two-parter either.  If you ever get a chance to read more behind-the-scenes material on Halo 2, it is clear that Bungie was beyond their depth in the schedule and scrapped over a year's worth of work and made Halo 2 in around a year basically from scratch. 
     
    Pure combat gameplay aside (which I think is uniformly excellent across the series), only Halo CE and Reach qualify as proper Halo games.  The ultimately listless writing in Halo 2 and 3 and the abominable "story" of ODST disqualify them from that standard.  Again, all fun to play any given encounter in those games, but I expect a complete experience.
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    deactivated-61665c8292280

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    @themangalist: Cool, man. I don't want to give off the impression that I loathe Halo 2 or something, I actually quite like the game. Even the campaign. But even I feel it's pretty significantly flawed.  
     
    The thing about Combat Evolved is that I always felt like it was moving. Even in repetitive levels like The Library, the game still manages to be rather fluid. And the Flood are probably the most fun to fight in Combat Evolved. Sometimes I think the tedium of The Library is exaggerated by the people who really want something to nag at Combat Evolved with. That game had a sense of flow. Halo 3 had a sense of flow. ODST, to a lesser extent, had that flow. But Halo 2--in trying to balance so many plates at once--lost itself and, as a result, its sense of movement. I'd play The Library a dozen times over before having to slog through that one Arbiter stretch in Halo 2 (Sacred Icon/Quarantine Zone). The Flood are just too powerful in Halo 2. And even more powerful in Halo 3, but they're only present in 3 for small bits at a time (until Cortana, of course). 
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    deactivated-61665c8292280

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    @Hashbrowns: I agree about Staten's writing. I feel like Combat Evolved was clear, to the point, but his attempts at making the Covenant speak in these high-brow platitudes just obfuscated the goings-on of the plot. Gravemind is a perfect example. I'm not really at all sure why he does what he does in Halo 2. I mean, I get he's chiefly interested in self-preservation, but why'd he send the Chief to get the Icon just to try and kill him before he's got it with a legion of Flood?  
     
    When your character's dialogue is that cryptic, you're almost always doing something wrong. 
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    CharlesAlanRatliff

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    It ends abruptly and I found it to be incredibly boring. I tried to play through it with a friend before Halo 3 came out, and I just couldn't finish it. I love all the other games, though.

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    Stinky2

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    #35  Edited By Stinky2

     
    story wise the ending in halo 2 was a bit WTF, but the campaign was fine. 
    better than Reach's IMO, which to me is the weakest campaign of the series. 

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    vaiz

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    #36  Edited By vaiz
    @Stinky2 said:
    " better than Reach's IMO, which to me is the weakest campaign of the series.  "
    On what grounds?
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    adoggz

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    #37  Edited By adoggz
    @Sir_Ragnarok said:
    " I think everyone saying the Covenant's humanization in and of itself caused the backlash is missing the point. It's not that we experienced the Covenant's side of the war, it's how we experienced it. The Arbiter levels were mostly bland, uninteresting, and poorly paced. The Flood were even less enjoyable to fight in Halo 2's campaign than they were in the original--their character models took uneven amounts of damage to bring down, many times for no explicable reason--and playing as the Arbiter almost always meant slogging through a mission mostly devoted to fighting Flood, especially since they were reintroduced so early in the game's campaign.  
     
    The Arbiter, on paper, is a really interesting character. And his active camo mechanic really separated him from the Master Chief. But the environments the Arbiter had to go through weren't at all engaging, and the amount of the Arbiter's backstory totally eclipsed the Master Chief's narrative.  
     
    Also, the game was hyped as some cataclysmic assault on planet Earth. Instead, there were two relatively good levels of Earth combat, followed by several hours of Arbiter-on-Covenant-on-Flood tedium, followed by barely an hour with the Master Chief, before another lengthy and tiresome mission with the Arbiter. (That said, the Arbiter's last mission before the final boss fight with Tartarus, the one where he is trying to regroup with the Elites after the Brute and Prophet betrayal, is one of the game's coolest missions.) 
     
    To add on to the game's bewildering structural choices, the moment the pace finally got on course and the action got truly interesting--that is, once the Master Chief began his hunt for the Prophet of Truth--the game stopped. It wasn't a cliffhanger, as cliffhangers are designed to introduce some new, shocking element to propel the audience's interest in the next installment. No, Halo 2's narrative just fucking stopped. The ending was unearned and felt extremely cheap. Especially when the game was marketed as the climactic battle between Covenant and Human forces.   ---  tl;dr -- It's an interesting game to read about, what with its philosophical slant. But it is a mess, structurally, on a general design level.  "
    pretty much this.
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    HandsomeDead

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    #38  Edited By HandsomeDead

    It's been years since I played but I felt like it expanded the universe in the most boring way by letting us see it from the perspective of a 'good' Covenant. Had it just been honest and let us play as a Covenant bad guy, shooting humans, and seeing it really from their perspective, it could have been interesting.

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    Vao

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    #39  Edited By Vao

    didn't really mind it, though thinking back i can't remember to much about the game. i remember taking down a scarab and running around as the arbiter. my biggest complaint was the lack of an ending or the really weak one that it had.  

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