I don't really understand why it's not as popular as Halo CE. Maybe because it can't be pirated or something? Who knows. The game has a simpler map editor, better graphics, MUCH better netcode (you don't need to lead your shots 5 feet in this game), achievements, controller support and Windows Live Support. But most of all, it has a more powerful engine. The bane of Halo CE was it's poor graphics and huge maps would be plagued with loading zones so that you couldn't see the other end of a huge space.


If this game just had a more active community it would be much more fun than CE as I see it.

Actually more because of Halo 1's Editing kit, which in ways is much more powerful and less limited when compared to Halo 2's. Also because of mexican pirates (about 300-500 servers on 1.00).

I just don't find Halo 2 as fun...too much flash, not enough bang, if you know what I mean. I had an obsession the first time I got it (2 months ago) than I gradually began to grow tired of limited servers, overbalanced weapons imo (I got used to the H1 pistols, I start off with a BR and go WTF)

Overbalanced weapons, now thats funny. Like balance is worse then overpowered weapons like the original AR and Pistol.


You are correct original poster. The H2EK that they released was very limited and that is surely a factor but not the main reason. CE is more popular because of the pirated version, this is visible by looking at how many players are still running the older version. If H2V's MP was easily pirated then H2V would be much more popular.



Oh and I would be stoked if the new CE remake featured ARs, BRs, DMRs and the CE Pistol, but thats just me I'm sure.

I'm just saying, it's hard for me to get a kill. More than likely because I'm used to precision shots with the Halo 1 pistol and can't shake off leading, or the high rate of fire of burst weapons in Call of Duty. Like said, when picking up a BR or starting with one I feel a sinking feeling in my gut. In addition, if the banshee was over powered in the first game (Like it is), it's even more so in the second, where players zoom around faster than any vehicle, hover, move left and right, etc, etc. Hijacking is a nice element, but you sure as **** aren't going to catch anyone unannounced to use it, maybe that is just me.

Yeah I hear ya. They take adjusting if you are coming from CE. I always hated the leading.

For the H2 Banshee; you could also use Dual SMGs, Dual Magnums, Two Shotguns Shots, a Plasma Nade or a Rocket. If you have a Human Tank that would work well. Good luck with the Wraith though. Banshee vs Banshee. Two Frag nades if they are near the ground. The Hog turret. Lotsa options.

Dedicated server lost many features.
Map Editing Kit was sabotaged, and so was the Custom map adding feature in the exe.
Games for Windows Live/xlive.dll disallows modifications to the exe which could have been beneficial.

I don't really bother playing CE online anymore. On 1.09 there aren't many servers. The problem with h2v is that 90% if the servers have 0 people playing in them. Like 5% have sucky connections or very few people in them. Then like 2.5% of the good connection-enough people- servers are on Coagulation -_- zzzzz. Then there are the 2.5% of the good connection servers that are on interesting maps with a lot of people in them (Monstrmoose).

Good luck finding a good game on a custom map. But if you get into a good game, it WAY better than CE.

The trick is to invite people to the server you want to play on (once you have about four players the rest come pouring in), otherwise most players are happy to play Coag until the end o time.

there was only one server when kills alone and myself were on last night which kinda sucked

The problem is that I dun have anybody to invite. None of my friends play halo2 pc... they play stuff like mw2 on xbox and that kind of thing. Or Minecraft -_-
Edited by Xoronatus on Mar 10, 2011 at 08:12 PM

All Bungie's fault for making a terrible port, 3 years after the original, without new content, as unfinished as ever. And the Editing kit is pathetic. 3 years is a lot in the gaming world, a game that was good for 2004 is far behind by 2007.

Thats why you invite players you were just playing with: Home > Players > Invite

No LIVE friends required.

First off, Bungie didn't make the port Phoenix. Hired Gun and PI studios did.

Second, Halo 2 is still to date, the best engine in terms of MP gameplay.

Simply whining and not helping to further advance the games HEK does nothing, and shows how little you actaully know about the game, it's code and it's potential.

And yes, people have horrible connections sucks, but that is not the main issue. Most people who play or host a server are doing so from a machine that is barely at all able to handle the game load. Yes, XP does handle the game better than Windows 7 or Vista, but it fails in the MP aspect altogether. If people used the proper settings and recommended rig for the game, you would see a large difference in the quality of hosted matches.

For one, I would never host my matches on anything but my AM3 Phenom II X4 rig. Using my AM2+ Phenom X3 rig is barely able to keep up with the large demand of connections from other clients when hosting max 16 player matches on huge custom maps.

Yeah it is kinda sad that this game had to die. I only just got into halo 2's multiplayer and theres only ever a few servers going whereas halo 1 has heaps.

Yup, too bad I don't have Xbox live, so that instead of playing the few few servers on halo 2 or the laggy-as-craziness servers on CE on the same old original Bloodgulch with the same gametypes, I could be playing halo 3 online or halo reach online. I could be getting better at the game and experiencing the true joy of killing people with the dmr and deflecting rockets with armor lock.

When i get Live, I'm going straight onto Odst four player legendary firefight

H2V Editing doesnt support Single Player. If it did I'd so be in

Same here. CE would have died a loooong time ago

What other games do you play, runescape or something? That engine was almost instantly outperformed by the Source engine when that came out, and that was in 2004. 7 years later, there's the Halo 3 Engine, which is obviously a direct upgrade, and the Halo Reach Engine, which is also a direct upgrade. You also have the newer Source Engine, the CryEngine 3, and no telling how many others.

I'm totally bawling my eyes dry over this terible port, I mean, any criticism against a game cannot possiblity not be whining. And I totally see you hacking the edititing kit of Halo 2 Vista. I bow down to your obvious superiority. How much do YOU know about this game's potential? Did you know its netcode still does not support online syncing AI, unlike almost every other game's engine nowadays? Get out.

Way to miss the point; he was obviously talking about Halo games, not other game engines.

Yeah...Kills. He totally missed the point. A game wngine is nothing more than a basis for which all things in the game interect, can be modified and what can and cannot be done in general. The game engines of newer Halo titles may be better written....but are far from being usefully utilized in terms of multiplayer handling and execution. Each installment of the mp aspect tried to.create newer more modern experiences witj flashier gizmos and junk. Since Halo.2, the playability has far strayed from makes a multiplayer match truley great. No amount of fancy abilities or weapons can substitute a good old melee or shoot mp match. All the added things of H3 and Reach show that Bungie was more concerned about outdoing other titles then focusing soley on good mp playability.

When I play H3 or Reach now....armor abilities and pickup extras dont even register on my scale of.importance in the match. If you truly are a good player and focus simply on outwitting ur opponent and heightening true skill, then no matter what the armament u will walk away victorious.

All new Halo titles forgot about what made and still makes the first Halo so great. To date, only Halo 2 stayed faithful to that magic formula.

H3 MP -> H2 MP.

I don't even know where to start with that whimsical nonsense of a statement. Should I really even bother going into a clear explanation from a programming and gameplay perspective to explain why Halo 2's multiplayer is superior to all the sequels following it?

Halo 3's engine is basically a less glitchy version of Halo 2's. I'm pretty sure you can choose to play it without Equipment.
Btw if you really just want the "good old melee or shoot mp match" Halo 1 is still better. It's even plainer, I daresay LESS glitchy, and even less fancy stuff.
Now explain the better programing aspect of Halo 2.

Well, having to lead your shots kills gameplay for me in HCE.


Halo 2 is hated by many but personally I loved all the additions such as dual wielding, destroyable vehicles, pulling a driver out of his/her seat and so forth.


Halo 3 I have not played as much and admit I'd like to play more (someday on PC , hopefully), but when I did play H3 I felt very let down, I think part of it was the nerfing of some weapons such as the BR. Equipment was cool but seemed to play too small a part in the MP.


Reach I have barely touched but was very disappointed to find that they removed dual weapons. I mean you don't have to use em, its just another option which I like having as it adds more gameplay possibilities. Plus I was hoping for something completely new, be it combat in space, in MP and/or a Halo that finally had maps that would allow up to 32 players.


Also, Bungie recycles many ideas. The idea of equipment and other types of power-ups (that would give you ability's like some of those found in Reach) have existed since at least H2 while others may predate the original HCE. Its also pretty obvious that they cut much of H2 and later poured it into H3 and ODST, and I do not mean just the story but actual content.


Theater Mode and other vehicles and weapons where also pulled from H2.


Engine-wise Reach is to H3 as H3 is to H2 as H2 is to HCE. In other words, they where all built on each-other. Bungie said the Reach engine was all new and made some pretty bold claims about H3's engine pre-release . The fact remains they utilize some of the same framework, this is evident when you looks at the tag structure, overall engine capability's and the glitches that remain from previous Halos.


So IMO (up until Reach) Bungie was making the same game since H2. Innovating less and less. Thats just how I feel about the gameplay in general, others will have different opinions and are not necessarily wrong, that is; two people can agree to disagree.


That said, I still love the series and always find the SciFi setting preferable to the Medal of Duty games.

Well to start, the Halo 2 game engine was a completely different beast than the previous halo 1 engine. For Halo 3, they stripped down the core Halo 1 engine and made modifications to it, to give it a Halo 2 engine feel. Documentation on all engines can be found in the developer archives on B-Net. The way the shaders and bitmaps work in halo 3 is almost identical to that of Halo and Halo CE. Halo 3 also unfortunatly carried over a small amount of the buggy netcode which is why in halo 3, you could slow down in theatre mode, and actually see a sniper shot a good 2 feet away from someone, and it still registered as a hit.

To date, only Halo Reach didn't require any amount of lead room to correctly connect with your shots. Although the main problem I find with Halo Reach is the sparatic spread rate of shots in accordance to the actual aiming you do. At times it almost seems as if you would be better off randomly zig zagging around while firing to hit something, especially in campaign.

One general aspect that bugs me about the difference in game engines and coding, is the tag structure. In halo 2, we can see a very methodical and well layed out tag structure, and very neatly organized and coded reflexive and chunk base. In Halo 3, the tag structure was slightly altered and includes an overabundance of unessessary tag classes. Many H2 developers at bungie stated how much they hated working on h2, and how much of a screw up it basically was. Looking back now, and comparing it to the pre-compiled and finished compiled product, Halo 2 was better layed out in terms of memory management and tag loading. This is partially due to utilizing 3 resource maps to offset the constant loading and unloading of core items used throughout the game.

In Halo 3, we not only saw a dramatic increase in map file size, but a moronic way of loading of resources. For example.... in the first bsp section of a level you use a tank. When the bsp switches you go into a building. When you switch to a third bsp you are back outside. The tank is only able to be loaded and used on a specific bsp, which is why throughout the game, we could not moddify our use of any weapon in the map file whenever we wanted.

The game basically loads and unloads data at almost every section of bsp switching, which forces each map to contain core items that halo 2 did not have to contain, becuase Halo 2 would load all items for a level into memory, so it could access it without having to load and unload it during actual gameplay.

I'll continue this later....

Continuing with the gameplay discussion above, I'm gonna lament the fact that I'm Australian, and therefore MY odds of finding a good game are... pretty much impossible.
Probably thw main reason I dislike Halo 2. They released it on a much disliked operating system, THREE years past its prime. What's up with them releasing the PC ports 3 years afterward anyway?
Imo the sniper rifle in Reach is overpowered. Before if a sniper was REALLY getting to you, you could always go to a massive scale and bring a vehicle or two. But now, the sniper rifle seems to be a 50. cal, and before when they hard to actually hit a part of you that was not covered, now they can blow up the vehicle in 2-3 shots by shooting it anywhere. Even a wraith. Inbalance much.
Edited by IcePhoenix on Apr 12, 2011 at 06:54 PM

but where am i to get CryEngine3 or Source engine. Even if i somehow magically do, i bet that its like 5x hardr to use than CE or Halo 2. halo 2 has limited support for Custom Weapons, no custom Bipeds or vehichles (that i know of) an no single player. Otherwise i would ditch CE.

Scale from 1 to 5

Halo 1:
Campaign- 4.5
Multiplayer -4.5

Halo 2:
Campaign- 4.6
Multiplayer- 4.5

Halo 3:
Campaign-4.1
Multiplayer-4.8

Halo 3 ODST:
Campaign-4.3
Firefight- 4.7

Halo Reach:
Campaign- 4.55
Multiplayer- 4.4
Firefight- 4.6

Well, that's a rough model of my opinion. Not very accurate, because I like all of them almost equally.
Edited by Xoronatus on May 10, 2011 at 10:53 PM

Halo 1
4

Halo 2
3

Halo 3
4.8

Odst
4.8

Reach
3

all out of 10 jk's
Edited by Muscl3r on May 29, 2011 at 03:48 AM