I’m continuing my playthrough of the Halo games, picking up with Halo 2 after finishing Combat Evolved about a year ago. I’m not as familiar with Halo 2 as I am with CE, 3, or Reach, having only played its campaign once back in the day to catch up with the story before diving deep into Halo 3 (the multiplayer of which I was playing a lot of). Revisiting it now, nearly fifteen(!?) years have I first played it, I find it a striking game, both in how deftly designed it is and its confidence as a sequel.
There are a bunch of new features in Halo 2 that weren’t present in the original. Perhaps the most obvious is the ability to dual-wield certain guns (it’s also the one on the game’s box). The game itself, though, doesn’t call attention to its presence — there’s no play-halting tutorial nor an NPC telling you that you can hold a weapon in each hand. Instead, when you first enter combat as Master Chief, you go to a weapon rack. Should you grab an SMG (which itself is a new addition to the game), a new prompt appears where the pick-up-weapon prompt had been: hold Y to dual wield. And then you can.
The other weapon you can take is the Battle Rifle (also a new weapon), but the logical thing is to take both, and so more likely than not you will see the prompt to dual wield. By making it one of the first things you do — and by having it happen in a controlled, pre-combat environment — the developers ensure that the player will interact with the new feature. All that without any handholding involved.
Other new things are introduced as elegantly. Were you to come across a Warthog in Combat Evolved, it would be up to you to drive it and hope that the AI-controller Marine crewing the machine gun would shoot the bad guys. The AI can drive the Warthog in Halo 2, but if you’re used to the first game you might hope in the driver’s seat out of habit. Come an early level, you’ll come across a Warthog careening around the battlefield, no one crewing the gun and a Marine in the driver’s seat. If you didn’t know earlier, well, you do now.
Similarly, the first time you play as the Arbiter — a member of the Covenant, the bad guys from the first game — you start with an Energy Sword already equipped. Though the sword was in Combat Evolved, unlike every other weapon you could never pick it up. Now you start with it and, just like that, the game lets you know that you can wield Energy Swords now. It’s only after this sequence that you encounter Elites wielding Energy Swords as Master Chief, and sure enough, you can use them.
I’ll admit, Halo 2 never stood too tall in my personal ranking of the series. But then, I never really spent much time with it. Looking at it now, it has an impressive confidence to it. It knows it’s a sequel and a good one at that. It deftly introduces its new systems and then lets you loose. It’s almost stunning how much the game knows exactly what it is. This is Halo 2, it’s different from Combat Evolved: you can dual-wield SMGs, your old trust Assault Rifle’s no longer in it, and sometimes you play as an Elite. As big as the changes are, trust the game to ease you into it; now go have fun.
Essays, Not Rants! 