After 6 months of no progress with my filed support ticket (okay with things taking long as there are other priorities), they closed my bug report as “solved” and instead directed me to post on the forums.
So I’m complaining here.
Classic Halo 2 used a lot of soft, smooth fade transitions in its cutscenes. For instance right at the beginning you’d see it normally a lot, like when the Heretic recounts events ("It fled, as we set fire to their planet - <normally a crossfade to the passage of time and distance to the ring> - “When you first saw Halo, were you blinded by its majesty?” etc) , and the scene in OG release and even on Vista fades instead of abruptly cutting to the next shot.
But on MCC, at least on PC, all of those fade transitions are broken, they just don’t work, it’s a blunt abrupt cut, like when it’s supposed to fade from the Prophets helmet ring decoration to the moon on earth, there were originally a ton of crossfades used throughout.
My old copy of Halo 2 Vista that I keep around still has them, and you can see them in old youtube videos where people still have their OG xbox or Vista copies that they upload.
You can also see it in the dev commentary: Halo 2: Developer Commentary Playthrough (2007)【1:21:15】 - YouTube
But it’s broken here, alongside a dynamic light source that’s supposed to be shining on the Heretic during the trial, and some flickering broken textures on the Prophets armrests. (Alongside the sun still being invisible on Classic Halo 2 visuals…)
I mean, is it just me somehow who has this? Can anyone else see these broken? Does anyone still play with Halo 2 Classic cutscenes & visuals?
Guess 343i won’t fix this unless more people complain?
Hard to find videos of people playing Halo 2 MCC, with the cutscenes uploaded in classic visuals, from recently enough, but here’s one:
You can clearly see the crossfades missing when compared to for instance the dev commentary. Also the missing dynamic spotlight.
So it’s not just me!
I’m glad I am not the only one who noticed this issue, I am going to report it and hope they are aware.
Yeah I found two pretty good videos that more clearly demonstrate the disparities:
Original with original effects:
MCC:
Even the first few minutes the differences should jump out at people.
I replayed Halo 2 on classic very recently, and here’s a list of what subjectively jumped out at me:
-The sun is missing in all outside levels, not just Cairo station
-30fps cutscene animations.
-No cutscene crossfades.
-Volume levels are really wack, music and dialogue volume is way too low, you can try turning effects down and that helps with music, but dialogue is still too low.
-A few missing dynamic lights (intro cutscene & Gravemind High Charity Prophet private chambers).
-Flickering textures on Prophets hoverchair armrests.
-All covenant vehicles lack the “ragdoll” twitchy effect before exploding one last time.
-And some effect “layers”(?) seem missing as well, like I remember the covenant vehicle explosion consisting of that blue fire, dark blue mist, but also an electrical, sparking cloud feel, like a storm cloud. Will need to replay, and also see how it exactly was in Vista.
-The shader discrepancies is hard to tell, in some places (cutscenes again mostly) they look more muted than in original, I think, but in some places in gameplay they look better (Delta Halo for instance felt prettier than last I played on Vista).
-I believe some glow and bloom effects are also potentially broken, like the cutscene where the Arbiter gets his armor in the Mausoleum, the open pod has a very muted effect, you see no glow on the Arbiter as he walks closer to it to pick up his helmet.
Though again I’d have to doublecheck to see if my memory is right that the glow & bloom was more apparent in scenes like that (another is as Chief at the end cutscene of Cairo Station drags the bomb out of the elevator, the glow from that elevator seems somehow wrong).
To be fair to 343i they did open up the ticket again and were very polite, and it’s still pending, but still could use more people filing tickets like this to at the very least bump it up into the Known Issues list.
Found the ultimate Halo 2 Classic visual issues compilation video:
https://youtu.be/cAfOWcBWITU
Man, I knew there were a lot of downgrades in MCC compared to OG Halo 2, but just having them this comprehensively listed makes MCC H2C seem so much worse than how MCC CE was!
How does one even begin to submit tickets for these? Feels like a massive undertaking to post individual tickets for every single bug, as 343 usually wants one ticket per one separate issue D:
(Only thing missing from video is audio mixing issue and 30fps cutscene animations)
