So, I was watching the E3 2011 Trailer for Halo: CE Anniversary and saw that the Halo: Reach Assult Rifle was in the game, and I say “beta” as internal pre-release, not public testing.
Anyway, was there some “controversy” over having the Reach AR in the game, when the Original AR was the trendsetter in Halo CE?
> Anyway, was there some “controversy” over having the Reach AR in the game
Yes. CEA had a rapid development, and lots of things were placeholderized.
A lot of things were placeholders back at announcement, as you can see, even the armour wasn’t final back then.
I believe Certain Affinity, Sabre & 343i were taking feedback from players to perfect it, and if you ask me, they nailed it.
Well, apart from the fact that the Wraith is using the Reach model with a player turret, while Halo CE didn’t have the option for that.
A lot of the assets were placeholder, apparently. In my opinion, a lot of the placeholder assets even stayed. They “fixed” things that were absolutely integral or memorable - such as the Assault Rifle and the Pistol (though they admittedly just crammed in the Halo 3 models and altered them to look like updated Combat Evolved models) and the Master Chief. That said, there are a lot of assets in there that probably could have been more faithful. As Moa said, the Wraith has the secondary gunner seat, which is not available in Combat Evolved. The Marines are no longer wearing their green armor with metal-based plating, and the eye “scanners” aren’t as distinct; instead, they use Halo: Reach Marine models. Cortana’s Halo 3 model is also shoehorned in, with slightly updated motion capture animations in places.
I believe that with more time, all of these “issues” would have been fixed. Halo: Combat Evolved Anniversary had a development cycle of about a little over a year, and a lot of that time on the campaign side was spent getting the engine technology working, and then sorting out mapping bugs. I do find the choice not to “fix” Cortana slightly funny, as she’s such a vital and important character in the universe. In my opinion, she’s second in importance only to John, and I would have liked to see an updated Combat Evolved model, rather than the Halo 3 model. That said, she’s only the most notable in a long list of continuity “errors” that could have been better fixed given more time. Remove the secondary gun from the Wraith, give the Marines an updated version of their original armor, and fix Cortana, and most of the problems that I notice when I play would have been solved.
But yes, the Assault Rifle was one of the few “placeholder” models that was actually fixed.
Yeah, they had a ton of place holders. They were originally going to use the Mjolnir Mk. V armour from Reach for Cheif’s armour. If that had kept that, it would have made a bad impact on how people looked at the game.