343 Industries had a good showing for Halo: The Master Chief Collection at PAX today. We learned new things about Halo 2 Anniversary, Halo 3 and Halo 4. They also held a tournament for Halo 2 Anniversary, which was streamed live.
On the panel, 343 Industries assured fans that Halo 3 and Halo 4 did not receive a simple up-port. They placed a tremendous amount of work on the games to make the changes conspicuous. Gameplay is conspicuously much more fluid, and there is also a larger amount of detail. You can see improvements in the water, and the results of a better lighting engine. 343 did not actually touch every aspect of the games, but they put in enough work to create a dramatic upgrade. They also revealed that they would place the Xbox 360 and Xbox One versions side-by-side to ensure the differences were conspicuous.
For Halo 2 Anniversary’s Forge Mode, they restored zoom and precision controls, and fixed bugs for magnet locations and polished the menus. They also added these features:
· Snap to ground
· Align to ground
· Movement snap
· Tool settings between sessions
· Cleaner, smoother palette for the Forge Structure
· Mirrored versions of objects
· More natural and terrain structure pieces.
· Skybox only maps
· Multiplayer map structure palette
· Simple scripting objects
· Gadget improvements and additions
· Forge budget as straight object count
· Performance meter
The Halo 2 Anniversary PAX Prime Showdown capped off the first day of PAX. The $ 10,000 pool was split $ 5,000 to the champion, and below $ 2,000 to each team after. The grand championship went to team eXcellence. The tournament was also streamed live, with a record 27,065 concurrent viewers.
You can watch the whole tournament below. Halo: The Master Chief Collection coming November 11 exclusively to Xbox One.
