The Halo: The Master Chief Collection remake of the E3 demo for Halo 2 and Halo 3 will both be playable very soon.
In the second-part breakdown of the Digsite crew’s excavations of old cutting room floor content from previous Halo games, it was revealed that the Halo: The Master Chief Collection remake of the E3 demo for both Halo 2 and Halo 3 will be arriving sometime soon.
For the uninitiated, the Digisite crew includes a group of modders that is working in partnership with the team at 343 Industries. Together, they have been working to restore some old cut content (weapons, vehicles, creatures, maps, levels, and more) so that fans can experience it for themselves in Halo: The Master Chief Collection on PC. The latest content update for Halo: The Master Chief Collection went live earlier this week on July 12, which included the first delivery of Digsite content on the platform.
The most noteworthy aspects of Halo’s cut content that the Digsite team are working on for Halo: The Master Chief Collection includes the E3 2003 demo for Halo 2 and the scenario used for the Halo 3 E3 2006 trailer. This content is not in the latest update, dubbed Release 1, as it’s been continually refined to be as close to the original setup as is humanly possible, and it’s pretty much just one person doing it all.
According to the developer breakdown, fans won’t be waiting long to get hold of the Halo: The Master Chief Collection remakes of both scenarios. The developer noted that this effort was partly to prove concepts and create tooling that the team can now use to semi-automatically port maps from engine revisions and content formatting changes. The team also made great strides over the last year to recover very “dodgy” early builds and ways of extracting data from them. According to the developer, this was something that was necessary to do a complete build of the map, as not every E3 asset survived in the later Bungie depots.
Regarding the Halo 3 E3 2006 scenario, the developer breakdown stated that the largest obstacle to getting it running again has been scripting. The scripts for the scenario were written during an earlier development phase of Halo 3 and, as such, much of the functionality has been changed. Notably, Halo 3 switched to a different cinematic system than Halo 2, using data files and tags to automatically create scripting for cinematics. The trailer dates back to before these systems were in place, using script functions that are now long gone.
Additionally, many assets used in the trailer evolved in the production that followed after. According to the developer, the bright side is that despite all of the challenges involved, the scenario can now be played from start to finish. However, it needs a little more time and effort before it can be released.
