First Look: Halo 2

First Look: Halo 2 is a documentary film on the art and visual design behind the various locations featured in the Halo 2 campaign, featuring commentary from environmental artists at Bungie: Dave Dunn, Mike Zak, and Michael Wu. Originally included on the Halo 2 Limited Collector's Edition bonus disc, the film was later uploaded to Bungie's YouTube channel on April 16, 2010.

Transcript

FIRST LOOK: HALO 2
_{DAVE DUNN,
// Lead Environmental Artist
MIKE ZAK,
// Single Player Environmental Artist
MICHAEL WU,
// Single Player Environmental Artist}

CAIRO STATION

• Dave Dunn: Here is the space station. I think the main gist of what we were trying to achieve with this, at the very, very beginning, was the idea of this giant perimeter gun that orbits the Earth and is used for satellite defense.

• Mike Zak: One thing I really liked about the space station was how you could really have a sense of where you were in the station with all the windows looking out onto the gun. Like all these atrium spaces where you've got a lot of sight lines to other parts of the station that you later get to. Unlike the Pillar of Autumn, you really didn't have a sense of how big the structure was.

OUTSKIRTS

• Dave Dunn: That leads us on to Old Mombasa. We had a lot of destruction present in this to really try to set the mood of the Earth being under attack. It was sort of an inspiration of: what would an old ethnic neighborhood look like in the future? So a lot of stuff has been retrofitted with wires, and it was a nice way to transition into the newer architecture which you eventually get to after you play through the beach and the tunnels and all that.

METROPOLIS

• Dave Dunn: And you eventually end up over what we call New Mombasa.

• Michael Wu: A lot of the look and feel of the city was based on either concepts that were painted or from actual photographs of the current city of Mombasa that exists in Kenya. And so that's why it seems familiar. At the same time, we've tried to add as simply as possible signs of 500 years of human advance.

• Dave Dunn: It sort of still hearkens to the arcology concept that Chris Lee was working on a long time ago for E3.

• Michael Wu: You see a lot of architecture here like this large bridge, there's some highway sections, and then the new city. And the reason why the arcology was replaced is because it was such a massive structure that you really felt like you were just in a gray metal canyon and not in a living city—nearly as much as the new level. So hopefully it was a change for the better.

GAS GIANT

• Mike Zak: Gas Giant.

• Michael Wu: Dave's baby. Big. Big baby.

• Dave Dunn: Worked on this baby too long, too many years. It was satisfying to play through it; I play through it today and I think successfully, the production half of it feels like, "Okay, this is where they're moving these odd canisters full of gas that they're farming." I think there's a good transition from that to the research area where this was... this predates the Halos. The idea for this was: this is where they first sort of came into contact with the Flood and had this horrible potential war in front of them, or infestation.

SENTINEL WALL

• Michael Wu: Okay here we go, Sentinel Wall. This is where things start to cook up story-wise.

• Mike Zak: This wall was built by the Forerunners to keep the Flood quarantined into a specific area on Delta Halo.

• Michael Wu: Even the exterior of the quarantine zone is supposed to reflect the barrenness and the lack of life that the Sentinels have been trying to instill in the area by starving it of light and energy and heat and all sorts of good things. Since that's why it's so cold.

HIGH CHARITY

• Michael Wu: And we're now at High Charity.

• Dave Dunn: We definitely took a departure from like the Covenant stuff that we did in Halo.

• Michael Wu: We're able to squeeze the most out of the Xbox and actually do all the fancy curves and shiny surfaces that we had drawn out.

• Dave Dunn: We chose a different palette for colors.

• Michael Wu: Yes, purple.

• Mike Zak: A lot darker.

• Michael Wu: Much darker purple than the mauve tone in Halo 1.

• Dave Dunn: Desaturated and luminescent, yeah. We pulled off a much better organic feel to everything, which was really, really kind of neat. The lighting is going to be very dark and moody.

DELTA HALO

• Michael Wu: So now we're looking at...

• Dave Dunn: ...the Delta Halo. It's really cool. It has a lot of beautiful water shots. I think some of our really good overgrowth throughout all of it.

• Mike Zak: Yeah, we definitely put a lot more attention onto making Forerunner structures look like they've actually aged. First game, they were pretty spick and span. This is somewhat reminiscent of the first control room in terms of its sort of ziggurat structure that Chris Barrett did in Halo 1. We wanted to relate to that in the spherical room shape or the control room shape, but unearth it a lot more.

• Dave Dunn: I think this is really where we hit our stride because the sheer scope and scale of all these levels...

• Michael Wu: ...and they're huge.

• Dave Dunn: They're huge.