After the events on the Forerunner ringworld Halo, Master Chief SPARTAN-117 returns home to Earth with the AI construct Cortana. The war with the Covenant forces is still not going well, despite the destruction of an entire fleet at Halo, but the Master Chief needs a refit. Armed with the Mjolnir Armor Mark VI, he is on his way to a decorations ceremony with the thought-to-be-dead Sergeant Johnson, when Covenant forces emerge from the Slipstream into Earth space. But something is wrong: the fleet is much smaller than the one used to destroy Reach, humanity's former frontline stronghold. The Master Chief and Cortana, along with Commander Miranda Keyes and the crew of In Amber Clad, must fight off the Covenant and protect Earth, a battle that will take them across the galaxy to a new planet, which is disturbingly familiar...Meanwhile, the Prophets, leaders of the Covenant, are not pleased with the Elite Commander that allowed the Master Chief to destroy Halo, and he is branded a heretic. But even Heretics have their uses. He is to become the new Arbiter, a warrior for the Prophets' will, destined to die in glorious battle like all the other Arbiters before him. But deep in the Covenant, rumors are spreading about a Jiralhanae take-over. Can the Arbiter uncover this treachery in time to save the Elites?
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Following on from his shame, Thel 'Vadam spends almost the entire game being called nothing but 'the Arbiter' by everyone around him, his real name effectively erased as punishment. It isn't until the Great Schism kicks off and the Sangheili break away from the Prophets that he's finally referred to as Thel again, which the writers use as a neat little signal that he's reclaimed his honour on his own terms.
The Great Schism kicks off properly in Halo 2 once the Prophet of Truth turns the Brutes against the Elites, trying to have the Sangheili wiped out and replaced as the Covenant's honour guard. It's the event that effectively breaks the Covenant from the inside, and without the Elites switching sides to fight alongside the UNSC afterwards, humanity's odds in the war look a lot grimmer.
According to the developer commentary that shipped with Halo 3's Legendary Edition, the Heretic faction you fight in Halo 2's Sacred Icon and Quarantine Zone was originally going to be made up entirely of Hunters, no Grunts or Elites involved at all. It got changed during development, but it's a strange alternate version of that mission to imagine.
Long before sprinting became a genre-wide staple thanks to games like Call of Duty 4, and years before Bungie officially added it as an armour ability in Halo: Reach, the mechanic was actually prototyped for Halo 2. It got cut, but leftover animation files for it were still sitting in the game's code the whole time.
High Charity was originally meant to throw a massive tentacled enemy called the Flood Juggernaut at players. It got cut before release, but the files never left the disc, and if you dig it up through modding tools it's technically still killable. There's just one catch: nobody ever built a death animation for it, so it simply freezes solid the moment it dies.
Halo 2 was originally supposed to bring back the large-scale vehicle warfare mode that had been cut from the first game, under the working name Warfare. As the single-player campaign ran into delay after delay, Warfare got shelved entirely, and it was really only down to multiplayer lead Max Hoberman pushing back that the smaller-scale multiplayer we actually got shipped at all.
Lead writer Joseph Staten had some far darker ideas for Halo 2's narrative than what made it to the final cut. One dropped scene reportedly had Miranda Keyes strapping a bomb to Master Chief's back and throwing him into a pit, a moment of betrayal that never made it past the drawing board once the deadline crunch really hit.
When the Halo 2 Editing Kit finally got released to the public in 2021, modders found the level scripting for every campaign mission still packed with developer comments. Alongside crude jokes and frustrated notes about the AI misbehaving, one designer apparently left a line about looking forward to a vacation once the final boss was finally done and dusted.
Several Warthog variants, including an arctic camo version, a proper transport model, and a small ATV, were all built for Halo 2 and then dropped before launch. They didn't go to waste forever though. The ATV effectively resurfaced as the Mongoose in Halo 3, and the arctic Warthog eventually made it into a Halo 3 map pack years later.
Start the campaign level Gravemind on Legendary difficulty and watch the opening cutscene closely. Once the camera pans across the crowd of Grunts inside High Charity, there's a barely visible 2D cutout of a man in gym shorts standing among them with his hands behind his head. It's actually Bungie co-founder Jason Jones, and fans nicknamed him the Half-Naked Guy long before anyone confirmed who he was.
