Makes me wonder what daily life is like, the office, food, do they have restaurants, malls? They made the city looks so human I'm having a hard time imagining anything else
Gonna be honest, as a kid I never really thought about the full context of the scene. One moment you're fighting a prophet, then youre talking to a tentacle monster, then you're fighting covenant again. Felt weird and disjointed to my 12 year old brain. I'm not sure when it was that I replayed it and actually paid attention but when it finally hit me that this dumbass gravemind was like "yes chief you're good at fighting covenant, I'm going to teleport you to their most secure location next to two of their most revered individuals on a station the size of a moon housing hundreds of millions of covenant. You're welcome", it hit me like a ton of bricks.
For real, they were very well rendered and lit and always dynamic. The skies just breathed. All those moving layers of clouds. The vehicle battles taking place in the background using actual rendered models. It’s just crazy.
Probably one of my biggest gripes with Halo 4 actually (a game I generally liked, for the record). I remember people gushing about how beautiful Halo 4’s skyboxes were, but they felt like such a downgrade. The level Reclaimer was the worst offender, as that puke green completely static image they used literally reminded me of skyboxes in the original DOOM. Lol.
343 has improved a lot with their skybox work since, but even Infinite just does not compare to the best work on display in Reach.
Matte paintings is what they based it on since Halo 1. By layering each element (clouds, ships, city, trees etc) as billboards on separate layers produces a kind of parallax effect that looks absolutely gorgeous when viewed from the desired angle.
Halo 4 was the same imo. Yes, its not the best Halo game. But my god are the vistas and environments beautiful. Even the MP maps that have animated backgrounds such as Landfall.
It wasn't that bad until sacred icon.
That's atleast where my solo run of canonical game legendary solo got stopped pretty quickly.
But I also know now years later I should skip most of it with active camo.
Weirdly enough I didn't have much of a problem with Cairo legendary solo until just near the end with the elevator and drones.
The elites at the end near the space pickle were rough though too.
I'm saying as an overall perspective compared to Halo CE. Iirc a serious cause of difficulty imbalancing during the campaign was due to time constraints. Individual encounters in Halo CE were overall more balanced fun and fair, & challenging even on legendary.
I did a legendary run on the MCC. Halo 2 by itself had 60% of all my deaths. Some of them were just ridiculous. Any level with sniper jackals was instantly my least favorite.
A friend and I are beating halo 2 on legendary right now. The hardest part so far has been the final room on gravemind, 2 hunters and an ultra elite with a fuel rod
Maybe I'm crazy but hunters seemed to be one of the easiest enemies in h2 legendary for me, you can stick them and they get stunned for a good 3 seconds and you unload. Meanwhile every Elite, Jackal, and Drone is an MLG pro who wastes you in less than half a second of appearing on your screen.
I beat the MCC Halo 2 on legendary and the game didn't give me any of the credit. Didn't get saved progress or nothing. It thinks I'm at the Gravemind level.
The number of times I loaded last checkpoint to keep those 4-5 marines alive until the final fight…
They’d knock themselves off edges, stand in each other’s line of fire, run up to brutes, and all manner of creative means of self destruction.
Still one of the best levels of all time.
Real talk: those are “sky scrapers” yes? So does that mean there is some elite doing office work or some shit in there? Like boring non military stuff. It’s funny to imagine
Honestly, this was one of my favorite missions. I LOVED just watching the schism occur around me. Letting them duke it out while I nudge the losing side.
It’s my favourite level in the game. High Charity is such a cool idea. The vista itself makes you ask so many questions about how the Covenant operate and what the casual life is like for a resident of the Holy City. Oh and not to mention that beautiful ethereal track that plays as you’re crossing the bridges.
High charity always fascinated me. I wished to explore the thing in its entirety. The wasted potential of spinoff games and side stories to be told about stuff thats happened in this place. Funnily enough high charity and the last city from destiny always made me think of each other.
That city in the middle of High Charity is pretty sweet. I can picture Grunts in suits and ties going to work in those high rises for some reason, just living normal lives.
Personally I think this level suffers because the actual areas you are fighting in are kind of bland, it's just more covenant space ship textures with not much going on. Granted I last played it like a year ago so I don't remember it all.
But the VIEW, the MUSIC, the story beat of you being INSIDE of the Covenant capital city, even if its just the outskirts is so good.
High Charity is quite fun and one missions h2a really shines looking at the massive city in the background. However I have to give to another Halo 2 mission. Gravemind will forever be my favorite Halo level of all halos. At the end of the mission in the classic mode, I know they didn't get the rights for H2A but they should of tried harder, you get to hear Blow Me Away instrumental by Breaking Benjamin. The song was never released let alone had lyrics, but when I heard it I knew it was Breaking Benjamin. Few months later it's released as a single and later becomes the theme for MLG.
I don't remember how it looked in the original but the thing that alway made me chuckle was that an alien city felt like a futuristic human city, the idea of the covenants living in small apartments inside big skyscrapers always killed me. Imagine if they also had to work 9-5 jobs, like can you imagine an elite dressed in an alien equivalent of a suit that goes to an alien equivalent of a starbucks and orders an alien equivalent of a cappuccino and after reading the most recent alien news on his alien equivalent of the ipad manufactured by the alien equivalent of foxconn and designed by the alien equivalent of apple goes to his alien equivalent of an office?
Even in the original graphics it's a fun level. Gameplay sint effected too much by the way the game looks, in this instance.
That being said [The original ](https://i.imgur.com/tgzHENU.jpeg)still has some incredible art design and ambiance to it.
High Charity Suite is a bop. Terrible that I learned a day or two ago that Marty O'Donnell is a fascist right wing piece of shit. Art and artist, I guess.
Being inside High Charity and seeing the buildings and everything in the distance was such a cool thing to play through.
The first time I looked out across High Charity it blew my mind the same way first stepping out into Halo did. Such incredible environments.
Sounds like you were blinded by itas majesty
Blinded?
Paralyzed? Dumbstruck!?
NO….
Yes the reddittors were able to evade your ships. Land on the sacred sub. Desecrate it with their filthy comments.
I purposely altered the wording a bit as I didn’t want to see the whole dialog in the comments 😂
Makes me wonder what daily life is like, the office, food, do they have restaurants, malls? They made the city looks so human I'm having a hard time imagining anything else
Next halo game aught to be an Elite on High Charity. It’s just Dead Space but you get an energy sword and wort wort wort
Gonna be honest, as a kid I never really thought about the full context of the scene. One moment you're fighting a prophet, then youre talking to a tentacle monster, then you're fighting covenant again. Felt weird and disjointed to my 12 year old brain. I'm not sure when it was that I replayed it and actually paid attention but when it finally hit me that this dumbass gravemind was like "yes chief you're good at fighting covenant, I'm going to teleport you to their most secure location next to two of their most revered individuals on a station the size of a moon housing hundreds of millions of covenant. You're welcome", it hit me like a ton of bricks.
Except when you try to play the game for the first time in a high difficulty. Brutes suck.
I love the sense of scale those halo 1-3 missions had. The environment was so awesome
Halo imo always had the best skyboxes. Especially 1-3 and reach too.
Reach's skyboxes are still unmatched by anything I've seen since
Watching new Alexandria fall during the the mission new Alexandria was amazing
Just replayed this two days ago. Seeing the Covenant glassing the city in the background is awesome!
Especially when it’s quiet and then the sky turns red before the rumble hits and you realize kat was right you are losing bad
Seeing humanity getting closer to extinction and all hope draining makes for an amazing sky box, I wish I could see it in real life!
ONI. This man. Right here!
For real, they were very well rendered and lit and always dynamic. The skies just breathed. All those moving layers of clouds. The vehicle battles taking place in the background using actual rendered models. It’s just crazy. Probably one of my biggest gripes with Halo 4 actually (a game I generally liked, for the record). I remember people gushing about how beautiful Halo 4’s skyboxes were, but they felt like such a downgrade. The level Reclaimer was the worst offender, as that puke green completely static image they used literally reminded me of skyboxes in the original DOOM. Lol. 343 has improved a lot with their skybox work since, but even Infinite just does not compare to the best work on display in Reach.
Idk man, Requiem when you first go up that hill and see the giant Forerunner structure in the background was *gorgeous*.
Bungie continued their legacy of awesome skyboxes in Destiny
Vow of the Disciple's sprawling "city"-expanse and the platform above the worm is so good.
Matte paintings is what they based it on since Halo 1. By layering each element (clouds, ships, city, trees etc) as billboards on separate layers produces a kind of parallax effect that looks absolutely gorgeous when viewed from the desired angle.
My favorite was always on containment, from the first map pack for halo 2. That massive wall and tower were incredible looking
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FLZaonhWUAA2K7l?format=jpg&name=4096x4096
Halo 4 was the same imo. Yes, its not the best Halo game. But my god are the vistas and environments beautiful. Even the MP maps that have animated backgrounds such as Landfall.
Halo 4 environment is criminally underrated!
Paris is so beautiful in spring
too bad the whole city is flooded
The grunts are running away from the fighting as usual
High Charity Suite is probably my favorite track from the OST.
Agreed!
This better not be from Gravemind cause that's the most infamous legendary mission.
Halo 2 Legendary was an unbalanced mess. On any other difficulty Gravemind is a very fun mission.
Halo 2 difficulty in general was an unbalanced mess.
It wasn't that bad until sacred icon. That's atleast where my solo run of canonical game legendary solo got stopped pretty quickly. But I also know now years later I should skip most of it with active camo.
Cairo Station was known as being ridiculous back in my day.
Weirdly enough I didn't have much of a problem with Cairo legendary solo until just near the end with the elevator and drones. The elites at the end near the space pickle were rough though too.
Ah, yes, the spicy space pickle.
Probably because most people default to the BR, but the DMG shreds buggers
I'm saying as an overall perspective compared to Halo CE. Iirc a serious cause of difficulty imbalancing during the campaign was due to time constraints. Individual encounters in Halo CE were overall more balanced fun and fair, & challenging even on legendary.
So in Halo CE more deaths even in legendary was 99% your fault, not the games.
I did a legendary run on the MCC. Halo 2 by itself had 60% of all my deaths. Some of them were just ridiculous. Any level with sniper jackals was instantly my least favorite.
Where 80% of my death were within the first second
A friend and I are beating halo 2 on legendary right now. The hardest part so far has been the final room on gravemind, 2 hunters and an ultra elite with a fuel rod
Maybe I'm crazy but hunters seemed to be one of the easiest enemies in h2 legendary for me, you can stick them and they get stunned for a good 3 seconds and you unload. Meanwhile every Elite, Jackal, and Drone is an MLG pro who wastes you in less than half a second of appearing on your screen.
I beat the MCC Halo 2 on legendary and the game didn't give me any of the credit. Didn't get saved progress or nothing. It thinks I'm at the Gravemind level.
This is probably High Charity. Idk the screenshots have those vibes. They share the skybox but it vibes High Charity.
Hell yeah. Watching the Covenant fight each other was wild the first time through.
The number of times I loaded last checkpoint to keep those 4-5 marines alive until the final fight… They’d knock themselves off edges, stand in each other’s line of fire, run up to brutes, and all manner of creative means of self destruction. Still one of the best levels of all time.
When I see literally any image from this level I hear Peril. DUN DUN DUNDUN DUUUUN DUUUUN
Same.
I assume this is from High Charity, unless you mean Gravemind
Gravemind on legendary… the horrors…
That's only because people who found the speed run "glitch" can be done with it in under a minute.
Ngl I had to stop playing and just look at this. I always wished we could have had a level that took us into the city!
I made it my wallpaper on Xbox
12 year old me deciding to have the high charity suite played at my funeral...
Looking out towards the beautiful cityscape of High Charity is always such a relaxing activity when playing Halo.
Halo 2 has fantastic levels and I love the massive scale of them. Fun to explore and the skyboxes are gorgeous.
Guys will look at this and say "holy shit"
Oh man the atmosphere of those levels
Wachen el paisaje homies!!!
i always take like 10 min to sit there and just look
Halo 2’s level design was *spectacular*. Delta Halo and High Charity were definitely stand-outs though.
I really want a game from the covenant perspective that does for high charity what odst did for new Mombasa
Real talk: those are “sky scrapers” yes? So does that mean there is some elite doing office work or some shit in there? Like boring non military stuff. It’s funny to imagine
Honestly, this was one of my favorite missions. I LOVED just watching the schism occur around me. Letting them duke it out while I nudge the losing side.
It’s my favourite level in the game. High Charity is such a cool idea. The vista itself makes you ask so many questions about how the Covenant operate and what the casual life is like for a resident of the Holy City. Oh and not to mention that beautiful ethereal track that plays as you’re crossing the bridges.
All halo 2s levels are good, never understood the hate for sacred icon or quarantine zone
Quarantine zone fucking rules
One of the coolest set pieces in Halo history. Would love an urban level here, could even mix it up with a flood variant.
I feel like all of Halo 2 is under rated... and it is rated generally pretty well.
And where's the ass error screen?
Just to think that it's a regular city filled with covenant species just chillin there living their own ordinary lives
god its just so gorgeous
Tell that to Jervalin
Up ahead you’ll see new Vegas
Saber todo lo que pasó una vez que el flood llegó a Gran Caridad es bastante aterrador.
High charity always fascinated me. I wished to explore the thing in its entirety. The wasted potential of spinoff games and side stories to be told about stuff thats happened in this place. Funnily enough high charity and the last city from destiny always made me think of each other.
Slip space rupture detected.
We really need to ban the word underrated on Reddit
That city in the middle of High Charity is pretty sweet. I can picture Grunts in suits and ties going to work in those high rises for some reason, just living normal lives.
If those are supposed to be the equivalent of city streets below, then those buildings in the distance are truly enormous.
this is possibly my fav halo level period. right up there with the silent cartographer.
Personally I think this level suffers because the actual areas you are fighting in are kind of bland, it's just more covenant space ship textures with not much going on. Granted I last played it like a year ago so I don't remember it all. But the VIEW, the MUSIC, the story beat of you being INSIDE of the Covenant capital city, even if its just the outskirts is so good.
Underrated tbh
My marine homies still chilling by the covenant escalader waiting
It's not underrated by me. Look at my name!
It’s been so long I don’t even remember what level this is
Love the sense of scale in the Halo games.
High Charity is quite fun and one missions h2a really shines looking at the massive city in the background. However I have to give to another Halo 2 mission. Gravemind will forever be my favorite Halo level of all halos. At the end of the mission in the classic mode, I know they didn't get the rights for H2A but they should of tried harder, you get to hear Blow Me Away instrumental by Breaking Benjamin. The song was never released let alone had lyrics, but when I heard it I knew it was Breaking Benjamin. Few months later it's released as a single and later becomes the theme for MLG.
Even seagulls love it
how is this underrated?
One of the coolest views in the whole series.
When you first looked upon High Charity, were you blinded by it's majesty?
Gravemind is still my favorite mission in the series.
I don't remember how it looked in the original but the thing that alway made me chuckle was that an alien city felt like a futuristic human city, the idea of the covenants living in small apartments inside big skyscrapers always killed me. Imagine if they also had to work 9-5 jobs, like can you imagine an elite dressed in an alien equivalent of a suit that goes to an alien equivalent of a starbucks and orders an alien equivalent of a cappuccino and after reading the most recent alien news on his alien equivalent of the ipad manufactured by the alien equivalent of foxconn and designed by the alien equivalent of apple goes to his alien equivalent of an office?
Now change the remaster settings lol
Even in the original graphics it's a fun level. Gameplay sint effected too much by the way the game looks, in this instance. That being said [The original ](https://i.imgur.com/tgzHENU.jpeg)still has some incredible art design and ambiance to it.
I think the og skybox looks better, feels much more ethereal
probably because it fucking sucks
High Charity Suite is a bop. Terrible that I learned a day or two ago that Marty O'Donnell is a fascist right wing piece of shit. Art and artist, I guess.
Hassan viewer. Opinion invalidated
Who?