Microsoft hit a home run with the release of Halo: Anniversary Edition a few years back; which saw a next-gen update of the classic shooter. Now, with rumors floating that Halo 2 may be in for the same treatment, Microsoft’s Phil Spencer throws more gas on the fire.
While not acknowledging the game’s existence (with its current development status still unknown), Spencer did point to the huge importance of the game’s online component as the corner stone of a new revision. “In this fictitious world where that game existed, it’s an easy answer: it has to be just the multiplayer experience that we all found in that first Halo 2 game…All the things that you and I know about the evolution of the franchise, if you’re going to say one thing about Halo 2 , you’re going to talk about real multiplayer. I think you just have to nail that in just such a fundamentally core way.” He feels.
While the Xbox One would naturally have no problem juggling both a revamped look as well as the updated online elements, Spencer compares Halo 2 to the original in a different way. He points out that even though Halo: Anniversary Edition shipped with a multiplayer component, the original (from the early 2000’s) never had such a feature. With Halo 2 , the bar would need to be set a lot higher. “Frankly we’d have to do it probably better than we did with Halo 1 Anniversary … I thought the multiplayer in Halo 1 Anniversary was good, but Halo 1 never had multiplayer in the truest sense, so it always was going to be something different….If there were something called Halo 2 Anniversary , I think the multiplayer would have to be fantastic.”
Again, it’s important to underscore that the game HAS NOT been confirmed; so this could be nothing more than speculation (but I’m certainly keeping my fingers crossed).