The time has come. In celebration of Halo 2’s twentieth birthday, the Digsite modding crew has released their latest content drop which includes two cut missions from the 2004 game.
Let’s dive into what’s available on the Steam Workshop for Halo: The Master Chief Collection on PC today!
E3 2003 "Earth City"
“Bet ya can’t stick it.”
At E3 in 2003, over twenty-one years ago now, a gameplay demo of Halo 2 was shown for the first time to the world.
The city of New Mombasa on Earth is under attack by the Covenant and the Master Chief is flown in to join the fight alongside Marines and ODSTs with a new arsenal (namely a single-shot battle rifle and dual-wieldable SMGs), new vehicles, new enemies, and a whole new look.
Alas, this mission was never part of Halo 2‘s retail release.
During the 2024 Halo World Championship, we replayed this demo on an original Xbox devkit before announcing that the intrepid Digsite crew have been finishing up work on rebuilding this demo as a playable level. The fruits of their labor are now available to everybody with MCC on PC.
Massive improvements have been made to the visual quality and overall stability of this experience, as the original demo required the player to hit specific individual triggers in order to ensure it did not break. Players will see that nav markers help to guide them through each beat of this mission from the moment they step off the Pelican all the way up to boarding the Ghost and escaping into the highway tunnel at the end.
We will be sharing more behind the scenes information about the E3 2003 demo and other recovered content in a future Digsite blog. But for now, after more than two decades, the Halo 2 E3 2003 demo is yours to experience!
Alpha Moon
“Assault the occupied control room and find the oracle.”
In Halo 2, we played not just as the Master Chief, but as the Arbiter as well—the Sangheili who led the Covenant fleet at Alpha Halo and has been punished by the Prophets for his failure to protect the ring. Given a final chance to redeem himself by taking on the role of Arbiter and sent to the gas mine known as Threshold that the ruins of Alpha Halo orbit, his mission is to assassinate a leader of heretics known as Sesa ‘Refumee.
As those who have played the game know, the Arbiter ultimately tracks ‘Refumee to the gas mine’s hangar bay where a boss fight ensues against him and two holographic decoys, whereupon the Covenant successfully recover 343 Guilty Spark—the monitor of Alpha Halo who survived its destruction.
Originally, things were a little different.
‘Refumee would have escaped the gas mine and the Arbiter would have pursued him to Basis, one of the moons of Threshold. Fighting through heretic forces on the surface of the moon amidst the shattered remains of the Halo ring, the Arbiter’s final showdown with ‘Refumee would’ve taken place in the ruins of the control room.
This mission has been rebuilt from existing tags and is now playable. Note, however, that the showdown with ‘Refumee was only finished to a blockout stage and is not included in this reconstruction. The last meeting notes for this mission are dated August 2003 and the mission appears to have been cut shortly thereafter, as references to it are scrubbed by February 2004.
The main issues that led to Alpha Moon’s removal were problems with lightmapping (difficult to solve even with modern hardware), lack of environmental variation, and negative playtester feedback on the encounters. As this mission was still in heavy revision when it was cut you may encounter glitches and bugs!
Additionally, the audio for Alpha Moon was all placeholder recordings. It was ultimately decided that the Digsite team would re-record the dialog to match the last script revision we had—we even used the same audio processing chains that Bungie did to replicate the Elite voices.
How Do I Play?
To install and play these experiences, you need follow only three simple steps!
STEP 1 – Head to the Steam Workshop page and subscribe to the mod.
STEP 2 – Boot up MCC on PC with Anti-Cheat disabled (this can be selected on start-up).
STEP 3 – Enter the campaign menu for Halo 2 and load up the level you want to play.
That’s all it takes! And if you want to mix up your experience a bit, you can enable Skulls in the campaign menu as well for both of these levels.
With all that said, go forth and celebrate Halo 2’s twentieth birthday by jumping into MCC and loading up these incredible new (old) levels that have been so faithfully restored and recreated by the Digsite crew.
Earth City awaits!