While Halo 2’s official ending was one that was met with controversy when it originally happened over 10 years ago, now we have word of how the game was originally supposed to end.
Former Bungie composer Marty O’Donnell recently spoke with IGN where he talked about several things, but most notably the Halo 2 ending. He revealed that “Basically you were supposed to go back to Earth City, find the Ark and at that point, that was the Ark that opened up – remember the thing coming down? That was where the Ark was, it wasn’t some other place. That thing on the earth had been where the Ark had been buried by the Covenant.”
“The Prophet of Truth had come back to there and the ending was you and the Dervish (who would be renamed the Arbiter) chasing the Prophet of Truth through the Ark and having a grand and glorious conclusion on earth, finishing the fight right there on earth.”
O’Donnell concludes by saying that “Of course the line ‘finish the fight’ came in later when we had to rewrite everything and do a cliffhanger, which was, by the way, so painful for me and everyone at Bungie to throw that all out.”
Halo 2 originally launched for the Xbox in 2004, before getting the remaster treatment as part of Halo: The Master Chief Collection in 2014 on Xbox One.
