Microsoft: Halo 2: Anniversary Campaign Not Quite 1080p

The Big M has confirmed that Halo 2: Anniversary's campaign will not have a native 1080p resolution.

Eurogamer reports that, because of Halo 2: Anniversary's ability to switch between the original Xbox engine and the Xbox One Anniversary engine on the fly, the game will output at 60 frames per second at a 1328x1080 resolution. 343 Industries claims that every other game in Halo: The Master Chief Collection will run at 60 frames per second and a display of 1920x1080.

Dan Ayoub, 343 Industries' executive producer, told IGN the following:

During development we were really pleased with the way the engine and buffer allowed us to switch instantly between classic and Anniversary engines that are running simultaneously - however that, as you might expect, put a hit on resolution. The campaign of Halo 2: Anniversary looked fantastic at 720p with the level of detail and clarity it gave us, but like every other aspect of the game and tech, we wanted to push it further. So in the last weeks of development, our teams were able to meet a stretch goal and the campaign of Halo 2: Anniversary now runs 60fps at a crisp resolution of 1328x1080, which is a significant and meaningful boost in image quality we think fans are really going to appreciate.

The reason for Halo 2's campaign having this smaller resolution is because the game's campaign must continuously run both the Xbox One and original Xbox versions of the game at the same time in order to let players switch between the two engines at the press of a button. 343 Industries claims that if it wasn't for running the original engine ssimultaneously with the new one, Halo 2 Anniversary would have a 1920x1080 display. Unfortunately, the studio claims that Microsoft was adamant in keeping the engine-switching feature always activated instead of having a way to turn it off via the main menu or pause menu's options.

Halo: The Master Chief Collection will launch on Nov. 11 for Xbox One.