Cortana Restored

(Art courtesy of: @VNanon_ on X)

Description

Much of Halo CE's identity for me, as I'm sure for many of you is in its music, dialogue, and soundscape. One thing about Campaign Evolved that I haven't been able to get over is how jarring the re-recorded lines for Cortana are for me. Not that some of the lines are necessarily bad, I just prefer the originals. So with this mod I went ahead and almost 1:1 replaced all of the re-recorded lines with their Combat Evolved originals (subtitles included), and completely removed the "tutorial" lines. Excluding cutscenes (for now).

  The die-hards among us might notice out of place lines, missing lines, or pacing issues- there's nothing I can change at the moment, those are baked in changes made by Halo Studios. I’d like to restore the original dialogue pacing and triggers as closely as possible to Combat Evolved, but more research is needed. I'd have to see if Baboon or other tools are powerful enough to make those corrections. Stay tuned.

v1. 3 introduces an optional file for those whole want to keep the new Campaign Evolved Cortana VO lines, while removing the "tutorial" lines. You do not need this file if you are using the main file. Pick either the main file or the misc. file. Do not install both together.

I'm looking to keep this mod updated, so please provide feedback on bugs or quirks. The restored VO lines are currently only for the English localization.

Installation instructions

Drag and drop the ~mods folder into the "Paks" folder located at "... Halo Campaign Evolved\Meteorite\Content\Paks"

Main features

Replaces all of the re-done Cortana lines in Campaign Evolved with their Combat Evolved counterparts.

Requirements

none

Credits

Description Art

VNanon - the absolute goat of Halo Art

Original game and audio

Halo: Combat Evolved and Halo: Campaign Evolved © Microsoft / Xbox Game Studios.

Halo: Combat Evolved originally developed by Bungie.

Halo: Campaign Evolved developed by Halo Studios.

Original Cortana performance by Jen Taylor.

repak — Unreal Engine PAK extraction and packaging.

wwiser — Wwise bank analysis and HIRC parsing.

vgmstream — WEM and MCC FSB audio decoding.

Baboon by Zoephie & Camden — Campaign Evolved tag extraction and JSON export.

faster-whisper — automated dialogue transcription.

Audiokinetic — Wwise Vorbis media encoding.

Python — cataloging, matching, loudness normalization, bank patching, and build automation.

Special thanks

WaWax007- the creator of Halo Campaign Evolved "VF ORIGINALE 2001" for demonstrating that restoring the original localized performances was possible and for inspiring this workflow. No files or manifests from that mod were reused.

OpenAI Codex — assistance developing the extraction, matching, validation, Wwise-bank patching, and packaging pipeline.