2. When the 360 came out, I can't remember if anything was lost with backwards compatibility for Halo & Halo 2....was there? I know the MCC and Halo CE Anniversary editions used the PC version of Halo and some things were lost as a result like effects and textures. I don't recall the same thing happening with the jump from OG Xbox to 360, but maybe I'm forgetting? I feel like if you had the discs and a 360, you got the original experience still.

Off the top of my head, the audio filter used for radio transmission VO stopped working, but I actually liked how clear the VO became because of it.

OG Xbox Audio

360 Audio

As for your queries about Destiny servers shutting down, I'll be kinda sad, mostly for the loss of VoG and the other raids. I actually spent a little bit of time trying to recreate the mechanics of the Templar Oracle encounter in Unreal a few years ago, but only got as far as having the oracles waves pop up in their specific sequences (and it's not as thrilling with no enemy AI to shoot).

I would absolutely put down money for your hypothetical offline Destiny game, just for posterity.

2. (Cody question) When the 360 came out, I can't remember if anything was lost with backwards compatibility for Halo & Halo 2....was there?

Just a decent framerate. Some chugging in single player but it’s borderline unplayable on coop.

I think graphically everything was fine, but I remember there being minor audio issues.

2. (Cody question) When the 360 came out, I can't remember if anything was lost with backwards compatibility for Halo & Halo 2....was there?

There were a variety of little quirks.
And one extremely extremely annoying quirk with Halo 2 specifically: sometimes a "ghost image" of sorts would get caught up in the rendering pipeline, and act a bit like a stationary transparent image over your screen unless you quit out and restarted things.
There was also an issue specifically with Backwash, where the framerate would be obliterated on 360 whenever a cloaked player fired a weapon. That's part of why the map got pulled from the matchmaking rotation.

People sometimes claim that the emulation increased the rendering resolution, but this is false. Image quality was changed by the addition of MSAA, but the base resolution was still 640x480.
This is very easy to confirm via pixel-counting in areas where edges are defined by straight lines in textures, like the floor grating at the start of Halo 2:

I know the MCC and Halo CE Anniversary editions used the PC version of Halo and some things were lost as a result like effects and textures.

The biggest-ticket items for me are the broken atmospheric effects, and a variety of missing or modified aspects of the lighting. Although the patches in 2021 largely fixed these in the MCC version.

I don't recall the same thing happening with the jump from OG Xbox to 360, but maybe I'm forgetting? I feel like if you had the discs and a 360, you got the original experience still.

The 360 emulation is far, far closer to the original game than the 2003 Gearbox port (and original version of CEA's "classic" graphics).

Although, both are missing CE's animated fog effects.

Does anyone other than me remember how halo 2 early-batch OG Xboxes? I don’t think there was a fix, and I ended up buying a new

3. Enter Destiny & Destiny 2: these games are live service. When Bungie says 'no more' and shuts em down, that's it. They won't be the first games to go through that and won't be the last. So, let's say 10 years from now you're feeling nostalgic and want to play Destiny\2, you have the disc and whatever data is on your hard drive but the game never loads because the servers are gone. How does that make you feel today, after 10 years with the game?

For some reason I was looking at my Playstation Profile page the other night, and the cover photo was a screenshot I took ages ago during an Eater of Worlds raid and it really bummed me out. That raid was freaking fun.