I don’t know about you but I’m concerned about halo 4 graphically.
There seems to be a drop in polygons. If you look at most of the objects, you can defiantly see edges that are disguised by textured scratch marks or have a subsurface bump maps to make objects look like they are made out of different materials or have a emulated curve finish.
All these are common techniques that are use to hid a polygon drop/shortage.
Personally I think 343 spent too much time improving the lighting and not spending enough time on increasing the amount of polygons there engine and the 360 can handle. While halo looks good (almost next gen) it seems the xbox hardware is letting the game developers down.
And it also seems that 343 are skimping on the sound, From what I’ve heard from trailers and game play the audio:
will not make me pick up every weapon regardless of the situation (one of 343 aims)
weapons sound synthetic and the sound produced is not loud enough to be gun fire sound.
^ probably due to the storage space on a DVD.
Finally the quality of partial effects seems to have doped as well. When I see a grande go off in halo 3 it seems that there are more partials dancing around on screen at once than in what I’ve seen in halo 4 videos.
I personally hadn’t noticed these things. I think it looks awesome so far. It’s important to keep in mind that it IS still a work in progress. I will judge it when I am playing the final product.
Yes but a build very close to the final product. Ie the only thing 343 will fixing is the glitches not graphics. (is part of the campaign about 1/3 into story line)
Partials don’t take very long to create 10 min and your done and ready to make them a global object ready to be called at run time any pint in game.
but I’m only making opinions on what I’m seeing now however I will make my final mind up once I’m playing the game.
I seem to remember them stating that at this stage there is still graphical polishing to be done, as well as bug fixing. I fully expect the game to look prettier when it is finished. It’s close to finished, but not quite there yet, and I’m pretty sure that includes the visuals.
It’s kind of hard to judge a game demoed at E3 and is slated for a holiday release. Mainly because the demo’s showed at E3 are almost always several months old- older builds tend to be more stable in terms of bugs and other things like that. So what we saw at E3 was probably how the game was at January/February.
Uhm… more scratches and dings means more poly-count. If you want more detail embedded onto the armor, you need more polygons to hold it all. Also, it was beta and E3. If you expect the best quality to be viewed there, then you shouldn’t attend.
> And it also seems that 343 are skimping on the sound, From what I’ve heard from trailers and game play the audio:
> - will not make me pick up every weapon regardless of the situation (one of 343 aims)
> - weapons sound synthetic and the sound produced is not loud enough to be gun fire sound.
And yet, for the first time, they recorded the sounds of real guns being fired for use in Halo 4. In my opinion, It’s just because we’re so used to the normal, generated sounds that Halo weapons usually make, we think that the real guns sound weird.
343i has a limited amount of processing power to work with. They are distributing the performance differently than Bungie did. Bungie used lots of time to do detailed surfaces and effects at the cost of lightning. Personally, I liked the fact that, in Reach, close to a wall I didn’t need to look at ugly low-resolution textures. They also had superb particle effects Bungie made.
343i are clearly putting more attention to lightning than Bungie did. I don’t think that’s really a bad solution either. Lightning often gives the game a more realistic feel and is a really good tool to make the graphics seem believeable from far away. However, due to the low powered console they have to work with, they can’t concentrate at close-up and far-away graphics at the same time, neither could Bungie. 343i are simply choosing the far-away solution.
We have to wait until next gen until we get rid of low-resolution textures, low-polygon surface, mediocre anti-aliasing, baked lightning and all that stuff that makes current generation games look bad. Until then, you can either complain, stop complaining, or move to PC gaming.
