This is something I’ve had to think a lot about but have not been able to reach a conclusion to satisfy myself. While Halo 5’s Beta looked great and I think people shouldn’t have complained about the lighting ( -_- eye roll, seriously, giving power to people who complain for the sake of complaining will never work) it still isn’t any Star Wars Battlefront. While yes, so much of Legacy has been revamped and coded and re-coded, but something obviously isn’t working somewhere. We can all tell for one reason or another that Halo 5 was rebuilt a few times and this may have resulted in many of the reasons for a less than stellar performance in appearance but there’s two factors here that make me perhaps lean more towards thinking good old Legacy may be out of its depth in 2016 and beyond.
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Legacy was built (or rebuilt) primary on and for the 360. While Halos CE and 2 were on the Original Xbox those core engine builds I believe (I know for H2) were ported over to the 360 for Halo 3. Then for Reach and H4 the engine was reworked to give them better looks - on the 360. Now the engine has been reworked again for Halo 5 but it definitely doesn’t look comparatively equal to what Halo 3 did on the 360. People will talk about how great Crysis looked in 2007, but in the same year Halo 3 I believe looked just as good and often better because of its large variety of colors in the Covenant, Forerunners, and Flood. - Halo only has to be built on one platform and it still isn’t the best looking on the One. Star Wars Battlefront, what I believe to be the best looking game on consoles currently, was on all three current-gen platforms and looks incredible on all of them, not to mention how Battlefield 1 looks. This kicks the argument of “Teh Xbox es not powrfl enof.” It isn’t the most powerful but it isn’t incapable. 343 is only required to build Halo on the Xbox but it’s not pushing the limits is one plausible answer. But either way constantly having to work with an older engine that was optimized for more than a decade old console can really hold a development team back. This could result in time spent in maintenance instead of working on the game itself.Now the contrast of these points.
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Rebuilding the game mid development due to change in direction would result in not having time to detail things to the extent they could have been. - 343’s environment choices aren’t well chosen. Everything, especially in Halo 4 and on Genesis, has a pastel off look and lacked vibrancy, looking like someone turned the saturation down on a photo for the majority of the time. Making things look less like they’re some kind of cartoon animation and more realistic by adding deeper colors would help a lot.With EA and Microsoft being on such good terms lately, it’s starting to look more and more attractive from my perspective to purchase the rights to Frostbite for the use for all Microsoft games; but I can’t settle on that and it leaves me oddly uncomfortable especially for someone who would like to see some change in Halo. What does everyone else think? Is it poor choice in art or is the general blah look in the current Halos systemic of the engine?