This topic may be a little different from the usual gameplay threads here, but surely I can’t be the only person who wants to see the true power of Halo running on the Xbox One? Also, this is my first post in months, so forgive me for any mistakes I may make. 
While the reception to Halo 4’s gameplay elements varied widely throughout the community, there was no denying that the tech behind Halo 4 was extremely impressive. The lighting was superb, animations were smooth and fluid, particle effects were gorgeous, model detail excellent, and the addition of FXAA was just the icing on the cake.
However, I do not feel that simply porting the engine over to Xbox One architecture would be enough. I truly hope that you guys have been making leaps and bounds with engine features and ability with the new hardware, and I am certain that you guys will floor the audience at E3 with (hopefully) an official gameplay reveal!
Below are just a few features I’d like to see with a revamped engine:
- Full scene/real-time dynamic reflections (see Unreal Engine 4).
- MAJOR increase in amount of particles on screen (also see UE4).
- 2K+ texture resolution.
- DirectX 12 integration. To me, this is an absolute must. What better game to show off the full power of DX12 than Halo on Xbox One?
- 1080p native resolution. Kinda beating a dead horse here, and I guess if other aspects of the engine were vastly improved, at least 900p would be tolerable, certainly didn’t make Ryse look bad by any means.
- Really vast draw distances. Halo has always had some stunning vistas throughout the campaign and multiplayer levels, but with new hardware, I feel that you guys could truly pull of some insane views.
I have many more, but I prefer to keep this as condensed as possible. Anybody else here really interested in what the newer hardware will enable to do besides 60FPS and dedicated servers?
Didn’t Halo 4 only have 720p textures? I dont think they’re gonna get 2k EDIT: texture res is different to native, my bad, we can def get 2k textures, these consoles can even get 4096x4096 textures. As for native 1080p, look at 900p 30FPS linear Ryse, or 1080p 60FPS Forza 5 which took a big hit in graphics since it’s E3 showing. Sure, 343i will release 2 years after these games, but I don’t think we’ll see 1080p 60fps. I’ll be amazed if we get 60FPS 900p. But I agree with the rest, I think native resolution should take a hit for better effects, improved lighting and shadows, and 2XMSAA over the FXAA solution used in Halo 4.
Lighting/Shadows obviously but the big thing for me is Shaders
I feel like that is something when compared to other games is something halo lacks big time. Usually with halo either something is shiny or it’s not.
There are no shaders for guns to make them look metallic or some form of plastic (whatever they use to make their weapons out of), there are no shaders that add that extra detail to environments to make them feel real, and there is no subsurface scatter which causes everything to look shiny especially characters which made them look odd in campaign.
The last one understandably wasn’t possible on the X360 but the others were. I don’t want to see graphics as a whole look like plastic, pastel, or cardboard.
I think 1080p is out of the question for this Halo if it is indeed 60FPS. Graphics would take a major hit since 1080p would be taking up huge amounts of memory/bandwidth which would leave things like high quality motion-blur & depth of field, ambient occlusion (which Halo 4 didn’t have btw.), no screen tear, stable frame-rate, even draw distances out of the picture. 900p or maybe a bit lower would be the sweet spot if they want consistent 60FPS, no screen tear, and enough memory/bandwidth for other technical jazz.
While 2xMSAA does retain crisp image-quality, the memory constraints may be a bit too high for 343 to implement. Post-process AA is the way to go this generation. Post-process AA only looked a bit washed out last generation because some developers were implementing it while rendering at sub-720p resolutions. This generation we’re seeing resolutions as high as 1080p. Infamous: Second Son and Ryse: Son of Rome both use some form of SMAA which provides great image quality while eliminating most, if not all jaggies. Digital Foundry states that Second Son’s use of SMAA is the best implementation they’ve ever seen.
- Deferred Shading or a hybrid approach to support more dynamic lights. Reach looked a lot better in the dynamic lighting department due to its hybrid approach of deferred rendering + forward rendering. Halo 4 I believe was strictly forward rendering. Forward rendering also allowed Halo 4 to be native 720p as oppose to the sub-HD resolutions of past Halos.
- Some form of SSAO or HBAO. Halo 4 had no ambient occlusion (maybe the sacrifice to achieve native 720p). Halo 4 could have highly benefited from a use of AO to have more depth in their environments. http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-vs-halo-4
- Stable, consistent 60FPS. 343 did a good job on the frame-rate side of Halo 4 which remained at an almost consistent 30FPS. So I’m not worried here.
- No screen-tear. I mean, who wants that? Really? Halo 4 had screen-tear but 343 had it where it was only at the top of the screen so it was basically unnoticeable to the human eye.
- A good use of anti-aliasing. SMAA would be a good choice but I wouldn’t be surprised if 343 went with FXAA again for memory/bandwidth reasons.
- High quality motion-blur & bokeh depth-of-field.
- Particle effects. Infamous: Second Son was just… WOW. Reach and H4 were also pretty good.
- Dynamic shadows. It bugged me in some Halo games where I run past a shadow from like a tree or something and it barely affects my gun. Halo CE: Anniversary did a GREAT job with shadows. So has games like Battlefield 4 and Killzone.
etc, etc, etc… Don’t disappoint 343. We’re counting on you. 
Did you guys see the cloud demo today, stable 30 fps with destruction all around the map. Now Halo doesn’t and shouldn’t have battlefield type of destruction, maybe just a tiny bit of destruction to make it a little realistic like maybe a couple small holes in the walls from rockets but nothing that ruins map flow. They can instead of using all this cloud power for destruction, they can use it for lighting and shaders and all types of other graphical effects, because battlefield type destruction is one of the most taxing things on the engine. Once DX12 comes Halo 5 should be able to achieve 1080p and 60 fps and still have loads of detail, hopefully even more than The Division, which seems impossible, but Halo is a first party game and first party games are typically able to achieve more than 3rd party games.