> hmm this reminds me halo 4 won best graphics of 2012 and black ops 2 was 2nd but if you go up close to textures in each game you will notice black ops 2 has the exact same pixelation as in halo 4 the game isnt meant for going up to walls and staring at textures same with any other game
Except for the fact that I could do that in Halo: Reach and even Halo: Combat Evolved Anniversary, and it looked fine. I did it quite frequently, in fact.
> > Are you drunk? Or are you playing on a Low res T.V.?
> >
> > These graphics are the best of the entire series…
>
> No, and I play on a 50" w/HDMI.
>
> They’re the best in the cut scenes and large scale environment. Seriously, go say hello to a dead grunt and see how muddy it is.
Or most of the skyboxes, which are sprites in Halo 4 as opposed to carefully-constructed, lively images in Halo: Reach. Or the background environments, which are literally super-pixelated sprite images that become excessively grainy when you zoom on them, as compared to Halo: Reach’s carefully-constructed, lively background actual-geometry environments that didn’t pixelate when you zoomed in and looked like a natural part of the environment. Or those little white rocks on “Reclaimer” that look much more grainy than they did on “The Ark” in Halo 3. Or just look down at your Spartan’s legs and see a bunch of muddy, grainy textures, as opposed to how detailed and real the legs looked in Halo: Reach. Or the water physics, which just barely respond to your touch, compared to how lively they were on “Sierra-117” and “Valhalla” in Halo 3. Or the flora on “Infinity” and “Reclaimer”, which is completely static and fake-looking, compared to the leaves that responded to your touch in Halo 3.
Don’t mind me. I’m just giving out more examples that illustrate how Halo 4 looks prettier at a glance, but is completely trumped by less recent Halo games in almost every conceivable way when it comes to actual detail.
OP I realize you have your opinion but graphics don’t matter, even though they have been improved over Reach. You say Reach is better? Go back and play Reach and see the blur effect, screen tearing and pop in.
> OP I realize you have your opinion but graphics don’t matter, even though they have been improved over Reach. You say Reach is better? Go back and play Reach and see the blur effect, screen tearing and pop in.
Go play Halo 4 and see the muddy, grainy textures, weapons disappearing erratically, and sprite backgrounds and skyboxes.
That logic can be applied either way.
> Halo 4 excels at lighting (in most situations, as the original post noted), but textures are mostly horrible and that really makes everything look dated.
Lighting is one of the most resource intensive processes for games, especially when you talk about real time lighting. Wait until we get into luminosity and not pre-baking lighting with next generation. Even next generation resources could all be eaten up by lighting alone.
Relax Halo 4 looks fantastic on the old 360 and games have different development choices about where to spend their limited resources e.g. textures, lighting, AI, models, animation, physics etc.
I’m curious which resources Halo 5 next generation is going focus on more than worrying about the state of graphics for Halo 4 on 7 or 8 year old hardware.
Well I don’t typically play the game to spend 20 minutes starring at somebody’s corpse, but whatever makes you happy.
> > How old is the xbox 360 again ?
>
> Halo: Reach and CEA had better graphics than Halo 4
>
> Your point is exactly? Did you even read this post?
CEA looks really good because it’s a retextured original xbox game with outdated physics, ai, animations, etc… So all that extra juice can be used to run HD textures and the simple dynamic shadows and better lighting.
Reach’s textures and polycount are higher than Halo 4’s because that’s what Reach’s engine was built for. Now in Halo 4 the engine was rebuilt for better lighting, AI, and particle effects and as a result some sacrifices were made towards the polycount and textures.
Lighting on weapons is my main concern. Tbf, they did a damn good job of overall environment design. It just needs the extra detail rendering from Reach. Maybe they had to limit themselves to what the 360 can handle.
I hope they can pull this off when Halo 5 comes to 720.
Yeahhh it makes the guns look really dry and plastic! not a good look.
> Lighting on weapons is my main concern. Tbf, they did a damn good job of overall environment design. It just needs the extra detail rendering from Reach. Maybe they had to limit themselves to what the 360 can handle.
>
> I hope they can pull this off when Halo 5 comes to 720.
Well remember too that Halo Reach was able to get that extra fine-rendering at the expense of other things such as, say, the overall environment. Reach looked fine on the move but stop for a minute to look at anything except your gun or a character model and it really did look like -Yoink-. Distant objects especially. You shouldn’t be able to nearly tell how many polygons a hill has at a glance in this day and age. Missing environment textures weren’t that hard to find either (just look at somewhere other than the main mission objectives and you’ll find something that bleeds the eyes.)
Personally though I really do like Halo 4’s aesthetics. It’s very balanced between weapons, characters, objects, effects, and the environment with only a few spots (outside the Dawn and in the first warthog encounter, come to think of it that’s it) where I can definitely say that more work should have been put in. But for a Halo game especially that’s peanuts.
> Lol what? Someone said that Reach has better graphics? Lol…
>
> Reach had worse framerate problems, that game doesn’t had big battles anyway. I won’t say anything about graphics, everyone with eyes or knoledge knows that Halo 4 blows Reach In everysingle way.
Not really. Graphically, both Halo 4 and Reach I would say are on par, or at least the difference is so minor that it’s impossible to be certain. After all, the Xbox has limited power. Regardless of what you do, you can’t get a lot more power out of it. You can do things more efficiently, but in the end of the day, that 1% of extra performance the previous game didn’t utilize isn’t going to help you much.
In terms of graphics, Halo 4 is different to Reach. It’s impossible to know which game utilizes the hardware more efficiently, and hence impossible to say which has better graphics, at least to us anyway. Both games handle the graphical side differently. I would say they are both about equal in terms of polygon density.
Now, both games take a very different approach in other regards. For example, Halo 4 uses a much more appealing lightning model that, probably, is also more tasking. Reach on the other hand seems to have far higher texture resolution on most objects. Other than those, my untrained eye can’t say about their approaches.
Nonetheless, I’m pretty certain neither game is graphically superior to the other. If you think one looks better, it’s more a matter of the art design, your personal preference, and where you tend to concentrate while looking at things. For example, I think Halo 4 does better job at looking good from a distance, while the sharper textures in Reach look better when standing near objects. I also prefer Reach when it comes to the areas outside the playable area as it seems like Bungie had used more of their resources to make those appealing.
> Xbox 360 has a 2006 hardware, what are you expecting? It doesn’t have any framerate issues in campaign, even with thad dynamic Lighting, AIs on screen and particles, not counting the large maps…
>
> Halo 4 has a better character design, lighting, AIs on screen, particles, bigger battles without a Framerate issues like Reach.
Character design is not a matter of graphics. However, it should be noted that while Reach generally has higher resolution textures, the Halo 4 Grunts seem to win this round against their Reach counterparts. The lightning is definitely better in Halo 4, but I wouldn’t say anything about the amount of onscreen AI, not without any real data to back my claims up.
Particles are another thing I wouldn’t be so certain about. Personally, I think any explosion in Reach is more appealing than its Halo 4 counterpart. Some of the explosions in Halo 4 reminds me of those seen last gen where something, a vehicle, for example, explodes and a bunch of flat, very low resolution objects fly out that represent parts of said vehicle. Still, I’m not going to say either game has better particle effects in lack of any numbers for how much particles both are able to have onscreen. But in terms of artistic quality, the particle effects in Reach are so much more appealing to me.
It seems that Spartan Ops has quite big battles. However, remembering back to Firefight in Reach, I remember having battles that were quite big, coupled with lots of projectiles flying around and particles with no major impact to framerate. But again, that’s just me. In reality, the fact still stands that both games have the same hardware to utilize, and I doubt either is more efficient than the other. Personally, I prefer Reach as regardless of how bland it looked at times, I really appreciated the texture details as well as the explosions.
> Well remember too that Halo Reach was able to get that extra fine-rendering at the expense of other things such as, say, the overall environment. Reach looked fine on the move but stop for a minute to look at anything except your gun or a character model and it really did look like -Yoink!-. Distant objects especially. You shouldn’t be able to nearly tell how many polygons a hill has at a glance in this day and age. Missing environment textures weren’t that hard to find either (just look at somewhere other than the main mission objectives and you’ll find something that bleeds the eyes.)
You have an example? Because as far as I remember, Reach handled environment details much better than Halo 4. I also fail to remember where the game would have had bad quality at distance, aside from obviously when playing splitscreen, of course.
> Explosions
> The most disappointing portion and biggest let down of this potentially fantastic game. Seriously, i get more exited over party poppers.
> I’m not mad, just disappointed.
Explosions? You mean those giant mega block toys breaking apart?
I was dissapointed when playing “Midnight” After the gravity jump I walked back to the edge of the platform to view the sky you could see after the roof opened. Really wanted to zoom in and take in the universe (and hopefully find that last remaining easter egg). Thier is an Earth like planet very close to Requiem and also a large moon.
These look like ours but we cannot zoom in to verify.
Having said that in Spartan Ops I noticed a shimmer around some large protruding rocks in some missions (the one with light bridges is easy to spot them). It’s looks really nice (like looking through a heatwave) but serves no purpose at all in the game.
Less shimer more details please is what I would say.
I thought the campaign mission Forerunner looked incredible.
First mission when we use the Dawn to send a missile to that Covie ship…yeah that explosion was disappointing. Halo 2 exploding Ghosts were better!
> I thought the campaign mission Forerunner looked incredible.
>
> Forerunner
>
> First mission when we use the Dawn to send a missile to that Covie ship…yeah that explosion was disappointing. Halo 2 exploding Ghosts were better!
But look at the weapon, looks like plastic! :C
You can’t be serious… Halo 4 has increadible graphics, well for such an old console. I’m surprised they even got it looking as good as it is.
Agreed OP, the texture graphics for armor and Forerunner structures is really bad, along with the explosions, 343 need to look into that. Apart from these things that OP has mentioned, the game is still very good, the new map packs look amazing.
I agree with the OP, the game looks well at first but when you take a better look it looks pixelated. Reach and CEA didn’t have that problem.
My biggest problem with the game is the horrible low drawing distance and the extremely bad skyboxes. I never get the feeling that I’m fighting in an open space. I always feel that I’m on the holo deck from the war games. Why, because the geometry/structures ends too soon. Remember back in the previous halo’s where you could look outside of the map towards the skybox/edge and still see geometry/structures. I remember back in Halo reach where you could go out of the maps and after a couple of kilometers you would still find geometry/structures. The skyboxes used to be huge.
It is thanks to the lighting engine that the game looks as “good” like it does now.
> Nonetheless, I’m pretty certain neither game is graphically superior to the other. If you think one looks better, it’s more a matter of the art design, your personal preference, and where you tend to concentrate while looking at things. For example, <mark>I think Halo 4 does better job at looking good from a distance,</mark> while the sharper textures in Reach look better when standing near objects. I also prefer Reach when it comes to the areas outside the playable area as it seems like Bungie had used more of their resources to make those appealing.
Halo 4 has a horrible low drawing distance. I would say that things look best at a distance of 2m to 40~50m. Closer and you will see the low res textures and any further and you will suffer from texture pop up.
> Are you drunk? Or are you playing on a Low res T.V.?
>
> These graphics are the best of the entire series…
That’s the same thing i’m thinking. People will try to harp on about everything.
> Halo 4 has a horrible low drawing distance. I would say that things look best at a distance of 2m to 40~50m. Closer and you will see the low res textures and any further and you will suffer from texture pop up.
Yes, that’s a problem. But I meant it in terms of the lightning as, as soon as you get far enough that you can’t notice the low resolution of the textures, the lightning and normal maps do their job very well.
