I thought the look of the game was excellent, the console is nearly 8 years old and devs seem to be good at squeezing the most out of it for the most part, and as it’s a console there is a limit,
It’s true some games look better than others, but that will always happen.
> > 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.
Ah my bad, agreed the lightning engine does a good job to cover it up.
Don’t you love when people try to seriously argue over subjectivity?
I agree with everything except for the Motion Blur. I hate it. It makes everything just blurry and not crisp and clear. It’s not even realitisc. If I turn my head, nothing around me blurs out, so what’s the purpose of that in Reach? I don’t know why Bungie added such an annoying thing.
Everything else is indeed the truth. Yuu guys just neecounts for some enemies.
The only high res textures are on the rocks and the multiplayer spartan models, lol. 343i also scrapped the epic skyboxes for the lighting effects. Many backgrounds are cheap looking low res 2d arts. Spartan Ops has tons of them and it is not even hard to see. It’s in fact very noticeable. A bit disappointing IMO.
Old hardware or not. Halo Reach pretty much showed that the most things, the OP mentioned, can be done better.
I agree with the first post completely. In some ways this game is actually visually worse than Halo 3. The phantoms look terrible and so do the Scorpion tanks…so low res. Then there are the ghost cockpits which are blank. Warthogs used to have moving dials and readouts. I think SOps especially looks really cartoony. By comparison in Assassins Creed 3 your character can stand outside in the moonlight and the light changes because of clouds overheard moving. The detail in that game is really amazing. By contrast in H4 the foliage looks pixilated and fake.
the pelican on ragnarok is an example where low res texture is used even when relatively close to (standing in the red cave, for example)
Somehow it doesn’t bother me. I’d rather have smooth games even if it means putting up with graphical sacrifices
Your Spartans are even low res. Just use a guest controller, go in customs, and look at the other Spartan. It is nasty looking. Walk up on a box or wall, it looks like blurry mesh. He looks good in Lobby lol. The texture pop ins aren’t enough. To those saying what the 360 can do, look at Far Cry 3…
Halo 4 pulled off lighting, but does not deserve best graphics as some say. Reach easily surpasses Halo 4 in texture. Maybe even Halo 3, because I don’t remember texture eye sores in Campaign or anywhere else.
> Your Spartans are even low res. Just use a guest controller, go in customs, and look at the other Spartan. It is nasty looking. Walk up on a box or wall, it looks like blurry mesh. He looks good in Lobby lol. The texture pop ins aren’t enough. To those saying what the 360 can do, look at Far Cry 3…
>
> Halo 4 pulled off lighting, but does not deserve best graphics as some say. Reach easily surpasses Halo 4 in texture. Maybe even Halo 3, because I don’t remember texture eye sores in Campaign or anywhere else.
Exactly, people need to realize it’s not about how old the console is, as other contempory (and past) games have better graphics than Halo 4.
ON A SINGLE DISC
Halo 4 has won many accolades for its visuals including “best graphics” at the VGAs.
You have “SWAG” in your name. Therefore, your opinion is always invalid.
> > Your Spartans are even low res. Just use a guest controller, go in customs, and look at the other Spartan. It is nasty looking. Walk up on a box or wall, it looks like blurry mesh. He looks good in Lobby lol. The texture pop ins aren’t enough. To those saying what the 360 can do, look at Far Cry 3…
> >
> > Halo 4 pulled off lighting, but does not deserve best graphics as some say. Reach easily surpasses Halo 4 in texture. Maybe even Halo 3, because I don’t remember texture eye sores in Campaign or anywhere else.
>
> Exactly, people need to realize it’s not about how old the console is, as other contempory (and past) games have better graphics than Halo 4.
>
> ON A SINGLE DISC
No, I don’t think any game on Xbox has better graphics than Halo 4, nor do I think that Halo 4 has the best graphics on the console. We’re so far into the console’s life that all games that have enough money put into development can have the level of graphics where it’s impossible to distinguish which game has better graphics.
As a matter of fact, graphical quality is really hard to judge in the first place. It’s not really about the art, as we know that as hardware gets more powerful, graphics get better. It definitely has to do with the processing power. Do “graphics” mean the average amount of operations per pixel per frame? What if certain type of code has the same visual effect with fewer operations and hence has less operations per pixel per frame, does it have worse graphics?
The only time we can see any actual difference in graphics is when it’s really clear, when every single aspect of a certain game is visibly of higher fidelity than in the other game. However, when it comes to any AAA title released during this decade, it’s impossible to tell which game has better graphics.
Far Cry on the 360, for example, has some things it does better than other games, and some things it does worse. On one hand, the foliage is very impressive. On the other hand, the texture resolution is low in most cases, and especially the foliage seems to have very low resolution textures. On the other hand, the foliage is only rendered to a very short distance, and at a distance, the LOD makes all trees to identical, flat, 2D textures.
With hardware with fixed power, it’s always a matter of tradeoffs, putting the detail where the player is most likely to see it while sacrificing somewhere else. Games do it differently, and what it ultimately comes down to is what the player’s attention is drawn to, and that’s not the same for everyone. On top of that, it also comes down to the artists’ abilities to make beautiful assets that utilize the given resources as well as possible. But on fixed hardware, towards the end of its lifetime, it never, ever comes down to differences in graphical quality.
So, in the end of the day, it’s all about how old the console is. If you are given an arbitrary amount of operations per second/frame or instructions/operations per cycle, you can’t make that amount bigger, nor can you run your code at vastly higher effiency than your competition. In which case making the game look better only comes down to the skill of your artists and your ability to hide the tradeoffs, but certainly not better graphics.
I don’t miss motion blur one bit.