Its not a gameplay balance complaint or anything, purely a cosmetic one, but was anyone else bummed out by the explosion effects in this game? They just look somewhat lazy. With phantoms and banshees especially, you blow them up and the explosion is actually smaller than the vehicle was. The transition looks super cheap, like instead of seperating into pieces the thing just disappears and 3 tiny chunks of metal just fall to the ground.
SLIGHT SPOILER!
I was playing the campaign mission where you leave the ground vehicle to board a phantom and blow it up for the first time. I destroyed the engine and the alarm goes off, I’m thinking this is gonna be sweet, oh man. I finish off the last few enemies and sail up through a small hatch in the ceiling with my jetpack. I land on the roof of the phantom and begin sprinting full bore down the stretch, then blast off and land to safety on the ground. Awesome, this is going to be epic and cinematic!
Poof. The massive phantom vanishes in a blink. Some blue dust and 3 pieces the size of a banshee magically come falling down and disappear below the cliff. Wow, really?
Halo 3 came out half a decade ago and did this better. Remember the first scarab battle scene? The entire screen got washed out and saturated in brilliant glowing light as the thing went up in a gargantuan blast of flames and sparks, giant chunks of metal parts sailing everywhere. By comparison to that awesome set piece this was super lame.
I feel the same way about the smaller vehicle explosions in multiplayer too, I think 343 just did a poorer job with them than Bungie did with their last couple installments. I do think the visuals in Halo 4 are fantastic for the most part (loving me some smoothed out dynamic shadows), but when a part like the explosion effects looks so subpar it magnifies it against everything else.