Remember when we first played the Halo 3 Beta, and everyone was just checking out the water? It was awesome. If you drove a vehicle into a river, the water would flow around it. Same with walking your character into it. Grenades would cause a huge explosion of water everywhere.
In Halo 4 … it looks like a placeholder. Throwing a grenade into water creates the same explosion as it would on land. Just watch this Youtube video below or play Halo 3. Then play Halo 4. What gives?
It doesn’t look as good as 3, but it looks a lot better than Reach’s one!
I noticed this to, take a look at the waterfall on Ragnarok, the only thing that makes you believe its water is because of the sound.
It looks this way on MP maps to save processing power.
Play the 2nd level of campaign and play around with the puddles after you get the Warthog, they’re beautiful.
I noticed this also. Its become just… a visual.
Same on the er… big forge map with the swampy green lake thing under it XD
you can drop a tank into it, and no splash
Theres a reason Halo 3 looked terrible.
It had, and probably still does have, the best water and lighting effects on the xbox. Maybe even console.
Unfortunately because of this, it couldn’t do much else and ended up being a graphically sub-par game with an amazing art style and glorious water and lighting effects. 'dat HDR.
> It looks this way on MP maps to save processing power.
>
> Play the 2nd level of campaign and play around with the puddles after you get the Warthog, they’re beautiful.
I’ll try that out, but it just seems a little distracting as it was one of my favorite things in Halo.
Yeah sadly small details like the water had to be sacrificed to save on performance. You’re playing a game on hardware from 2005 after all, it does have it’s limits.
> Theres a reason Halo 3 looked terrible.
spit-take
Say WHAT?! We talking about the same game here?
> Theres a reason Halo 3 looked terrible.
I don’t think it looked terrible, the visual fidelity was fine for 2007 and if you play through it now it still holds up reasonably well to other console games. Now if you compare it to PC games at ultra-high settings in 2012, of course it looks bad.
Maybe Microsoft should release an “expansion pack” like Nintendo did with the Nintendo 64 so we can have the water we want. /joke
yeah halo 3’s water effects are still my favorite.
> I noticed this also. Its become just… a visual.
>
> Same on the er… big forge map with the swampy green lake thing under it XD
>
> you can drop a tank into it, and no splash
To be honest, you can’t go very far into the water before you hit an instant kill barrier ;/
To get all the fancy lightning, character models and other things Halo desperately needed in the graphics department for years, the textures and apparently, the water took a hit. It’s to be expected on such ancient tech.
Some forget that unlike the much superior PCs, you can’t upgrade consoles and thus get stronger looking games. Halo 4 built for the PC would be -Yoinking!- mind blowing with no limitations.
> > Theres a reason Halo 3 looked terrible.
>
> I don’t think it looked terrible, the visual fidelity was fine for 2007 and if you play through it now it still holds up reasonably well to other console games. Now if you compare it to PC games at ultra-high settings in 2012, of course it looks bad.
>
> Maybe Microsoft should release an “expansion pack” like Nintendo did with the Nintendo 64 so we can have the water we want. /joke
Are we talking about the same Halo 3? The water and HDR were really the only things that looked good.
Mass Effect, Bioshock, and Gears of War all looked better than Halo 4.
And that is not even including all the PC games that came out around or before that looked better.
Halo 3 looked nice, but by no means was it groudbreaking in the graphics department.