So I’m in the insider flight and tried out the test last night. I’m running a Ryzen 5900x, RTX 3090 Kingpin, both on their own 360mm radiators, CL14 3800MHz RAM and the game is running on an NVMe gen 4 SSD. Have the game running at max everything and it looks… well… unfinished to say the least. To say the worst is it looks hideous. People complained at the reveal because it seemed 343 Studios had a pedestrian understanding of global illumination and dynamic lighting and they delayed the game to fix those complaints but here in this build it is clear none of those fixes happened. When objects are rendered in the shadow of something larger (something in the shadow of direct sunlight) said object renders no shadows resulting in flat muddy textures and items that appear to float above the ground and have no depth. I’m ignoring the obvious subpar textures and poor AA implementation for a moment and just talking about shadows. What the heck happened 343? Is this really the best you guys can do? Did Microsoft pull all your funding or did all your senior designers leave early in the project? I haven’t seen a AAA game that looks this poor in a long long time. Here is a screenshot at max everything for reference: https://i.imgur.com/ROnl9Wd.jpg
Surely you all see what is wrong with this picture too right? My God, the game is out in like 3 months! It was a simple fix! This is a generic problem every developer runs into by using dynamic ToD lighting. You just either edge light your player model or I dunno… go through the game and put in static lights in each covered/indoor area in the game. Yes it is work, but it should have easily been doable in the last YEAR.
> 2659268351409432;1:
> So I’m in the insider flight and tried out the test last night. I’m running a 5900x, 3090 Kingpin, both on their on 360mm radiators, CL14 3800MHz RAM and the game is running on an NVMe gen 4 SSD. Have the game running at max everything and it looks… well… unfinished to say the least. To say the worst is it looks hideous. People complained at the reveal because it seemed 343 Studios had a pedestrian understanding of global illumination and dynamic lighting and they delayed the game to fix those complaints but here in this build it is clear none of those fixes happened. When objects are rendered in the shadow of something larger (something in the shadow of direct sunlight) said object renders no shadows resulting in flat muddy textures and items that appear to float above the ground and have no depth. I’m ignoring the obvious subpar textures and poor AA implementation for a moment and just talking about shadows. What the heck happened 343? Is this really the best you guys can do? Did Microsoft pull all your funding or did all your senior designers leave early in the project? I haven’t seen a AAA game that looks this poor in a long long time. Here is a screenshot at max everything for reference: https://i.imgur.com/ROnl9Wd.jpg
>
> Surely you all see what is wrong with this picture too right? My God, the game is out in like 3 months! It was a simple fix! This is a generic problem every developer runs into by using dynamic ToD lighting. You just either edge light your player model or I dunno… go through the game and put in static lights in each covered/indoor area in the game. Yes it is work, but it should have easily been doable in the last YEAR.
This is an older build though, they openly said that this tech preview isn’t as complete and polished as the current release build.
> This is an older build though, they openly said that this tech preview isn’t as complete and polished as the current release build.
Look they’ve been saying this for well over a year now and I’m not buying it. They said the other day on stream this build is only 2 months old. We’re well within art-lock feature-lock for game development at this point. This is how the game will look and it is disheartening. Don’t make excuses for a triple-A developer. Hold them to their promises.
The game is literally not done. As far as I know, the point of fighting is to give 343 feedback on the game before they release the full version. If there’s a problem that you notice with the game, submit a ticket so that the problem is covered better.
> 2659268351409432;3:
> > This is an older build though, they openly said that this tech preview isn’t as complete and polished as the current release build.
>
> Look they’ve been saying this for well over a year now and I’m not buying it. They said the other day on stream this build is only 2 months old. We’re well within art-lock feature-lock for game development at this point. This is how the game will look and it is disheartening. Don’t make excuses for a triple-A developer. Hold them to their promises.
What promises though.
It’s literally one of several small flights. Its also a “technical preview” - I’m not sure what you could hope to find here that wouldnt be infinitely (pun intended) better in the final product anyway. List your issues in the official feedback forums and make your observations but lets not pretend they made any promises about what is one of many tech tests and builds.
If this was the final game I’d understand but its not and internal testing only gets you so far.
Usually graphics are a different team and stuff like that is implemented near the end; typically games focus fundamentals / tech > graphics during the development period and testing cycles like this. So they will use a less graphically intensive build (smaller in size, less performance hit) so they can narrow in on technical only.
This ISN’T an Alpha or a Beta. This is a technical build to test technical capabilities and they are giving us the privilege’s to help test the technical aspects on a large scale.
> 2533274817345506;6:
> Usually graphics are a different team and stuff like that is implemented near the end; typically games focus fundamentals / tech > graphics during the development period and testing cycles like this. So they will use a less graphically intensive build (smaller in size, less performance hit) so they can narrow in on technical only.
>
> This ISN’T an Alpha or a Beta. This is a technical build to test technical capabilities and they are giving us the privilege’s to help test the technical aspects on a large scale.
Not at all. I’m a software developer by profession and worked at EA for 5 years before transitioning into government work. Alpha means art is locked and the game is feature complete. You declare beta when all systems and flow is fully set in stone. No changes occur from then on. This is essentially what we will see at launch. The only thing they might do is turn on Raytracing which would fix the occluded object texture/shadow issue if it was implemented right. But based on how poorly they seem to understand dynamic lighting I’m not hopeful they can work out how to utilize the RTX plugin.
> 2659268351409432;3:
> > This is an older build though, they openly said that this tech preview isn’t as complete and polished as the current release build.
>
> Look they’ve been saying this for well over a year now and I’m not buying it. They said the other day on stream this build is only 2 months old. We’re well within art-lock feature-lock for game development at this point. This is how the game will look and it is disheartening. Don’t make excuses for a triple-A developer. Hold them to their promises.
No, this is not within art-lock timing for a release. Main models and stuff? 100% yes, that’s locked in mostly. But polish and touching up stuff? Not even close… That will get touched up til the moment the game goes gold.
> 2659268351409432;7:
> > 2533274817345506;6:
> > Usually graphics are a different team and stuff like that is implemented near the end; typically games focus fundamentals / tech > graphics during the development period and testing cycles like this. So they will use a less graphically intensive build (smaller in size, less performance hit) so they can narrow in on technical only.
> >
> > This ISN’T an Alpha or a Beta. This is a technical build to test technical capabilities and they are giving us the privilege’s to help test the technical aspects on a large scale.
>
> Not at all. I’m a software developer by profession and worked at EA for 5 years before transitioning into government work. Alpha means art is locked and the game is feature complete. You declare beta when all systems and flow is fully set in stone. No changes occur from then on. This is essentially what we will see at launch. The only thing they might do is turn on Raytracing which would fix the occluded object texture/shadow issue if it was implemented right. But based on how poorly they seem to understand dynamic lighting I’m not hopeful they can work out how to utilize the RTX plugin.
You may be right or you may not be; from my experiences it isn’t this case. I’d rather not argue semantics and experiences in the area so I will respectfully disagree. This is advocated as a technical build. 343i made sure that people are to understand this isn’t Alpha or Beta. I’d side on the benefit of the doubt and hazard to guess will we see positive changes and this is only a slice designed for specific testing and isn’t all inclusive feature, function, or art wise.
> 2659268351409432;1:
> So I’m in the insider flight and tried out the test last night. I’m running a Ryzen 5900x, RTX 3090 Kingpin, both on their own 360mm radiators, CL14 3800MHz RAM and the game is running on an NVMe gen 4 SSD. Have the game running at max everything and it looks… well… unfinished to say the least. To say the worst is it looks hideous. People complained at the reveal because it seemed 343 Studios had a pedestrian understanding of global illumination and dynamic lighting and they delayed the game to fix those complaints but here in this build it is clear none of those fixes happened. When objects are rendered in the shadow of something larger (something in the shadow of direct sunlight) said object renders no shadows resulting in flat muddy textures and items that appear to float above the ground and have no depth. I’m ignoring the obvious subpar textures and poor AA implementation for a moment and just talking about shadows. What the heck happened 343? Is this really the best you guys can do? Did Microsoft pull all your funding or did all your senior designers leave early in the project? I haven’t seen a AAA game that looks this poor in a long long time. Here is a screenshot at max everything for reference: https://i.imgur.com/ROnl9Wd.jpg
>
> Surely you all see what is wrong with this picture too right? My God, the game is out in like 3 months! It was a simple fix! This is a generic problem every developer runs into by using dynamic ToD lighting. You just either edge light your player model or I dunno… go through the game and put in static lights in each covered/indoor area in the game. Yes it is work, but it should have easily been doable in the last YEAR.
The devs stated that its an old build, not a current version of the game at all. Its just there for us to find bugs and let them know about issues we have with balance, bot intelligence, etc. Not for us to critique the graphics.
> 2535438636443468;10:
> > 2659268351409432;1:
> > So I’m in the insider flight and tried out the test last night. I’m running a Ryzen 5900x, RTX 3090 Kingpin, both on their own 360mm radiators, CL14 3800MHz RAM and the game is running on an NVMe gen 4 SSD. Have the game running at max everything and it looks… well… unfinished to say the least. To say the worst is it looks hideous. People complained at the reveal because it seemed 343 Studios had a pedestrian understanding of global illumination and dynamic lighting and they delayed the game to fix those complaints but here in this build it is clear none of those fixes happened. When objects are rendered in the shadow of something larger (something in the shadow of direct sunlight) said object renders no shadows resulting in flat muddy textures and items that appear to float above the ground and have no depth. I’m ignoring the obvious subpar textures and poor AA implementation for a moment and just talking about shadows. What the heck happened 343? Is this really the best you guys can do? Did Microsoft pull all your funding or did all your senior designers leave early in the project? I haven’t seen a AAA game that looks this poor in a long long time. Here is a screenshot at max everything for reference: https://i.imgur.com/ROnl9Wd.jpg
> >
> > Surely you all see what is wrong with this picture too right? My God, the game is out in like 3 months! It was a simple fix! This is a generic problem every developer runs into by using dynamic ToD lighting. You just either edge light your player model or I dunno… go through the game and put in static lights in each covered/indoor area in the game. Yes it is work, but it should have easily been doable in the last YEAR.
>
> The devs stated that its an old build, not a current version of the game at all. Its just there for us to find bugs and let them know about issues we have with balance, bot intelligence, etc. Not for us to critique the graphics.
You don’t test old builds. It is funny to me that you think this. Demos are old builds often yes, because they pick a build and debug that slice specifically to show off to press. I worked on a few E3 builds back in my day, namely for BF3. However you do not bring old builds in to soak test with playtesters. And if you follow the leads on Twitter they said specifically the build pushed out late last night was a nightly last minute regressed build. I.e. as current as current can be. There is no functional or beneficial reason to have people test and find bugs in a build you have already moved on from. Just apply critical thinking here for a moment. You’re just falling for PR to protect a rough unfinished product that is in an emergency state.
let me give you better example gears of war 4 alpha test happen on april 2016 and with worst graphic you can imagine but 6 month later on release it was a whole new game with graphical showcase, in halo infinite case it’s not even alpha it’s tech-preview, by the way i played the game couple hours ago on my 3070 and it was fine, same halo aesthetic i expected.
> 2535445608274502;2:
> > 2659268351409432;1:
> > So I’m in the insider flight and tried out the test last night. I’m running a 5900x, 3090 Kingpin, both on their on 360mm radiators, CL14 3800MHz RAM and the game is running on an NVMe gen 4 SSD. Have the game running at max everything and it looks… well… unfinished to say the least. To say the worst is it looks hideous. People complained at the reveal because it seemed 343 Studios had a pedestrian understanding of global illumination and dynamic lighting and they delayed the game to fix those complaints but here in this build it is clear none of those fixes happened. When objects are rendered in the shadow of something larger (something in the shadow of direct sunlight) said object renders no shadows resulting in flat muddy textures and items that appear to float above the ground and have no depth. I’m ignoring the obvious subpar textures and poor AA implementation for a moment and just talking about shadows. What the heck happened 343? Is this really the best you guys can do? Did Microsoft pull all your funding or did all your senior designers leave early in the project? I haven’t seen a AAA game that looks this poor in a long long time. Here is a screenshot at max everything for reference: https://i.imgur.com/ROnl9Wd.jpg
> >
> > Surely you all see what is wrong with this picture too right? My God, the game is out in like 3 months! It was a simple fix! This is a generic problem every developer runs into by using dynamic ToD lighting. You just either edge light your player model or I dunno… go through the game and put in static lights in each covered/indoor area in the game. Yes it is work, but it should have easily been doable in the last YEAR.
>
> This is an older build though, they openly said that this tech preview isn’t as complete and polished as the current release build.
It’s supposed to be a two month old build all I’m seeing is a hell of a lot of work and a very very short time in which to do it . I don’t claim to be a game dev but I’ve been in plenty of flights of both halo and various other shooters , this game doesn’t look sound or feel particularly good .
. If I’m Microsoft I’m worried about this games short medium and long term future
> 2659268351409432;13:
> > 2535438636443468;10:
> > > 2659268351409432;1:
> > > So I’m in the insider flight and tried out the test last night. I’m running a Ryzen 5900x, RTX 3090 Kingpin, both on their own 360mm radiators, CL14 3800MHz RAM and the game is running on an NVMe gen 4 SSD. Have the game running at max everything and it looks… well… unfinished to say the least. To say the worst is it looks hideous. People complained at the reveal because it seemed 343 Studios had a pedestrian understanding of global illumination and dynamic lighting and they delayed the game to fix those complaints but here in this build it is clear none of those fixes happened. When objects are rendered in the shadow of something larger (something in the shadow of direct sunlight) said object renders no shadows resulting in flat muddy textures and items that appear to float above the ground and have no depth. I’m ignoring the obvious subpar textures and poor AA implementation for a moment and just talking about shadows. What the heck happened 343? Is this really the best you guys can do? Did Microsoft pull all your funding or did all your senior designers leave early in the project? I haven’t seen a AAA game that looks this poor in a long long time. Here is a screenshot at max everything for reference: https://i.imgur.com/ROnl9Wd.jpg
> > >
> > > Surely you all see what is wrong with this picture too right? My God, the game is out in like 3 months! It was a simple fix! This is a generic problem every developer runs into by using dynamic ToD lighting. You just either edge light your player model or I dunno… go through the game and put in static lights in each covered/indoor area in the game. Yes it is work, but it should have easily been doable in the last YEAR.
> >
> > The devs stated that its an old build, not a current version of the game at all. Its just there for us to find bugs and let them know about issues we have with balance, bot intelligence, etc. Not for us to critique the graphics.
>
> You don’t test old builds. It is funny to me that you think this. Demos are old builds often yes, because they pick a build and debug that slice specifically to show off to press. I worked on a few E3 builds back in my day, namely for BF3. However you do not bring old builds in to soak test with playtesters. And if you follow the leads on Twitter they said specifically the build pushed out late last night was a nightly last minute regressed build. I.e. as current as current can be. There is no functional or beneficial reason to have people test and find bugs in a build you have already moved on from. Just apply critical thinking here for a moment. You’re just falling for PR to protect a rough unfinished product that is in an emergency state.
Well 343 didn’t really move on from it, by “old build”, they probably meant “old graphical build”, but they want us to test a simpler version so that its easier to find problems at a faster pace. Plus, apparently you DO bring old builds in to test a game because in the newest gameplay videos released by 343 they literally said that it was an old build. There is no reason to bring in a new build that is more complicated when you could find issues faster with an older, smaller version of the game that has the same issues. Part of the problem is that you are looking through a development lens from a different company and from an older date, 343 likely develops differently at this point than the devs of BF3 did way back when. I respect you as a game dev, since I’m actually planning on making a game myself, but I must point out that judging an old build for its graphical qualities isn’t very fair.
I’m going to warn people that throw around “TECH preview” and “it’ll look better come launch”, that it won’t. You are basically looking at the finished product. They only have time for some optimizations and even that is iffy with this timeline. 'Cause they’re gonna have to do a -Yoink- ton of it. Even on high end pcs people are reporting choppiness and low fps.
To all the people that are saying this game looks horrible. You do realize that the game is not finished right? So there is no reason to be making these kind of comments. The game has not gone gold yet and they are still polishing things up and completing tasks to get the game to where it needs to be at launch. Ske7ch even said on the YouTube channel before the preview went live that the build we’re playing on is a couple months old. There are also gonna be more flights before the game launches so with each flight people are gonna notice improvements until launch. I realize everybody has an opinion but people need to think before posting threads like this.
This game is 100% being pushed back again, I fully expect it to get pushed back another year to a 2022 release.
The foundation is good, its solid, but there is a lot of work to do in a very short order of time and even if this build is apparnetly 2-3 months old you have to consider the following
-Game is meant to launch in November
-Launch is 3 months away
-In three months they have to do the following
-Finish first flight
-collect data from flight
-analyise data
-come up with changed needed based on data
-implelemt those changes to the build
They then have to do that for at minimum I’d say 3-4 more flights, at minimum, probably more
3 months is not a big enough window to get this game up to scratch for a full launch
I’m not pooping on the game, like I said the foundation is soild and I am overall enjoying it, I’m also a realist and theres simply too much to do for a november release
(IMO)
and if they DO launch in november it is going to be the same bare-bones no content debacle that H5 was
