Halo Infinite

Building a new team to do SP would be pointless. I doubt there's a lack of talent or ability among the vast majority of the development team who worked on the campaign. The issue is likely the leadership, which already changed in the tail end of the game's production, and the engine/tools and changing a bunch of designers over isn't going to do anything there.

Only playing on a Series S but generally thought it looked pretty poor, is there a big jump with the Series X? kinda feeling like I chose poorly with going for the cheap option.

Halo has always kind of looked shit and flat though.

Halo 1, Reach and 4 looked great so I'm not sure about that.

Halo 5 looked great one One X, too.

Infinite looks pretty good on Series X but that's about it. There's still a lot of pop in, which is really annoying, but there are some bits that look stunning. There's an achievement for getting to the highest possible point on the map and it looks belting up there.

Unless your only reference point was console Halo 1 was purely meh looking. Halo 2 improved things but much the same, half life 2 was released almost the exact same time but had been seen for a year or two prior.

3 looked shit in comparison to many contemporary games. Reach did look better but still has that halo style and 4/5 were the best of the bunch looks wise. Didn't play as well though and still not really on a par with the best competition in that area.

Yeah this, it was doing shaders that the pc wasn't doing at the time. To say it looked shit is some proper hyperbole.

I remember the pc version of Halo not looking that great, that was down to Gearbox though and their shitty port which barely had any of the Xbox graphical effects and the audio was out of sync. Can't believe that it was never officially fixed until this year.

I've just finished a replay of H2 today and overall I kind of hate it (whereas I love CE, H3, Reach and ODST). It just feels massively unfair at times with one shot kills out of nowhere (on heroic), other cheap tactics and the weapons balanced completely differently to CE without it being an improvement. People criticise the Library in the original Halo for being repetitive and boring, but fuck me some of the levels in Halo 2 are far worse in those aspects, just repeating the same rooms over and over. CE never felt unfair or like poor design choices were screwing you over. H2 felt like a chore to play a lot of the time because of those things. Plus it was really, really long. In a bad way.

Just my two cents.

I think I have bought almost every just cause game and never actually finished one. Every time I hope the gunplay is more engaging and it never is. I think I have got past that stage now though and they won't be getting another shot.

I just went back to look at screenshots of halo 1 and half life and I'm sorry to my eyes there is no comparison, half life looks more interesting.

I know the size of the environments in halo was impressive but that's a different thing.

I remember Halo 2's funky textures largely being completely undermined by the absolutely horrendous pop-in ruining the overall visual impression.

Can't stand pop-in - find it completely immersion-breaking to have the world build itself in front of you. Lower overall image quality for a stable world is vastly preferable.

Which has been one of the great things about playing past-gen games on the Series X.

I'm fucking raging! I soldiered on and got to the end of the campaign. It was galling that it turned into horde mode for a while there, and then basically a boss rush for the last two hours, but I'm done. On Heroic. That's what I selected at the start. That's what it has said in the pause menu all the way through. That's the challenge it felt like I was getting.

Did I get the Heroic Achievement? I did not. 35% complete apparently. RAAAARGH! I'm going to guess that it's Quick Resume or something fucking with it here.

Anyways. Got to the end. I look back on the campaign with more fondness than I felt whilst playing it. The next one had better be a genuine step up.



Oh, and OG Halo pissed all over even PC games of the time. Don't forget that the hardware was pretty decently specced. Pentium 3 level CPU, dedicated Nvidia GPU, decent early shader support. Half-life was a few years old by this point, and definitely looked a lot flatter on a technical level. You had to see Halo in motion really. The bump-mapped surfaces, the judicious use of hardware lighting, all that jazz. Things like Far Cry, Doom 3, Half-Life 2, et al came along a few years later and took back the crown obvs, but in that moment it was a thing to behold!

Probably mentioned but do the vehicles feel super light compared to previous games? Seems like a bit of grass is enough to flip it over