Halo: Reach

Pretty impressive number of units on screen simultaneously for a console. Counted about 20-22 enemy AI during peak times, all on screen.

Regards,
SB
 
Pretty impressive number of units on screen simultaneously for a console. Counted about 20-22 enemy AI during peak times, all on screen.

Regards,
SB

Considering how Bungie claimed the engine can handle ~40 AI, I actually found it as a bit of a let down. Maybe it's a design choice since the play area wasn't all that large, but I really hope to see battles during the campaign that have a larger number of enemies.
 
interference, I'm kinda new here so I'm not sure if I'm following you:
First you're saying that Bungie watered down the series because there's no blood during assassinations (which were never present in previous games), and that complete lack of blood makes the game seem childish (which is quite wrong on both fronts: first because there is blood in the game, and second because addition of blood does not make a game more mature).

After people try to explain you the logic behind this artistic decision, you made the following remark: "it's a mature rated game, I mean have they played Gears of War".
Well, people replied to your remark on Gears, and to that you say "I hate how everyone automatically refers to Gears 2 when you complain why there isn't blood"?!
But tt's you who made that Gears reference in the first place. What did you expect? Don't you find that comment just a tad bit ridiculous?

But let's leave that Gears comment. Now you're comparing Halo Reach to Assassins Creed and claiming that the assassinations in Reach are far more over the top and yet they are not as gory.
Have you actually seen the assassinations in AC? How can you describe them as less exaggerated when in one scene you have a guy landing from a three story building on two guards, killing them both simultaneously with hidden blades? That's quite exaggerated IMO.
Yet, from what I've seen there's not much blood and gore in AC assassinations except maybe for some red color on the blades. Which makes sense, because as I mentioned earlier not leaving a mess is the whole point of a silent assassination.

The last thing I find weird, is that not only you claim that more blood gives you a more mature experience, but you also explicitly say that it makes for a better game - bringing Ninja Gaiden 2 X360 vs PS3 as an example (not a very "mature" game in the first place IMO).
And yet, the first Ninja Gaiden was far better then the second one (it a matter of opinion, but I believe there's a general agreement on that), although it didn't contain the excessive blood and gore effects we saw in NG2. Why is that then?



Hello, if you look at the context of my statement, I was referring to Gears of War to indicate the kind of violent content present in mature rated titles and therefore why is Reach still so conservative - especially when Bungie have made much of it being darker than previous games.

And I the 'complete lack of blood making the game seem childish' was in reference to the assassinations as I clearly realise that Reach has blood in it otherwise - which only serves to show how incongruent the assassinations are.

Secondly, I nowhere said that the assassinations in AC were not over the top, they are. And in AC there is some blood if you stab someone, it's not like Gears 2, there's no gibbing or anything but there is blood, which is realistic.

Lastly, I was comparing NG2 to NGS2 not to NG1, I was comparing the two as they play basically identically aside from the omission of blood on the PS3 version. So the only gameplay variable in this case is the presence of blood between the two.

Obviously if you compare NG1 with NG2 it would involve a lot more factors other than just the omission of blood in NG1.
 
Pretty impressive number of units on screen simultaneously for a console. Counted about 20-22 enemy AI during peak times, all on screen.

Regards,
SB

That's not that much, they were already doing that (or more) in ODST.
I was hoping for 40 characters on screen in Firefight for Reach on the insane difficulties, but they did take out Drones.

EDIT: having seen that video, he's only fighting 20 or so Elites which are probably more computationally expensive than other types of Covenant so 40 units could well be possible for a mixed group of Covenant.
 
Considering how Bungie claimed the engine can handle ~40 AI, I actually found it as a bit of a let down. Maybe it's a design choice since the play area wasn't all that large, but I really hope to see battles during the campaign that have a larger number of enemies.

I think bungie said it depends on how many players there are.
Because no hell that the player can defeat that many elites and hunters in his own if he was playing under normal circumstances.
 
EDIT: having seen that video, he's only fighting 20 or so Elites which are probably more computationally expensive than other types of Covenant so 40 units could well be possible for a mixed group of Covenant.

IIRC, AI isn't that computationally expensive and really AI for an Elite shouldn't be any more expensive than AI for a grunt.

I know you like to blame every issue you have with Reach on technical limitations, but I really don't think that's the case with these videos.

I think bungie said it depends on how many players there are.
Because no hell that the player can defeat that many elites and hunters in his own if he was playing under normal circumstances.

No, in one of the BWU they clarified that the number of players doesn't really effect the amount of enemies you face. The difficulty does though.

The GI issue with the Reach article claimed that the new engine can handle 40 AI plus 20 vehicles at once.
 
AI requires a lot of raycasting for visibility calculations. Can the agent see the player? Is that crate there good cover to hide behind from the player (ie. can the player see behind the crate)? These were however running well enough on an Xbox1 so they definitely should scale well for the 360.

The more intensive issue was that of the AI agents' awareness of their surroundings and the state of other agents. This is what would make a battle look as a big event instead of a lot of smaller ones happening alongside each other. But this scales exponentially as each additional agent increases CPU time for all the existing ones too. Bungie decided to limit the AI's awareness for Halo1, but these larger battles in Reach suggest that they've made changes to this part of the code as well.

Nevertheless, I think it's the Elites who are the least concerned with other enemy AI agents, they always concentrate on the player and are good enough fighters not to bother with what anyone else's doing. Grunts on the other hand have to pay attention to the team's leading Elite, Jackals need to work in formations, etc. etc.
 
Evade looks silly with those settings. No way that will be MLG settings, but watching that makes me want play some custom games with evade, and the speed be higher and less gravity. :LOL:
 
hm... well, the ODST live-action stuff was filmed in Hungary. Maybe this is too, and they're just... a shout-out to all their hard work? :p
 
It's gotta be more than that, I doubt that too many Bungie guys were involved with the shooting of the spots, there's gotta be something else too.
See, hungarians are interesting people, we've always been all around the world. The atomic and H bombs were all co-developed by emigrant scientists (there's even been a saying that those guys were actually Martians), then there's Neumann who pretty much built the foundations for today's computers... so maybe there's someone working at Bungie, too.

(And some of the henchmen in Iron Man 1 in the Afghanistan scenes were speaking hungarian too... but that is kinda backwards, as we've just lost two soldiers there fighting alongside the US forces last week...)
 
I notice the top4 spots at amazon.com are filled with halo reach (also halo reach has been #1 for the last ~3weeks) so it will have a nice launch in the US, sorry no idea how this will compare to MW2, though in the US that achieved 4.2million first month + 1million UK in 2 weeks (xbox360 figures only)

FWIW my calcs from amazon will have xbox360 ~400k, wii ~230k, ps3 ~220k (though still perfecting my algorithm)
 
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