Are there any videos from the SP mode?
What I ve seen so far from the game graphically wise doesnt impress me at all, and I hope thast because the videos I ve seen are from the MP mode. Atleast I hope they are from MP. I was expecting a lot more from such a mega franchise. Resistance and Bioshock look much better
It should be obvious it's MP if you've ever played Halo. :smile:
In any case, the only good SP footage is the E3 announcement trailer last year (but if you're desperate for something 'new', there's
this really low-res shot that
might be from single player). So take that announce trailer, replace the billboard plants with something next-gen, replace the horrible textures (all the ground textures) with ones that look worth something that would at least be in Halo 2, add a total of 40+ allies, enemies, and vehicles for any average encounter, translate that to the multitude of different environments Halo normally includes, and you should have an idea of the baseline for the SP. The engine has only improved since then, and the art has presumably gotten better.
How old is this build?
I was reading the Bungie.net forums and a person there claimed that it was around six months old based on the fact that you can see Dan Hsu from EGM in one of the later scenes of the ViDoc. I have not checked to confirm, but has Bungie made any statements regarding the age of the footage in the ViDoc?
Bungie's basically said that due to being a professionally produced film (part of a documentary that's presumably also going to be made by Film Oasis, for which they've been recording footage since late 2005), most footage is quite old. Dan Hsu was there back in mid-October, and you see him playing it a number of times. None of the features they've talked about since late last year, or early this year (literally first half of January), were in those builds. Notably the interactive water (which flows around objects, such as Warthog tires, reacts to other objects moving through it or hitting it, etc) and the "decorators" such as 3d, properly-lit and shadowed, physics-affected grass and debris. And they've been "sitting on it" for a while too. The last vidoc, too, was 4-6 months old back when it was released in December, according to what somebody from 1Up said when they asked Bungie about it.
But they haven't gone out in any press release and said it's X months old. Just that it's "old and alpha" and that's pretty much it.
Warning: time for me to inject my opinion on this stuff, geek out, and go slightly tangential.
I think elements, just like that old E3 announce, look really good. Others are obviously placeholder, some things dropped right in from Halo 2, and I fully expect them to improve. Honestly, I have pretty high expectations... and honestly, I see little reason to not expect them to be met. How many hands does it take you to count the number of games which outdid Bungie's previous efforts in those timeframes, considering the hardware, considering everything the games did? After that, it's all art, and with that.... well, you know what goes on with that.
Halo 1 looked good/great. Halo 2 was a mixed bag. As one of the developers said on the bonus DVD, "all we're asking for is 6 more weeks," or something to that effect. Obviously it's no excuse for screwing up the development schedule... and you can always use more time to fix one thing or another, but there's also a point in there where it's just time to release it. The game clearly wasn't there yet, both visually AND gameplay wise (grenades,
Brutes. Jackal Snipers, and even some AI on like the Elites, with those boxes...). So, some things in Halo 2 looked really good, and others looked like ****. Given everything, I think development, and everything else about Halo 3, is going much better than Halo 1 and 2. So, yeah, High expectations. And perhaps a little too optimistic about that. But we'll see. A comment regarding their graphics was that some of it looks eerily similar to their concept art, in color palettes, setup, etc. And I've always loved Bungie's concept art, from Halo 1, to the stuff you can see in the 2nd vidoc (brutes especially--the ancient-looking armor sets; the more ornate sets; the look of the face, so that they didn't look completely retarded), to the High Ground concept art seen in this vidoc. If they have the proper amount of time to produce that
content, I think Halo 3 could look significantly better for its time than either 1 or 2. Maybe they should make the weapons look less practical, and more crazy looking. Those things take up a large percentage of the screen real estate, afterall. Same goes for the environments--more little details, that break up the simplicity and monotony of the levels. In this way, I hope that it was development time that put limits on the latter (perhaps even the former, to some extent) in the first two games.
And that was a nice way for me to cram in alot of things regarding everything Halo. You guys should appreciate that I keep it all in one place.
