Oooof, reading this, it's obvious I'm not like the majority of people on this forum.
People like graphics. People want to be wowed.
I think there is a good case for wowing. There are also good cases for just gameplay. Halo and Mass Effect are the types of games that I would like to be wowed in and I enjoy the gameplay. It's a different universe, it's sci-fi... I mean... why not?
But I want gameplay, a big focus on gameplay, and I'm willing to concede on technical superiority for gameplay.
However, graphics is a combination of technology and artistic design. And you can have very good looking games without the need to break the bank technically. That's just good art design. And Halo could have had the latter here, despite not having the former even in this scenario.
It might be too late for any drastic changes to the art now. Enough time to fix technical ones though.
They were probably working on this demo for E3. Usually they have about 3 months to complete a WIP for a E3 demo (just working off some timelines I've been passed on other titles). And this AAA studio did create a trailer during covid for a Summer Games event, but upon review they canceled it, so you never saw the gameplay trailer... and that may not have been an option here for 343i.
This unfortunately would have landed them during COVID. And COVID is tough to work through, I have my 3 children here every day beside me and it's hard to get anything done; this is a legitimate excuse as we cancelled a bunch of E3 and businesses for it.
It doesn't come across as scripted as much as I've seen other demos. So I guess it's possible that this game is working through finalization and things are content locked.
I'm hopeful the final version will clean up better, but it's going to be hard to make any changes given their current development status with covid.