Halo Infinite [Fall 2021] [XO, XBSX|S, PC, XGP]

Like lighting and shadows and textures, #AMIRITE?!
/sigh

 

The Halo Infinite commentary here is not great.

 

This game also has very big issue with lack of any post processing effects such as motion blur and solid DOF. It looks barren.

 

Yes, yes yes. And then there are the guns...Some look like they are from future warfare, some look like kids drew them in elementary school, first grade at that. There is pink and purple all around, and then there are enemies that look downright comical with story that tries to take itself way, way too seriously all this taken into account. I just think they haven't yet wake up from early 2000's, Halo just doesn't look that good. Its not cohesive, not from any point you look at.

 

That's the Bungie formula. Literally all of their games have had wacky art directions and color schemes dating back to Marathon. Destiny is also full of it. 343i started to change that...and fanboys cried...

 

I mean Halo always was a mix of futuristic human military weapons and aliens weapons. Some of the covenant weapons always looked a bit like nerf guns that shoot neon laser pulses...

 

Then they got rid of the distinctive plasma rifle design in favour of something that could be mistaken for the cov carbine.

 

I posted this in the XGS Showcase thread but I think its more appropriate here.
My issue is with Halo: Infinite. Its the one game I was looking forward to. Halo is a series I adore simply for the campaign. It means a lot to me but I was left hugely deflated after yesterday's showing. The E3 2018 trailer showed an engine that looked remarkable; wide-open areas with lots of foliage and trees, high-quality textures and geometry, remarkably impressive lighting. The fidelity of graphics on display in that trailer was everything I wanted in a Halo game; the art of earlier Halo with the graphic quality that matches contemporary engines/games.

The E3 2019 trailer showed the same level of art and fidelity but in an enclosed spaced and I was even more impressed. I could already imagine the marriage of the kinds of stuff we saw in both trailers. Matter of fact I watched both trailers back to back just before the showcase so what was shown was extremely jarring to me. It simply does not look anywhere close to as good as what the showed before. The textures are a mess with the gun model looking like they are made out of clay or untextured plastic, the ground textures....where are all that foliage in the first trailer? the models for the brute and other enemies look really bad...they look really off, lacking in detail and their armor are too shiny and look like they are made out of Lego pieces. What are these structures that look like long vertical blocks everywhere? Where is the long-distance view that was visible at the end of the 2018 E3 trailer? What happened to the beautiful lighting? Why is this game lit so wrong? Why are MC and Brohammer the only one that looks nicely detailed? Why is it that MC armor looks worn and having incidental detail while the Elites and Brutes armor looks like they just came off the factory? How is the face of the Brute at the end of the trailer allowed to look like it does? I mean how??? What is up with the textures??? What happened to the beautiful lighting?

I could go on and on but I just hope something changes. The game does not look good even for a current-gen game talkless of a game with an engine supposedly built for the ground up to power Halo for the next ten years. And you might say that gameplay is all that matter but that is not the issue here. My issue is that they showed two trailers; An engine debut/features trailer and a cutscene and what they showed yesterday was missing all of it. Its not the worst looking game in the world but it is much much less than what I expected and that expectation wasn't something I came up with on my own. It was something I was made to expect based on what they previously showed and was told to expect. And they went on about how Halo Infinite has 10x the processing per pixel compared to Halo 5 but I am not seeing it. They said this game and engine was built from the ground up with XSX in mind and I can't see it at all. It doesn't even look good compared to current-gen games. I am not even going to talk about the art because there is so much clashing here. Why all the pop-ups? Where are the shadows to ground the scene? In short, I am disappointed and I have every right to be.
Just because there is so much fake outrage and vitriol around here does not mean you cannot voice your concern and disappointment of what was shown of Halo Infinite yesterday.

In closing, with the current state of the game, and apparently a raytracing update I personally won't mind if the game is delayed. I don't get what they mean by ray tracing update btw. Is it more like BF raytracing update or more like CyberPunk graphics update for next-gen which isn't launching day one? They really need to get this right. I am not sure if Halo can withstand another relatively bad outing. A lot is riding on this.

 

If you actually dissect the 2018 trailer itself I would argue there is a massive difference between the "game engine demonstration" up-close shots at the beginning ....and the end where the warthog is driving which looks more like an actual in-game rendering. The latter looks a lot less detailed than those initial "demonstrations" and closer to what we are seeing now:




That last shot of the warthog driving was all of 5-6 seconds but the "game engine demonstrations" took up most of the trailer. In a way it was misleading...but have we learned nothing from E3 trailers...

 

But his is Halo, you either like it or you don't...
Technical issues aside, the art direction, tone of the story and feel of the game is what it is.
I personally like it, as I would assume most fans of the series do...
I bought the original xbox for this game, after realizing it would be on Microsoft's new console, instead of being a mac exclusive like the Marathon series.
The art direction is pure nostalgia.
A bit of volumetric lighting, wouldn't hurt though.

 

I was expecting the fundamentals and the core technology to be held back by the requirement for it to run on X1 platforms. What I wasn't expecting is for it to look like it's running on an X1X (intro cutscene aside).

It looks rudimentary in its visuals. I understand that that look may hearken back to the OG Halo titles and bring about some nostalgia, but this is a flagship launch title that has been very heavily hyped by MS in relation to the next-generation. It's also going to be a Halo title intended to last many, many years as a service; and so I don't think it's going to hold up very well unless the entire thing gets major technical overhauls.

I really feel like this no next-gen exclusives approach is gonna hurt them out of the gate. Game Pass may be great value, but they're concentrating too much on the Pass and not enough on the Game(s); games that I wish showed something not possible on prior generation hardware.

 

The lack of next gen exclusives definitely will, it's baffling overall. "12 teraflops, use it to play games than run on a seven year old machine and rather look like it too!" isn't a singular, coherent strategy. My only guess is there's a bunch of overlapping executives at MS that all have their own ideas for what the console should be and do, and so with all these goals and ideas some of them end up being fundamentally at odds with each other.

 

I don't think it's there approach it's more that they have nothing ready and Halo had been a current gen game that's just so far behind in development that it became a series x game.

It's all just been marketing spin to try gloss over that they have nothing ready for the next two years.

 

I may be clutching at straws here but perhaps there is a narrative explanation for this. Otherwise, it just seems random. And wrong.

 

I'll give Infinite a fair go but I'm not liking the sound of this at all.

 

I hope this is not correct. Already feel like enough excuses are being made.

Got a question. Did anyone see how many grenades of each type you can carry? One of the modifications I hated going back to 3 was the move to a 2 grenade limit. When they did that, I felt I could no longer use grenades in regular combat and had to hoard them.

 

They always did though...
I think there is an art direction problem. You can make a game look cartoony but still feel modern. The art direction here is blunt for 2020 standards and the technical issues don't help it either.
There is a good chance, that with some nice DOF and motion blur it will look OKish, but some of the decisions that were made when it comes to art, like the uneven detailing on character models in contrast with the lack of detail when it comes to the environment make it look disjointed.
If they nail the lighting at some point, it might actually come together, but who knows...
I haven't seen any concept art that represents what the game should look like in a finished state, so I can't really tell if they are just a few steps behind the final look...
I'll check Artstation to see if they released anything.

 

There is a narrative explanation, but I just find it contrived. The art director wanted assault rifle weapons to have a certain profile, IIRC, and they arrived at axing the classic plasma rifle, but I find that on a silhouette basis, it has ended up making it more confusing (since it now basically looks like the carbine, the semi-auto single shot).

By silhouette, I mean take the side profile of all the weapons, make it black on white, and see if you can identify the weapon quickly. It's mind boggling how much they failed with it just so they could change the art style.

Take the Forerunner light rifle and the sniper rifle for instance. Both are long weapons that taper to a point. That's a failure of silhouette distinction (since size on-screen can change, it's left to the major shape designs to make something distinct). It's kind of telling how in the Halo 4 art book, one of the alternate designs for the light rifle was the sniper rifle, and they decided to roll with it anyway.

 

Very interesting, I've never considered weapon design from this perspective before!