When I play Reach I honestly don't find the textures that impressive, maybe it's due to the sub HD factor or ghosting, poor AA perhaps? The cutscenes on the other hand looks far better.
I agree on the ghosting part, but it doesn't happen often and I don't find it annoying. The temporal AA -I prefer MLAA- has its shortcomings also, like not working all the time, and some low geometry elements of the environment, like ropes and things like that.
However, Reach looks great whichever way you look at it, at least for me. In fact I'm surprised at how well it looks.
Besides that, after 4 years without playing Halo, passing for the very first time an Halo game like ODST, I am actually having a lot of fun playing Halo Reach. It's up there with Halo 1 and 2, my all time favourites in the series. Some of the battles are really intense and exciting.
Halo Reach is a gripping game!
I didn't like Halo 3 much, if at all -it always sucks when you realize that developers like Bungie you previously admired and liked are actually going in the wrong direction-, I have had that happen to me sometimes and it's frustrating as hell. I even bought two copies of Halo 3 -long story- before definitely losing my temper and not playing it anymore.
Reach is, fortunately, a totally different game, mixing everything that made Halo what it is now. Kudos to Bungie.
Also, Reach shows how you can innovate because of the universe they created. I can't say the same about other FPSs, which are all almost the same. The only FPS that is innovative lately is Halo.
Bungie built a rich universe, and maybe that means that the only way to achieve innovative gameplay is featuring it on futuristic FPSs and science fiction games. Too many games featuring "realistic" war gameplay (despite they have many Sci-Fi elements), they look like clones.
If I am going to play a game like that, I do rather like to confront aliens as they aren't my species, so yeah, no "emotional attachment". :smile: I don't know if any of this made sense...