Great animation system, even if I'm not a huge fan of the animations themselves.
Otherwise, it seems much more a technical sidegrade from Reach than any sort of upgrade.
It's got lots of foreground detail, and shading with respect to baked lightmaps looks really good (at least when conditions aren't changing rapidly).
However.
-Dynamic lighting arguably weakest in the entire series (no spotlights, no specularity, lights tend to be very small)
-Static water surface
-No AO
-No motion blur
-Very aggressive geometric LOD
-Some effects being used to fake detail are questionable, like the smudgy black contour shadows on the ground that fade when you come near
-HDR depth is nowhere near good enough to support what they're trying to do with the lighting. Seeing the bloom clamp left and right in some environments actually helped me to appreciate Halo 3's technical choices.
-Relatively little geometry allocated for far-off backgrounds
-Hardly any chromatic contrast, aside from tron lines
Combined with Halo 4's art style, you get a game which often looks muddy, blown-out, and sometimes excessively JJ Abrams'd.
And even if I did think the graphical decisions resulted in a consistantly amazing-looking (as opposed to occasionally amazing-looking but mostly just okay-looking) game, I wouldn't consider it worth the additional tradeoffs in level design, physics, garbage collection...
When all is said and done, Halo 4 is a really neat demo for some stuff, but overall I don't think it's as gorgeous or technically outstanding as it's made out to be. Bungie's frequent comments about designing the engine to serve the game and nothing else really do hit home with Halo 4.
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