Digital Foundry: Hands-on with Halo: The Master Chief Collection

I may end up picking this up in the end after all, not a huge Halo guy, but I do enjoy the rare game that does local split screen coop and does it right, and the Halo games always aced that.
 
raziel said:
Sounds slapped together. Hopefully the Gears collection gets a more consistent treatment.
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2 different developers. I just hope 343i don't outsource Halo 5 multiplayer maps, like they did with Halo 4. The quality of maps from them verses Certain Affinity was something. Outsourcing doesn't always work out. Don't get me wrong, the ports are not terrible, between alright and good. They not so bad.
 
Meh, kinda disappointing. Is it possible that 20GB day one patch will address some of these issues? :/
 
It's a shame Richard provided no screenshots, especially of Halo 2 Anniversary because even the highish bitrate (33Mbit/sec 60fps) Gamersyde videos aren't great for this. There's not much camera movement at this point.

Halo 2 Classic (1920x1080 noAA)
ily9DruEt4Nm9.png


Halo 2 Anniversary (1328x1080 ppAA)
iU3WCYOMHfqTi.png
 
Peterpan said:
2 different developers. I just hope 343i don't outsource Halo 5 multiplayer maps, like they did with Halo 4. The quality of maps from them verses Certain Affinity was something. Outsourcing doesn't always work out. Don't get me wrong, the ports are not terrible, between alright and good. They not so bad.
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It doesn't look like they are outsourcing them, at this time. Max Hoberman, President of Certain Affinity, said on Podcast Unlocked that he and Certain Affinity aren't working on Halo 5 in any way. His team is, however, doing the all of the MP for a big AAA game coming out next Fall that hasn't been announced yet.
 
Shin-Ra said:
It's a shame Richard provided no screenshots, especially of Halo 2 Anniversary because even the highish bitrate (33Mbit/sec 60fps) Gamersyde videos aren't great for this. There's not much camera movement at this point.

Halo 2 Classic (1920x1080 noAA)
ily9DruEt4Nm9.png


Halo 2 Anniversary (1328x1080 ppAA)
iU3WCYOMHfqTi.png
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Classic background looks so much better.
 
The natural, rocky parts in Gravemind (H2A) look much worse than The Silent Cartographer (HA) despite targeting a generation later hardware.

And specular aliasing's a SoaB at the best of times but the reduced horizontal res really accentuates it.
 
Shin-Ra said:
It's a shame Richard provided no screenshots, especially of Halo 2 Anniversary because even the highish bitrate (33Mbit/sec 60fps) Gamersyde videos aren't great for this. There's not much camera movement at this point.

Halo 2 Classic (1920x1080 noAA)
ily9DruEt4Nm9.png


Halo 2 Anniversary (1328x1080 ppAA)
iU3WCYOMHfqTi.png
Click to expand...

Anniversary looks so much better.
 
Shin-Ra said:
It's a shame Richard provided no screenshots, especially of Halo 2 Anniversary because even the highish bitrate (33Mbit/sec 60fps) Gamersyde videos aren't great for this. There's not much camera movement at this point.

Halo 2 Classic (1920x1080 noAA)
ily9DruEt4Nm9.png


Halo 2 Anniversary (1328x1080 ppAA)
iU3WCYOMHfqTi.png
Click to expand...

Wow. Just wow...
 
Shin-Ra said:
It's a shame Richard provided no screenshots, especially of Halo 2 Anniversary because even the highish bitrate (33Mbit/sec 60fps) Gamersyde videos aren't great for this. There's not much camera movement at this point.

Halo 2 Classic (1920x1080 noAA)

Halo 2 Anniversary (1328x1080 ppAA)
Click to expand...

post-24099-well-there-it-is-gif-Jeff-Gold-yNHs.gif
 
Nice. Halo 3 looks fantastic. And what I've seen of H2A, though the campaign disappointed in 2004.


CEA cutscenes are a bother at 60 frames. It's the same way with Halo PC, the 30fps animations. How hard would that be to fix?
 
Shin-Ra said:
Even if you ignore Halo 1 and 2 in the collection, tremendous is a very generous description.

Only HexaDrive's done a tremendous job on major remasters.
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Halo 2 looks way better. Your comparison picture reflects this. Lighting alone is massively improved. The only aspect of the original that looks superior is clarity due to higher resolution.

Anniversary looks better in every single other way.
 
Shin-Ra said:
It's kind of baffling that performance is wasted constantly for a switching feature that you benefit from so rarely in comparison.

edit: I mean, is it really too much to expect the original (and best) Halo in 1080p60 with ANY anti-aliasing and 16xAF?
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From reading the article, it seems CE suffers from the same issue as the original PC version when playing at 60fps.
 
The Shogun said:
Halo 2 looks way better. Your comparison picture reflects this. Lighting alone is massively improved. The only aspect of the original that looks superior is clarity due to higher resolution.

Anniversary looks better in every single other way.
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Looking better isn't always enough. It should look polished, but due to the compromised resolution and low-res transparencies it looks messy.

scitek said:
From reading the article, it seems CE suffers from the same issue as the original PC version when playing at 60fps.
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You can force AA and AF on PC.
 
Shin-Ra said:
Looking better isn't always enough. It should look polished, but due to the compromised resolution and low-res transparencies it looks messy.


You can force AA and AF on PC.
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Yeah I do agree. 1080p would've been so much nicer. I really wish 343 would have cut out the real time switching of engines. Would have made Halo CE and Halo 2 look so much nicer. Do many people even use that feature?
 
In the end as long as multiplayer performance is solid 60 I am happy. The campaign stuff is disappointing but I didntnexpect them to rewrite the animations for 60hz. That's just a halo 1 issue that will forever be.
 
scitek said:
Cool. Last I knew you couldn't force AA through the control panel with Nvidia cards, that's why I asked.
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Just because Halo PC has a weird incompatibility with MSAA doesn't mean that shouldn't be fixed, or they shouldn't use a ppAA instead of nothing.
 
It seems like the juddering issue problems are due to cutscenes being rendered at 30hz but being forced into 60fps. Why not lock cutscenes to 30fps? It's not like it would matter to gameplay as long as it gets unlocked (or locked to 60) when gameplay begins.

Seems strange to force non-gameplay to be 60fps and make it look juddery instead of capping cutscenes at 30.
 
dark10x said:
You really think so? The texture work, per-pixel lighting, and shader quality was all a step up but the dodgy frame-rate, very simplistic geometry, and mediocre animation bring it down. From that same period in 2001 I think Metal Gear Solid 2 stands the test of the time much better with superior animation, 60 fps, an an incredible attention to detail. Obviously it's much smaller in scope but it looks less dated to my eyes.

Halo 2, though, is quite ugly by today's standards.
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The scope, physics and emergent gameplay of Halo are far more impressive than anything Metal Gear did at the time. Plus it had a flawless co op element that maintained the single player experience intact.

Time has been more kind to MGS 2 in terms of visuals due to it's superb art direction, something Japanese developers were above (maybe still are?) it's western counterparts at that stage in time.

Really would never get the decision to run 2 simultaneous engines for a neat feature at the expense of sacrifying optimun playability. Can't they give an option to select a single engine at the time for those who want to experience an smoother game?
 
Parts of this article literally read like some of the posts we got in that thread about PS4 sales that had to be locked because of console wars yesterday... Right down to the persistent Last of Us comparisons too.
 
Percy said:
Parts of this article literally read like some of the posts we got in that thread about PS4 sales that had to be locked because of console wars yesterday... Right down to the persistent Last of Us comparisons too.
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Digital Foundry is biased toward the PS4? That's one I hadn't heard before and seems opposite of what I've heard most of the time this gen.
 
BigDug13 said:
It seems like the juddering issue problems are due to cutscenes being rendered at 30hz but being forced into 60fps. Why not lock cutscenes to 30fps? It's not like it would matter to gameplay as long as it gets unlocked (or locked to 60) when gameplay begins.

Seems strange to force non-gameplay to be 60fps and make it look juddery instead of capping cutscenes at 30.
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Didn't someone say they were fixing the animation judder, or is it only for first person weapon animations?
 
Halo CE: Anniversey had the original game engine running in the backround too, but the original game graphics were actually different from the actual original game, right? If so, did they fix that with the MCC?
 
BigDug13 said:
Digital Foundry is biased toward the PS4? That's one I hadn't heard before and seems opposite of what I've heard most of the time this gen.
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That's not what I was suggesting at all. Article just came across to me like some of the posters in this thread at times is all. Especially towards the end.
 
They mention that the resolution/scaling in Halo 2 seems to produce better results than the typical 900p resolution. I believe Killzone 2/3 did very similar things, using a resolution that was scaled more in one direction, but produced better results. I wonder why more games don't use it?
 
EvB said:
They mention that the resolution/scaling in Halo 2 seems to produce better results than the typical 900p resolution. I believe Killzone 2/3 did very similar things, using a resolution that was scaled more in one direction, but produced better results. I wonder why more games don't use it?
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I personally think it can produce some weird looking aliasing.

You can clearly see it along some of the edges in this pic:
iU3WCYOMHfqTi.png
 
Backfoggen said:
I personally think it can produce some weird looking aliasing.

You can clearly see it along some of the edges in this pic:
iU3WCYOMHfqTi.png
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You can't deny the crystal-like sharpness though.

Stinkles said:
Personal opinion?

a. It looks much better than prior showings now for obvious reasons of dev progress.
b. Yeah, I think the scaling of this res looks better. Great in fact. There's a crystal-like sharpness in-game.
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Stinkles said:
A fade in wouldn't work. The engine is either running in sync or it isn't. The fidelity of the game is not suffering, it's balanced to achieve a set goal. We've been very open about this throughout, as you know.
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The fidelity isn't suffering at all!
 
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