Dirtbag 504 said:
So Ghaleon, only one question.... was the drive worth it ?
Yes. No regrets at all.
Dirtbag 504 said:
DUDE THE FRAMERATE!!!
Its buttery smooth!!!
I'll corroborate what Drew said. When Tsavo Highway started, the first thing I did was turn to D3vious and say, "That's not 30 frames per second. It's way too smooth for that." The rate held up during combat too. It was
buttery.
I keep coming back to a couple general thoughts about last night.
First, is how polished the whole thing is. Remember how polished the Beta felt right out of the gate? The interface is clean and intuitive, the loading screen cool and brief. I saw the "loading..." at the bottom of the screen during Campaign a few times, but didn't notice any frame hitch when that happened. Everything just flowed beautifully.
What also struck me was the juxtaposition of scale and detail. The little stuff that made the Beta cool (blowing snow, falling leaves, etc.) is there in abundance in Campaign. The grass moves when you pass through it convincingly, the HDR transitions from dark to light environments is subtle yet impressive. At the same time, the environments are just mammoth in scale, as Drew described. And the same level of detail appeared to be applied to these giant structures and environments as to ever corner of the battle terrain. The artists spent a lot of love on the environments.
The last is the feature set. They showed three demos, but looking at them as three separate parts of the game is like looking at three puzzle pieces and imagining the picture. The co-op demo was great, and so was the saved film demo. But they took a Saved Film of the Campaign demo, too - which is going to rock watching back, especially with four players. Forge in and of itself is a wonderful tool, but layering custom games on top of them takes it to another level. And then sharing those out via File Sharing, and being able to browse them on Bungie.net. More Saved Films can be recorded on those Forge creations.....it all ties together into a very complete package. The features integrate and complement each other in a way that makes them more than the sum of the parts.
Halo 2 MP was known for breaking new ground due to its party system and matchmaking. I think Halo 3 has several features that are on par in significance with those - Saved Films, Forge, online co-op (with the skull modifiers - I counted 13 of them before Luke toggled away), File Sharing. Even outside of the actual Campaign, the feature set alone is going to have a huge impact. Saved Films have already spoiled me - I want them in Bioshock.
