Halo 4, One Year Later: What Happened?
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they do update the maps and add them. Half the maps you mentioned are in other Halo games.
"Ya I played that pretty new Halo game for about 4 hours, it looked really good and was alright. Not sure what you are all upset about."
Except it does matter. First of all, a lot of the tricks are actually pulled off pretty badly if you actually look at them. I mean, don't get me started on split-screen.
And it matters more than that. It came at the expensive of huge environments and decent enemy AI, two staples of the Halo franchise.
Oh, and the skyboxes are sooooo ugly.
Just landed on the first planet so I haven't noticed the small environs or weak ai yet. Sucks you can't have the best of both worlds but the console came out in 2005.
Still gun sounds matter a lot to me and 343 def made improvements there.
That's only if you actually look for them though. If you just play the game normally it looks very good for a game running on 9 year old hardware from 2 years ago.
I do agree that splitscreen had some serious LOD issues though.
However the AI was fine, and yes it's sad about the lack of lots of large environments but that's a limitation of the hardware, not due to "tricks". They can't improve the graphics and keep large loads of big areas even though a couple of them weren't exactly small.
They really weren't ugly either. They weren't hugely wow inducing but they certainly weren't ugly.
Halo 4 may have had problems, however it's graphics certainly weren't one of them. For a 360 game it is incredibly good looking.
I'm not sure what you're trying to say here.
fixed. really the hardware is from 2003.
The Lamonster
Member
I thought Halo 4 looked fantastic, although I wasn't standing around zooming in on shadows and examining grains of wheat.
Ein Bear
Member
Halo 4's tech is absolutely rubbish. Yeah, it might look pretty on a superficial level in screenshots and such, but the enemy AI, environment scale and splitscreen performance are worse than Halo 1 on the original Xbox, never mind the other 360 titles. Halo Reach is only a very marginal step-back visually, and pisses all over Halo 4 in every other technical aspect.
Neither of the bolded are true and the boring enemies aren't due to the graphics.
Twilight Gap
Member
The Elite AI suffers the most. They have a really short engagement distance and sometimes will completely detach from the player. They also tend to get stuck on geometry more than the other games. Coming off of Reach, it was a noticeable downgrade for them.
GlenChivas
Member
Haven't played Halo since Reach but this was a great read OP. Very nicely done.
Ein Bear
Member
Enemy AI and environment scale are noticeably downgraded in Halo 4.
Compare blowing up that Covenant ship in Halo 4 to the multi-Scarab battle in Halo 3, the latter has so much more stuff going on, in such a larger area it's crazy. The Reclaimer mission in Halo 4 is about the largest that game gets, and the areas are much smaller and more linear than the 'big' missions in the previous games.
As for AI... Load up Halo 4 and go to a level with Banshees. Watch the Covenant try to fly them and see how the react to you when you're in one, then try saying there's no downgrade there.
squidhands
Member
I had a Promethean Knight completely stop melee-ing me and walk away when I engaged the shield AA, that's some bad AI. I'd show the clip of it, but oh yeah, the graphics were so pretty that they broke the campaign theater that worked properly in the previous 3 Halo games.
Both of the bolded are true.
The AI is absolutely terrible, even on Legendary. Elites were a downright joke compared to the ones in Reach, who were brutal. The Prometheans are only difficult to fight because of their ability to sponge bullets and teleport, mechanics that can't be attributed to AI.
Boring enemies, I would argue, are because of the graphics. They spent so much time and money on the visuals that it detracted from the rest of the game.
Compared to previous Halo titles, the environments are tiny. Every previous Halo game (even ODST) has at least two levels that dwarf the largest Halo 4 has to offer (with the exception being maybe Shutdown, but you're pretty much just flying from one pillar to the next, there's no real opportunity for exploration).
Halo
The Silent Cartographer
AotCR
Metropolis
Delta Halo
Quarantine Zone
The Storm
The Arc
The Covenant
Hub City
Uplift Reserve
Winter Contingency
Tip of The Spear
Long Night of Solace
New Alexandria
The Package
---
Halo 4 is an embarrassment to the franchise, an abomination that should have never been birthed.
Also, damn, I forgot how many awesome levels Reach had. Time for a replay.
User 73706
Banned
On the "maps don't work in new game iterations" note, I am amazed they avoided Waterworks for Halo 4. It's nothing but rocks and Forerunner architecture and the map seems like the perfect place to spam the shit out of Mantises. It's, like, the one map I would have been content with them introducing to the Halo 4 sandbox.
Twilight Gap
Member
They squished it together and named it Shatter.
And it was complete bunk. It's probably for the best that it was excluded, they only would've managed to somehow make it worse.
eh they where pretty fucking intimidating on legendary all skulls on
Not_A-Cop_Maybe
Member
I think you are taking video games a bit to serious here buddy.
Also, its debatable whether H4 is the series worst game, but id give all the games a solid 9 through-out. Every game has brought in some form or shape some innovation to the marker. Now, speaking of H4's merits, it did bring some cool episodic content that was FREE with the game, albeit needing XBL AND cutting features likes Theatre, etc. But seeing as the XBO has these Theatre features built in, it i suppose in a way could be making a come back in future titles.
User 73706
Banned
Stalactite Ordnance drops.
Twilight Gap
Member
To be fair, it's one of the better CTF maps in the game (if you manage to ever find DLC). It falls apart in anything else though. If Assault was in the game, it probably would have played that well too.
Jex
Member
That's really not go much to do with the AI though. The AI in Halo 4 is distinctly worse than the previous games, regardless of difficulty. If you just mess around in Reach's Firefight mode and fight all the different kinds of really well balanced enemies that are in that game and then dip into Halo 4 the difference is really night and day.
That's just ridiculous. The developers creating the graphics have nothing to do with the developers coding the AI and designing the enemy encounters. 343i isn't some 2 man indie team, they have multiple people working on every aspect of the game.
I'm not saying the environments in Halo are huge, but they aren't small. They levels quite regularly open up into reasonably sized arenas. It is in no way a corridor shooter. However again, this is due to limitations of the hardware. The 360 is extremely old and has something like 256mb of RAM. I'm surprised they managed to create levels that large with the graphics looking as good as they do.
And this is when I realised there is no point discussing this with you...
I'm not saying the environments are massive, however they certainly aren't tiny.
Regarding AI, I never noticed any issues with them and I've played through the game 4 times once on legendary where the AI is fucking evil.
To add to this, the Sword Elite is the worst offender of the bunch. His AI boils down to this: Can I see the player? Can I reach the player? If either of those is no, he'll do nothing to change the situation. When they do decide to attack the player, they still have the Sword passive of not slowing while the wielding biped is being shot. It ends up being a lot of frustration when battling them.
Ein Bear
Member
The 'it's old hardware' argument has always seemed flawed to me, since the developers should have worked within the 360's limitations. If the console can't deliver visuals like Halo 4's without compromising the things that the series is known for, then they shouldn't be shooting for those visuals in the first place.
The problem there is that they can't not improve the graphics. Thankfully this issue won't be here for Halo 5, new hardware is awesome
PedroLumpy
Member
Halo was the last major holdout on the weapon/perk unlock grind. It was really sad to see them dive down that rabbit hole, not sure we'll see a major title without all that baggage again.
Twilight Gap
Member
The good news is that if H2A is real and successful
and relatively unchanged
It was not. It was goddamn awful. Worse than Reach and Halo 2.
I didn't say that was directly due to tricks. Basically, the game puts graphics over gameplay and level design, and even then it has to cheat to look the way it does. Often times, you can run into things that really kill that when you see the tricks not working out, and you will.
The focus on making it such a good looking kept the areas from being large and for the most part being awfully small, as well as the AI being really bad. Halo 2 did the exact same thing, and had the exact same results. Both are considered the poorest of the campaigns as a result.
They were awful quality. Worse than 3 and Reach's.
The game suffered from emphasizing graphics over other things.
Yes it does. When you have the GPU working all out on graphics, and the CPU helping out, and then have the CPU working on things like graphics and all the other things it has to handle, there simply isn't enough to go around for things like AI.
It's not a manpower thing. It's a horsepower thing.
Also, being able to hit you easier doesn't just make the AI better. It could just mean that it's really, really cheap, like Killzone Shadowfall, for example. It's pretty easy to implement something like an aimbot and then make it so it misses every once in a while. That's called cheap. Artificial difficulty. It's bad.
I haven't seen any evidence of the AI being poor, when I played it regularly tried to flank and outmaneuver me just like older Halos. There were occasionally some quirks but they happened in the older Halos too.
This thing is they couldn't bring out a game where the graphics weren't improved, especially when you had games like Battlefield 3 looking absolutely gorgeous coming out a year before. The fact that they had areas as large as they were with the graphics they had is incredibly impressive.
If you can provide any form of evidence that CPU cycles were being taken up with graphics processing so much so that it couldn't compute good AI other than that you think the AI is bad then I will be impressed. Currently though that's a load of crap you're pulling out of thin air.
I agree that aimbots are artificial difficulty, however I found that the AI did more than just shoot well. As I stated above.
It was awful. Most people seem to think it is as well. Elites would sometimes outright stand in the open not doing a thing.
And even if for the most part it wasn't that outright bad, the AI didn't do things like it did in other halos, like Elites literally using grunts as meat shields, for example.
It's pure and simple bad AI. Halo has always had REALLY GOOD AI.
There's nothing that says they couldn't have improved it while preserving those huge environments and overall making it look prettier. Reach, for example, took Halo 3's insane draw distance of like 13 miles or whatever, and doubled it. Remember the last mission in Reach? Look to your left once you get to the top of the first cliff. There's a gigantic valley to the left. At the far end are mountains. Those are actually being drawn. Not background. Actually being rendered by the engine. That is insane. There are obviously many things that could have been improved and made more efficient, and likely as not, Halo 4 did that.
The problem is not that it improved the graphics, it's that it when too far.
Gameplay > graphics is something you hear all the time, but 343 knows that gamers and the press are impressed with graphics when attempting to hype a game. This game was very much focused on fluff and rather than substance. Good looking game instead of things gamers, at the end of it all, want, such as an open beta, good AI, good multiplayer, etc.
The lack of open beta is a fantastic example. If people had played the beta, there would have been a huge backlash, and it likely would have been saved. Instead, we just got screenshots and vidoc after vidoc. Visuals. That's all we got. Visuals (and some sound). Fluff, in other words. Surface-level stuff. It's clear that 343 was more interested in the way the game appeared to the public to really up those initial sales than the actual substance of the game. Don't get me wrong, the game isn't half-assed. But it's about priorities. And it looks like the whole thing worked, too. Initial sales for Halo 4 were insane.
You only have a limited amount of resources to do things.
Also, recall that sound takes inordinate amounts of CPU power. Up to a third. You will recall that Halo 4 is very sound heavy. Lots of high quality sounds being processed, up to the point that they had to set the quality/volume of the music down to where you could practically not hear it at all (the fact that there was no music volume slider, a standard option in video games for years now, provides more support for this).
With a ton of CPU power being dedicated to sound, you've got even less for complex things like AI.
I never said that they just shoot. I was giving an example.
User 73706
Banned
FUNKNOWN iXi
Member
I like you.
Or alternately, have it get progressively worse. Having it at one particular spot suddenly off would be really odd and dissonant imo. You could mess around with at one point it starts, and how quickly it dissipates the further you go out, but having a single abrupt point at which it stops wouldn't work well I would think.
Oh, and yes. I like you too. You get it.
Me? Get bent out of shape about video games?
Never.
:lol
Might actually be interesting, we couldn't have that.
RIP Assault. We hardly knew ye. ;_;
It does, though. Microsoft has a lot of money, but even they aren't dedicating unlimited money to the project. Sacrifices are always made somewhere.
So... You're saying that it's an acceptable compromise? To have gorgeous areas that are tiny and completely uninteresting from a gameplay standpoint? In my view, it's bad game design. Reach looked absolutely gorgeous, and look at what it accomplished. There was no reason they needed to crank it up as much as they did, it completely compromised every other aspect of the game. Hugely disappointing.
Why? A long-time fan isn't allowed a little hyperbole every now and then? Halo was my favorite (still is, I suppose, if you exclude 4) gaming franchise of all time. I'm obviously going to be upset when the series takes such a huge and dramatic departure from the previous formula, especially when it's in the complete wrong direction as is the case here.
In comparison to every previous title in the series they most certainly are.
it accomplished making me hate the game.
Fun Factor
Formerly FTWer
I always thought Halo 3, to me, looked better, these are the reasons why.
You didn't like the art style in Reach? To each their own, I suppose, but it stands as the most aesthetically pleasing Halo title in my book.
hooijdonk17
Member
Halo 3 does not look better than 4, I have no idea where this comes from. It's technically more impressive in some regards, especially lighting, shadows, HDR. But overall it looks much worse, mostly due to low geometry, low resolution, terrible aliasing, ugly character models and awful animations.
Reach was by far the best looking of the Halo games, IMO.
Awful animations? What, like, in cutscenes? Because Bungie Haloes' gameplay animations were always leagues ahead of 343's static animatronics, and those are infinitely more important and impressive.
I wouldn't even say that Halo 3's cutscenes were badly animated, they just made it look like the cartoon it was. Mocap would only make their low poly puppets look more awkward.
hooijdonk17
Member
Human animations looked awful ingame and in cutscenes (they wer emuch more obvious here though). The lack of any motion capture effort was painfully obvious. I love me some Halo 3, but remembering the human models and animations make me cringe still..
old manatee
Banned
Halo 4 has the worst Halo campaign and honestly I doubt I'll play any more of them. Another franchise run completely into the dirt. Everything interesting to me about the first game has been ground off or buried under bullshit.
Halo 4 is my least favourite Halo with respect to visual aesthetics.
It's often very cluttered, and there's not much of a sense of iconic imagery outside of cutscenes and "vignette" moments. The game doesn't enjoy the deliciously bold color schemes of Bungie's games; usually, chromatic contrast is either very low, or only manifests through annoyingly harsh tron lines.
Halo 4 is also very inconsistent, making awkward graphical tradeoffs depending on the costliness of an area or scene. The game resultantly has difficulty blending different imagery and sequence types; the big skybox reveal at the start of Requiem would have had a lot more kick if they could have actually used it as a backdrop for major parts of the level, as Bungie had done with the view you get in Halo 1 after stepping out of the lifepod. The big impact of this is that Halo 4's levels have a hard time feeling spatially connected.
As I detailed earlier in the thread, Halo 4's graphics have lots of weaknesses with dynamic phenomena, and the game often winds up looking and feeling very "flat" in action as a result. The example that sits in my own mind as the most iconic: I round a corner in a warthog in Halo 1, I see the gigantic headlight reflection sweep across the walls; I round a corner in a warthog in Halo 4, nothing. It looks dead.
There are plenty of moments in Halo 4 that can look cool in and of themselves, but as an overall package, I'll take any other Halo.
They're pretty tacky, but over time Halo 3's cutscene animations have strongly grown on me. There's a serious stop motion action figure vibe going on, and it's awesome, especially with a light touch of the cutscene DoF.
Except for Lord Hood. That guy is one of the leading contenders for most appalling 3D model in a seventh-gen game.
See? This guy is talking some sense.
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