Resolution vs Effects (Gaming)

by uberfoop , Seattle-ish, Tuesday, July 03, 2018, 00:15 (2135 days ago) @ Revenant1988

LOL YES, it did.

The Elites for example were ripped out Reach!

Sharing some assets doesn't mean the style is the same. If anything, sharing assets from multiple games with different styles was a visible complaint about CEA.

CEA is arguably in the same 'art' style as the Bungie era games. H4 and H5 are not, at all.

CEA was starting to go in the direction of Halo's 4 and 5 in some respects. It has a lot of disruptive macrodetailing, and makes considerable use of the sorts of teal-and-orange-esque palettes that 343i often likes. It also pretty much dropped Bungie's snazzy specular emphasis.

But also, while there are some common themes through the Bungie Halo games, they don't all share the same art style. Like, Halo 1 is extremely juicy and also oozes with a bit of an almost 1990s sega visual attitude, while Halo's 2 and 3 have an almost stop-motion-action-figures thing going on.

From a technical perspective, H4 had a wayy higher level of detail and effects than the previous entries

Not really. It's got a lot of very polished asset work, and it does make extensive use of techniques that make the environments look like they contain lots of detail. But it also makes a lot of graphical compromises compared with its predecessors.

Although the game supports large numbers of dynamic lights, the quality of dynamic lights is perhaps the worst in the entire series; dynamic lights have no specular reflections, and they're all point lights. So vehicles don't have actual spotlight headlights, there's no flashlight, and there's no gloss to the reflections.

The environmental baked lighting is also compromised in some respects. The game doesn't appear to have the "area specular" that Bungie used for indirect specular in their 360 Halo games, causing snazzy materials in complex lighting environments to often exhibit issues like false rim lighting.

A lot of effects light explosions are just plain toned down, including having less debris from vehicles and such.

A lot of special-case stuff is poor. Water is often very low-quality, not just in terms of splash interactivity but also lighting (a lot of the water doesn't really react to environment lighting at all). And the game is never really asked to do much in terms of weather.

Halo 4 is a very graphically refined game, and it cleverly goes about achieving its visual goals, but it's not the huge-leap-in-every-way that it's sometimes made out to be.