Am I the only one around here

by uberfoop , Seattle-ish, Friday, March 29, 2013, 12:35 (4046 days ago) @ Cody Miller
edited by uberfoop, Friday, March 29, 2013, 12:41

Did you see MGS 5? It's running on current gen hardware and looks next gen.

Oh, you mean the game running on Konami's proprietary in-house FOX Engine? ;)

Games with Unreal engine 3 are consistently better looking than H3/Reach, and have an amazing diversity.

That's more than a little subjective. There is a core "look" that unmodified UE3 tends to provide, and not everyone likes it. And it wouldn't necessarily be what Bungie wanted with Halo.
Sure, Bungie could go pull a Mirrors Edge and do things like implement a different lighting model into UE3... And we're right back to talking about custom graphical engineering.

I'm not sure where you're coming from with the notion that Reach is terribly graphically outclassed by other 360 games. I can see where the argument comes from with Halo 3 because Bungie compromised so heavily on raw detail (I still think it was totally worth it, but it doesn't shock me that people disagree), but Reach is no slouch in that department.
How many UE3 games with as wide open environments full of as much interactive stuff and can be moved about as quickly and freely (and hence necessitate being able to push all the details in the environment on the fly) are much more impressive?

Actually, this attitude of Reach being graphically unimpressive perplexes me in general. Halo 4 is applauded for being super graphically impressive, but Reach isn't all that far behind Halo 4 in terms of raw stuff-pushing, and there's a lot of stuff it graphically does better. It has seemingly higher-quality HDR resulting in less hazy bloom, its water is a semi-interactive 3d-animated surface as compared with Halo 4's static surface, environment shadows aren't dithered, it has more particles, the dynamic lights are big enough that they actually have an effect on the visual makeup of the game, the LODing is astronomically less aggressive, and textures are typically better. Heck, for all the praise Halo 4's shadowing gets, Reach's in-game dynamic and self shadows are actually often higher-resolution (seriously, compared the ones on the scorpions), which means that Reach's environment and dynamic shadows both do things better than Halo 4's. And that's all while filling fairly large and fleshed-out combat areas with reasonable amounts of simultaneous enemies and physics objects and tracking data for theater, the former 2 of which Halo 4 only does rarely and the latter of which it never does.
I agree that Reach doesn't look quite as "polished" as most of its competitors... Bungie could easily have changed that by dropping the quality of the HDR while increasing the lighting contrast to get hazy Halo 4-style bloom, adding in some hazy screen-space godrays, applying a blurry post-process filter, and using less colour contrast. Bungie doesn't do that because they care more about crisp imagery and diverse, bold colour schemes. (This is part of why all the screen-space godrays in Destiny footage has me a little worried.)