Disappointed. One would expect more of an XBOX flagship title in the making for so long. Especially considering Gears of War as the benchmark.
Ill note the watermark: halo3-0725.04.II.05.0927.AlphaBuild From what I have read online all the footage Bungie has shown publically is from an older build and the upcoming beta will look better, but still not up to par with the eventual final. Remember, the rumored released date is October, and even accounting for time to press the discs they still have around 5 months of development time.
Disapointing but on the plus side. It looks more like halo 1 (ie good texturing for a change and not the crap they pulled in halo 2). God why can't people match halo 1 in terms of good lod textures and not buckets of normal maps that should have been done with geometry.
I understand that it is an alpha build, don't get me wrong, but experience has shown that the final product can't be extremely different from its public images, especially considering they have only till October (press-time, debugging, etc included). Somehow, I doubt that it will reach the complexity of Gears in terms of visuals. Gameplay should be superior however to that of GoW.
After the ball-busting graphics from Halo2 (when compared to the gargantuan level of hype around that) back in 2004 makes me think that at least this time the "let down" wont be as big since the big premise is that, finally, we'll know how the friggin thing ends... Anyway, has bungie ever had the capacity to go against other studios? I remember the marathon games, and those werent that good at all (but again, it was Mac gaming) so did MS fucked it by paying so much for bungie just for the Halo exclusivity? after all, Halo was NOBODY before the Xbox, just one of those WiP games that only hardcore PC gamers were talking about. Is too late now, but if you ask me, getting a license from the Unreal3 engine would be a great idea...
The Marathon games were competitive for their day, although I find their aesthetic style pretty revolting. Can't deny that Halo looked great when it came out, though. So yeah, even though they've never made games that appealed to me, I think Bungie have consistently had the capacity to go against other studios...
They probably started Halo 3 on the xbox hardware and can't do great changes to the engine without major time extension. It does look like they cranked up the physics tremendously though.
What makes you think they started it on XBOX hardware? It doesn't make sense that they would start working on Halo 3 on the XBOX when they knew that the 360 was going to come.
qft... lots of parts of Halo 2 look markedly inferior to Halo 1... and I know this is an early alpha, but release is only 6 months away, and that screenshot is somewhat underwhelming.. =/
At least they aren't pulling a Halo 2 (you'll know what I mean if you've watched the "Making Of" on the Halo 2 bonus disc, which explains why H2 is a blah game instead of the game it could/should have been)...
That looks worse than the visuals I've already seen from other places. More than likely it is not the end result we will get.
Well, apart from the lack of anti aliasing, low quality textures, lack of bump mapping and poor lighting, it looks OK
the lack of Anti-Aliasing strikes me as odd though, even in the alpha build, because the 360, unlike other consoles , is able to pull x4FSAA without any noticable penalty, per Microsoft.
What's gets me is this BS about Alpha, pre-Beta et all builds. For crying out loud the game is going to be released in several months YOU should have the graphics ironed out by now ! Stupid Bungie, I sure as heck hope the know the can't pull a Halo 2 again and get away with it. They are way too full of themselves to be taken seriously anymore EvilWays: totally agree, the halfway mark of the Halo 2 doc was most illuminating when they figure out they don't have a game they have a demo.
I disagree: it had the graphics of Doom (93) in 97, plus with those crappy low-frame prerendered sprites, when on the other side people was playing quake (96) and waiting for quake2. Then they had the fully 3D (as in fully-poly) marathon resurrection project with wicked Quake3 graphics................in 2006:lol: Again, is not that bad since it was Mac gaming, but you gotta be honest: bungie was going nowhere near to where it is today if MS hadnt opened their wallet and trew money at them. Wait.....what? I didnt see that video, what was the problem? lack of time?
Marathon was released in 1994. Marathon Resurrection is a fan-made remake of Marathon in the form of a TC of Unreal Tournament. Do try to keep up.
Yeah I know, but new versions and maps kept it all the same, they didnt do any real upgrades, but continue to sell the same game over and over. My bad, a friend just told me that over Messenger like 10 mins ago...
Like, say, Final Doom in 1996? Maybe Doom Collector's Edition in 2001? By comparison, the Marathon games all had totally different maps and had engine differences...? Seriously, engine-wise Marathon Infinity (the final game in the Marathon Trilogy, released in 1996, not 1997) is comparable to Duke Nukem, which was released the same year. Ok, neither of them are Quake, but then Quake is a pretty special case; more or less an industry reset. The next FPS game Bungie started on was Halo if I'm not mistaken, and we know where that went. I guess I don't know what you're complaining about, exactly? Like I say, I'm not a huge fan of their games, but all of your criticisms apply to comparable developers in the PC industry.
Dude those were merely re-releases, not a flagship game, and thats what I'm talking about here. My point is simple: bungie is what it is today thanks to MS. Without that kind of help they would be in the exact same place they were before the buyout. And even with all that help from MS they cant archieve the technical prowess of other standalone studios like id, Valve and Epic. EDIT: theres that "et tu brute?" ad-documentary from bungie that shows some footage of Halo3 and the new brutes. I've to say it looks halfway between FEAR and GoW, but again the video is subVGA so you cant tell if the jaggies from the screenshot above are there or not.
