God I remember losing my shit when I saw this demo for the first time.
i'm still upset we didn't get to play this
The shot of the sniper/spotter is one of my favorite cutaways in any piece of media.
I don't know why either, but it adds a lot for some reason.
I honestly think Halo CE aged a lot better than the final release Halo 2.
Yes and no. I feel the environments in Halo 2 largely aged better, but a lot of the individual character assets reek of mid 00s graphics.
Halo 1 aged more consistently, I think. Everything looks 'bad' in a charming way.
Visually? Yeah. Gameplay wise? No.
Halo 2 tried to do more graphically but I think their early attempts at bump maps and the toned down color palette really drag it down, so I still think by-and-large Halo CE looks better even if Halo 2 looked better at the time by pushing the system further.
CE does look better for the most part, mostly due to the color palette.
Honestly if they followed the vivid palette of the E3 demo even with the downgrades they probably could've achieved something pretty comparable visually, even if the full release didn't measure up technically.
I think Halo 2's gameplay and level design has aged better though. Halo CE is fun but even early on it gets way repetitive. Halo 2's sandbox and physics make the combat a little more dynamic and the spaces and setpieces always kept things fresh.
Plus some were just really great, like when you have to cut the cables in the heretic mission. The way they did that end part of the mission really made it feel like the whole facility was plunging down at high speed
I always loved this demo because I love the story and setpieces of Halo above anything.
Would be amazing if 343 would remaster it just as a thank you to the fans.
that's all literally trend shit; people like colorful and cartoony now, and which version looks coloful and cartoony.
five years from now something else will look "better"
They considered it but the demo is held together by duct tape and required several guiding hands to make it work. It wasn't worth the effort to do it.
Nah, the 7th-gen was a mistake in terms of art direction, only a few games made the decision to not go full on grey/brown sepia, and they still look very good today.
https://www.windowscentral.com/sites/wpcentral.com/files/styles/xlarge/public/field/image/2017/11/halo-3-screenie.jpg?itok=N29W7lbw
VS
https://thegtaplace.com/images/gta4/screenshots/pc/gta-iv-pc-screenshot_050.jpg
Except FPS corridor shooters don't inform all of gamingdom and never did. Neither do pixel art games nor the resurgence of neon nor the current need to color grade the shit out of everything with a "master tone".
That isnt a fair comparison. The halo picture you posted is from the Eldewrito mod which is a game that was made for the PC in 2015; updated, re-written and everything.
In reality Halo 3 would have looked like this
https://files.facepunch.com/forum/upload/238897/06f90777-11d4-457a-bc03-9e1460cede32/image.png
No it's not, that's a pre release Halo 3 shot.
The point still stands because look at Halo 3 MCC, it's still the same maps but with a higher resolution. The point is about art direction - Halo 3 has a colorful direction, GTA IV does not. If you up the rez in GTA IV it still looks like ass while Halo 3 does not.
If i dug around in the shed i could find an ancient gameinformer with that picture. I spent hours of my youth just staring at pictures in anticipation of halo 3 that is an original screen.
dewrito doesn't even have that map, are you sure?
Pretty sure it was this exact GamePro issue too. Shame I'm not at my parent's house and I can't dig out from my closet
http://blogs-images.forbes.com/erikkain/files/2011/11/gamepro.jpg
When on viewed on a CRT from 2007, it looks like this in that same level:
https://russellsreviews.files.wordpress.com/2009/11/halo-3-20070923023559740.jpg
Which depending on the directing of the scene, can be drab.
https://content.halocdn.com/media/Default/games/halo-3/media/h3_004-36714d0f450240afa780c4fcd9a68a17.jpg
But that's on the cinematic director, just add in some light and walk into a scene that isn't shaded and boom:
https://cdn.stevivor.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/arbiter.jpg
This, frankly, is how color correction should be done.
I guess it doesn't really matter since you guys are only talking about color and nothing else. IMO Halo 3 looks better then GTA4 in terms of color and art direction; but in terms of everything else GTA4 looked way better; even in that picture posted above.
In what, model density, model polycount, surface microfacet model? On all of those counts, Halo 3 is superior. GTAIV is an open world, and that's what it excels at. It's just a shame it's tied to such an ugly aesthetic.
you know you should really not go through the effort of snipping someones comment down if you're going to miss crucial information pertaining to their point.
i said it subjectively looks better and more contemporary then halo 3's blocky and chunky world design
If things aren't in terms of art direction, then you can basically go into technical differentiation (polycount, shader model, etc). Making claims about such things can't be "subjective" since you're making statements that can be proven true/false.
And I can make these claims pretty easily:
The only really complicated shader in GTA4 is the proto-pearlescent car paint shader, everything else is just bog-standard 7th-gen specular+env+diffuse.
Halo 3 on the other hand, has proto-PBR:
https://s.gvid.me/s/2017/01/27/sbY065.png
https://s.gvid.me/s/2017/01/27/2R7345.png
https://s.gvid.me/s/2017/01/27/Cyc793.png
GTA4 is also LDR (to my knowledge), whereas Bungie made the very forward thinking decision of going HDR:
https://s.gvid.me/s/2017/01/27/P8g392.png
So as far as lighting complexity and shader model, Halo 3 wins hands down.
Simply due to how large the GTA4 world must be, the can't pump as high res textures, or as many polygons per screen area as compared a smaller-scope game such a Halo.
Just compare the "hero" characters:
https://www.gtagaming.com/images/24830/1384121252_untitled.png
https://shadowofthevoid.files.wordpress.com/2013/01/masterchief-comparison.png
Niko looks to have about the same number of polys as Halo 2 chief.
GTA4 Combat Sniper:
http://www.imfdb.org/images/thumb/0/0b/GTAIV_psg1_world.jpg/600px-GTAIV_psg1_world.jpg
Halo 3 SR:
http://s3.amazonaws.com/estock_dev/fspid10/68/74/85/halo-master-chief-687485-o.jpg
And on and on. Halo 3 isn't a huge open-world game, so obviously it can spend its budget in different ways - and these are a better shader model, higher poly characters and textures.
You know, I actually sat and read through your entire post; and I want to give you credit where it would be due but you really didn't say anything with it. You just labelled the types of shader each game used and then said "it looks like halo 3 has a higher poly count" without knowing the actual numbers or if anything you said was actually true; lol.
Also lay back man, I know you made your post obscenely long to bait winner ratings and it just comes across as forced. Like I said, it's all in my opinion that GTA4 looks better.
Congrats on reading a post with only around 200 words, I guess?
Halo 3's Cook-Torrance BRDF is able to represent materials of way more sophistication and variety than the de-fact Blinn-Phong used in basically all 7th-gen games. Modern graphics look so good in part because of the move to "PBR" and subsequently these BRDF models. It's very easy to see in any lit shot of Halo 3 vs GTA4 (and most other 7th-gen games) that its materials are much more diverse and expressive.
As for strict polycounts, I wish I had numbers, but it's very non-trivial for me to rip some Niko model, chief model, and then the weapons to compare exact poly and vertex count - just look at the screengrabs and you get an idea of what model has more geometric detail (Hint: Pretty clearly Halo). Also FWIW, since Halo is FPS, there's always going to be a huge high-poly weapon on-screen, whereas 3rd-person shooters, the 3d "world" model is all you get.
Just because you're upset you got dumb'd to oblivion doesn't mean I care about ratings. I made the post as long as it needed to be to demonstrate my points; lest you go off again about how I'm not providing evidence.
Anyway, my conviction that the 7th-gen was largely an brown/sepia mess with horrible shading must've been shared by the industry, since at the end of it, and the early 8th-gen, we finally started getting color back!
Prime example: GTAV, which released on PS3/Xbox360.
https://steamcdn-a.akamaihd.net/steam/apps/271590/ss_6efecf505052b51071024f32dc4db364cbb0ab6e.jpg?t=1516043170
https://steamcdn-a.akamaihd.net/steam/apps/271590/ss_fae62fcb24412928d97ec23b6bd9473b26690596.jpg?t=1516043170
https://steamcdn-a.akamaihd.net/steam/apps/271590/ss_ea78dfa1d7d81c3781287cab165f64ca70f1f2ea.jpg?t=1516043170
Never quite realized how forward thinking Halo 3's renderer really was. Thanks for the info on that! Got a link to the original presentation?
The one I was referencing was "Lighting and Material of HALO 3"
http://halo.bungie.net/inside/publications.aspx
Though, all of Bungie's publications are worth looking at.
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