So I finally got a chance to sit down with Halo 3 tonight and played some multiplayer and the first few missions. The multiplayer is fun, it's all been done before but it's fun. The campaign is meh so far. I tried heroic right off and got my ass handed to me so I had to go down to normal. As for the look of the game, I understand the complaints.
Outside, the game is beautiful. I loved that first mission because you actually feel like you're in these large lush environments and they just did a spectacular job on these places. Everything feels very natural and it actually feels like place. There vegetation everywhere, the water is nice, everything has curves and isn't boxy, the textures are great. The outside part of Halo 3 is just great.
Once you step inside a non-natural place, the game just turns bad though. It's a shame that the outside looked so great but the inside is just so boring. The have boring textures everywhere with almost no decals to make one boring hallway look different than another boring hallway. Their idea of populating the area is to throw large boxes and ruined trucks everywhere and maybe some dead bodies for good measure and the place just doesn't feel real. You can tell everything was placed there for one particular reason and the place just doesn't come off feeling natural.
If you really want to see a game that did this well, just look at Quake 4. Yeah, Quake 4 wasn't that great but they did an awesome job through texture use and prop placements to make their spaces feel real. Instead of a wall just being one BSP block, they cut theirs into many pieces and brought together many very nice textures to make their spaces come alive. Halo 3 just uses boring textures and has the most minimal prop placements it can get away with. Every prop there has the specific use of cover which is nice for gameplay but doesn't do anything to make their space worth anything. It would have actually made the gameplay better if they took the same time in their metal environments as they did their outside ones.
There are more complains I have about the game, but those can be for another thread. All in all, Halo 3 isn't a bad looking game, it's just the inside areas are boring and repetitive because of their poor texture use and prop placement (it also makes the places harder to navigate since every place looks exactly the same).
