Eurogamer
After a few years of offering only the smallest hints at what it's been working on, 343 Industries finally came clean at this year's E3. No more CG trailers, no more offline rendered "in-engine" cinematics - instead, actual Halo 4 gameplay was revealed, and with it our first chance to get a look at the new tech operating in real-time on standard Xbox 360 hardware.
Microsoft chose Halo 4 to commence proceedings at its E3 press conference and it's easy to see why - it was by far and away the strongest title in its entire presentation. This is perhaps not surprising. When the platform holder realised that its relationship with Bungie was drawing to a close, it founded 343 Industries - an in-house, Halo-specific studio that quickly set out to recruit a wealth of top-tier games developmental talent, including ex-Space Shuttle program coder and nuclear physics award winner Corrinne Yu, who acts as principal engine architect - along with her husband, senior art director Kenneth Scott, previously responsible for defining the look of many of id Software's greatest games.
Over the last three to four years, the newly formed 343 Industries team has substantially rewritten the entire Halo engine bequeathed to it by Bungie, resulting in a game that builds upon the foundations of its predecessors in terms of core gameplay but also receives a state-of-the-art visual revamp. Halo: Reach got close, but the new game is the first outing for the Master Chief that plays out at native 720p. The ghosting temporal anti-aliasing solution found in Bungie's swansong has also gone in favour a more modern post-process anti-aliasing solution, almost certainly NVIDIA's FXAA. But beyond the basic set-up of the framebuffer, there's a whole lot more going on with Halo 4's visuals, and lighting, environment detail and effects work reaches new heights for the series.
Factoring in the timelines and the fact that commonalities in specific visual effects with Halo: Reach are few and far between, it may well have been the case that there was some degree of overlap between the development of the two games. It's almost as if both 343 and Bungie ventured off in different directions at some time in the past.
http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-tech-analysis-halo-4-at-e3#comments
