A gamer with sense; finally!

But I think Killzone 2 is the best example of boredom and dull looking. Are the KZ developers colour-blind or something?

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).

And just to prove the Quake 4 stuff, these are the first few screenshots chosen at random from google image search.


Notice the rounded wall on the right. It's round so it's automatically more interesting (something Halo 3 doesn't do) and notice all the textures being used just on that one wall. It takes an insane amount of effort to make just that one wall, but it's worth it. Look how nice that wall looks just because of good texture choice.


Notice how these walls are in no way flat. Halo 3 at least angles a lot of their walls in so they aren't completely flat, but they are still just a single plane. Adding those little alcoves makes them so much more interesting.


More good texture choices here. Even the ceiling is nice with just its one texture because it's rounded. The other textures are interesting because they're mixed with other textures and they're just more interesting.


And once again, a mixture of textures and shapes to make a space that feels more real.

I'm not saying Quake 4 is a better game (Quake 4 was actually not that good of a game) but its inside environments were just so much more interesting because you can tell they actually took some time to make those. If Bungie had put the same amount of detail into the inside areas as they did their outside areas, the game would have looked so much better. Instead, we just get boring textures everywhere with boring shapes and minimal prop placement that makes every area look exactly the same and feel unreal.

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Bah, you'll have to view image to see all the images posted.

Ya know, I got bored with Quake 4 though. It became a chore playing the game. I'd force myself to play so that I could finish it and be done with it. But I finally decided that's stupid, a game is for fun. I traded it in. Does Quake 4 have better graphics. Sure. But Halo sure has gorgeous graphics still.  And I'm with DonWii and Androo.  Color is so much better!  I like the vibrant colors as opposed to dark colors and shadow.  And what happened to gameplay being the true factor of a better game?

Also, to be completly fair you really should compair graphics to games with the same scale. i.e. It is much easier to have better looking creatures if there is only going to be 2-10 fighting at once. (Such as Bioshock, Quake, Gears, etc.)

In Halo, the scale of conflict is much greater, with somtimes 20+ opponents on the battlefield with aircraft, vehicles, etc.

I completely agree that Halo 3 is the better game, in fact I thought I had said that Quake 4 wasn't that good of a game in one of my above posts. I wasn't comparing gameplay or creatures, I was just showing what interesting walls, floors, and ceilings through clever texture use and shapes can do for a space.

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And I wasn't even looking for the best or even good screenshots like people do when they try to tell me Halo 3 has the best graphics ever, I just google image searched Quake 4 and picked a few random screenshots on the first page.

You did say Quake 4 wasn't that great of a game, that is true. And Halo 3 could have been better with the enviorment design, you are right. But it wouldn't make the game anymore fun to me than it is right now.

 Now here's where I disagree with you.  Think of the feeling you get while you're walking through the outside jungle type of areas in Halo 3.  It's awesome right?  Why does it feel so good?  Because they put a lot of attention into the atmosphere and making that place feel like an actual place.  Doing that bring you into the game and just enhances it that much more.

 With the inside areas, they did a fine job of giving the player cover areas and things to maneuver around but it doesn't feel like a place.  Every place looks exactly the same and you can tell that every object was placed just for cover or tactical advantage and not because it just should be there.  This makes the area confusing (since every place looks the same) and feel very unnatural (and not in it's a man-made thing so it should feel unnatural way but in a this place would never exist like this type of way).

When the space you're playing in feels like an actual place, it brings you into the game more and would just enhance the already good gameplay that Halo 3 has even more.

again comes to preference, halo is is gorgous to my eyes, the lighting and color is drop dead gorgous sometimes, and on MULTIPLAYER!

 I completely agree that a lot of this is opinion and the lighting is great outside, but play through the game and really look at the inside areas.  They are boring as all Hell.  They don't necessarily look bad, just they are boring.  If they would have taken the same care with the inside areas as they took with the outside areas I think the game would have really benefited from it.

 As for the multiplayer areas, the same thing goes for them.  Outside the game is beautiful, inside it's boring.