I read this thread because I wanted to dispel some of my ignorance about some of these Xbox 360 games. I guess you could say that a lot of games make tradeoffs.

Some of the first PC shooters I played were what was called corridor shooters in that you had a much more narrow frame of view with essentially cheap walls taking up a large proportion of the rendered area of your monitor. Your general Wolf3d, Blake Stone etc. This was an artistic choice to maximise the best visuals from more limited resources.

Ever since the days of corridor shooters, developers have made tradeoffs between different artistic choices they could make and in the end much of this has been interpretted as technical differences when infact they are really the differences in artistic choices. The goal of a games designer is to make the tradeoffs they make transparent to the player and to make it seem like the choices they made are the natural fit for the game.

Since I recently played Uncharted 2 nearly to the end, one extremely obvious gameplay design element has to be that people cannot tranverse back the way they came. The game design is extremely linear and unidirectional. I lost track of the number of times I went to a certain area and the way back was cut off by some means. My guess is that is has something to do with their streaming system and how they optimised the game.

guys... GUYS...

it is 100% confirmed to be real time in-game engine!

http://twitter.com/bungietweets/status/6616587410

reachs in-game engine has a CGI look which looks better than halo 3s real CGIs.

this is a major improvement! actually, the game will look the same as in the trailer just with BATTLE-ACTION on a very big scale with a lot of special effects. which means = it will look even better in action than the trailer.

also to the other guys comparing it to UC2 and KZ2...

my impression:

animation: they are awesome on all 3. one game has to be halo, the other has to be KZ2-drama and the other is just awesome in every way.

frames: goes difinitely to Reach. the game does look much more smooth than the other 2 judged by the trailer - which is the most important thing for a fps.

character models poligon-wise: goes to UC2. then comes reach and after reach comes KZ2.

character models texture-wise: goes to UC2. then comes reach and after reach comes KZ2.

character models shader-wise: goes to Reach, then comes KZ2 and then comes UC2.

ground textures: goes to UC2. Tie between KZ2 and Reach.

environment athmosphericl effects (like dust and wind): goes to KZ2 then comes Reach and then comes UC2. this is all judged by 1 trailer. i still doubt the effects will be as good as in KZ2.

special effects: goes to KZ2 with UC2 a little behind. we dont know anythiing about Reachs special effects because we havent seen any battles.

lighting: this one is a hard one and is very much depending on the art-style of each game. all 3 games did a great work here. in Reach you get the CGI-like feeling and the reflections on the spartans-character model is very realistic - its still your Halo-looking game though, which one like more, another like less. in UC2 you have a completly different art-style and the strong lighting fits it very good and is almost perfect. KZ2 uses a completly different render-and lighting engine which gives it a completly different feeling and an overall completly different graphical appearance. design-wise i would give it to KZ2 then Reach then UC2... but thats just me.

CGI-like appearance: all 3 have it in different ways. the games feature 3 completly different worlds. Reach looks a lot like CGI while still managing the Halo-style. KZ2s CGI appearance is all due to special effects and spot-lights in combination with the darkness and not so colorfull world. UC2 is the complete opposite from KZ2 with a lot of colours and strong HDR lighting and it looks even better.

Overall: lets ask some questions here: does Halo Reach look like CGI? yes it does. Is it still featuring the Halo universe/art-style? yes it is. Does it look great for what it is and for what it tried to be? of course. Does the same apply to UC2 and KZ2? yes. all 3 games did an awesome job in delivering awesome graphics for their respective worlds/designs/art-styles/whatever.

NOTE: this is all based on my opinion, because we dont know any specific numbers of polygones and pixels.

I do have to say that tehe Reach trailer looks FANTASTIC on the 360, 720P downloaded from the marketplace,

I'm not going to comment about Reach vs KZ2/Unchartred 2 as Reach is still in development and has a good 9 months of development yet, looking great though and looks like they are using the latest effects from the latest 360 development kit!

I'm just enjoying some of the reactions from some of the more...biased sony fans.  Let's face it we've had three threads created about the halo:reach trailer, all by Sony Defense Force, god forbid a thread get started about how good the trailer looked.

No offense, but you're only adding fuel to the fire. Besides, I haven't really seen any heated discussions in this thread.

These aren't Sony Defense Force. Those are people who like Halo .

I, the OP, am a massive Halo fan. Don't judge people just because they said something against a 360 game :)

of course you are a massive Halo fan, of course you are, of course, without even owning a 360 =/.

sorry man but you are a bad lier - of course your UC2 avatar and KZ2 sig makes you even more believeable. of course. nice try.

I own a 360, never liked Halo 3 or ODST and i am looking forward to Halo Reach. Why? easy! the trailer was awesome and the game seems very promising. i hope the gameplay keeps up with the awesomeness of the trailer.

2010 is going to be the best year in gaming history! Reach, ME2, GOW3, GT5, HR, Rage, Alan Wake, Brink, Crysis 2, FIFA 11, PES 11, new NFS and many many many other games =).

How on earth would you know that I don't own a 360? I definitely own one (died on me) and I'm planning to get my second one around the time Halo: Reach releases...just because I haven't written down my gamertag on vgchartz doesn't mean I don't own the damn machine!

And I'll have you know that before my Killzone 2 sig, I had a Halo sig...honestly, why is it that someone can't like both consoles? I admit that I do prefer the PS3, but that doesn't mean I hate the 360...I'm a gamer, that's all, and gamers play anything that's good instead of being loyal to just one platform!