http://www.bungie.net/News/con...sures

And if I am hearing correctly, some Red vs Blue fans might be pleasantly surprised...

Another Halo game for my birthday!!! 9/25

I have to be honest, with the exception of Halo 2, the Halo universe hasn't let me down. I have been playing Halo Wars nonstop since i got it. I am actually going to through the Halo 3 campaign this week, that video made me want to play Halo again. I was a skeptic at first, but this game looks promising. I hope it delivers. At least the collectors edition will have something extra that you can actually use, an extra controller.

Why the hell am i excited for this game?

I feel like im still attracted to bridget from Guilty Gear. I told myself i wouldnt care about a Halo3:Lite, but the trailers and gameplay have looked so enticing......what to do, what to do.

FYI: This is Bridget

This is also a dude.

Honestly, I thought that trailer sucked. Sure Mal's voice suits the setting well but the dialog he was reading was terrible for the most part.

Also, the character faces look TERRIBLE. I've seen better from PS2 games.

MinisterofDOOM wrote:Honestly, I thought that trailer sucked. Sure Mal's voice suits the setting well but the dialog he was reading was terrible for the most part.

Also, the character faces look TERRIBLE. I've seen better from PS2 games.

Let me guess, when you watch p0rn and critique the plot and music quality.

Odds are that there aren't going to be many visuals of what's behind the visor, I expect to see a mirrored faceplate when I happen to see one at all - remember, the storyline has the FNG separated from the rest of his squad. Frankly, I'll be surprised if any of the faces that are seen are anywhere outside of a cutscene.

Graphics like that aren't important to me, for me its always been about...1. Playability - is it fun?2. Controls - bad controls make #1 impossible3. Camera angles - bad camera control can ruin a game, but not always

Then the less concrete game qualities like story, dialogue and visuals come into play. Think about something as old as the original Diablo, do the low quality graphics present throughout the game make it any less enjoyable? Do the outstanding visuals of Crysis make it a better than any other run of the mill shooter (provided your PC can handle it)? While Halo has some good graphics I'd never say that they were top tier, and I wouldn't want them to be if it were at the sake of numbers 1,2 & 3 above.

Certainly the dialogue we've heard up to this point is no Mass Effect, Assassin's Creed, or Half-Life 2, but its also no "All your base..." either. Given Halo's typicasl in-game storytelling I expect a lot of dialogue, even after FNG is alone, but there's a big multiplayer part of ODST, so I don't hold it to the same standard as I would a game that's mainly (or completely) single player.

Still, even though I'm a fan of the Halo franchise I find myself on the fence about this installment. I understand that multiplayer is a huge portion of most games on XBL and that a large part of ODST will continue to cater to this trend, but I really want a Halo game with a large, no HUGE, single player campaign with multiplayer only there as an afterthought (or not at all). ODST could have been amazing as a single trooper trying to make his way through a ruined city all alone and without support. From what I've heard it sounds like I'll be waiting a while longer.

I empathize with players that have purchased all of the Halo 3 muliplayer maps and are still going to have shell out for the full price of ODST, in effect paying for content that they already have. Bungie should have made a cheaper, "lite" version without the multiplayer content but with the new campaign/storyline.

BusyBadger wrote:Frankly, I'll be surprised if any of the faces that are seen are anywhere outside of a cutscene.

All the more reason for it to not look like s***.Plus...Halo 3 (and even Halo 2) never had any problems rendering faces in more detail than that. Why does this guy have a 4-poly beak-nose and two flat eyes and nothing more? The Aliens-ripoff Sarge dude certainly had better facial detail than this squad leader guy does.

I honestly didn't click on that video link planning to hate it. I was hoping it'd be interesting. But the narration took me off guard it was so bad, and then I noticed the dude's 7-polygon face and cringed and he still wasn't shutting up or getting better lines, at which point my reaction to the trailer went down the toilet.The narration wasn't just "bad," it was a special kind of bad...my most despised kind of bad. It's called "trying to hard." It was very clearly trying to be dramatic-tough-guy-space-cowboy and failing really, really, really hard.

BTW, the very original design for Halo, before it was an Xbox exclusive, was hugely multiplayer focused, not single player with multiplayer as an afterthought. It was supposed to feature multiplayer battles on a new scale, with vehicles and pilotable craft and tons of people per team and just be generally freaking epic. None of that came true of course, aside from the vehicles, because they game was stripped down so much to fit on the Xbox. Whoops.

MinisterofDOOM wrote:
All the more reason for it to not look like s***.Plus...Halo 3 (and even Halo 2) never had any problems rendering faces in more detail than that. Why does this guy have a 4-poly beak-nose and two flat eyes and nothing more? The Aliens-ripoff Sarge dude certainly had better facial detail than this squad leader guy does.

I honestly didn't click on that video link planning to hate it. I was hoping it'd be interesting. But the narration took me off guard it was so bad, and then I noticed the dude's 7-polygon face and cringed and he still wasn't shutting up or getting better lines, at which point my reaction to the trailer went down the toilet.The narration wasn't just "bad," it was a special kind of bad...my most despised kind of bad. It's called "trying to hard." It was very clearly trying to be dramatic-tough-guy-space-cowboy and failing really, really, really hard.

Are we looking at the same video?I know the 7 poly comment was a huge hyperbole, but still the facial features dont look half bad.

Can you time stamp for me the points where the facial features were bad enough to warrant the comment.

Ive got some timestamps of relatively good facial features.1:18 - 1:25 < you get a good look at a bunch of faces which dont look half bad.

2:58 - 3:20

The narration was lame and clearly this guy isnt the best voice actor out there, but its just a trailer hopefully the narration isnt going to be this bad in the final product.

Actually, the dude's a good actor. He's the main character from Firefly. The lines they gave him just sucked.

Timestamp:About 1:23. That's really horrible. A couple of the other guys look okay, but still way below par for a 360 game.

MinisterofDOOM wrote:Timestamp:About 1:23. That's really horrible. A couple of the other guys look okay, but still way below par for a 360 game.

Really? I see plenty of polygons in there. You can see it in the shadowing and lighting quite a bit. There is definition that couldn't be there unless there were plenty of polygons. Particularly in the softness in his appearance as it would struggle to render that smoothly with a loy poly model. Not to mention the blend shapes (mouth movements) are pretty good and match the words well. Something that would be quite difficult to achieve with a low poly model. For a great example, look no further than Captain Keyes in the first Halo. To me, his mouth movement looked like a switch in textures rather than any kind of actual animation.

As for the quality of the trailer, sure, it wasn't great. But my focus was not on the cinematography of a game trailer, but rather what the game will appear to play like. Which is ultimately what is important. We'll find out late september how good (or bad) this game will actually be. But the gameplay looks pretty good so far...

The low res trailer was partly to blame. I downloaded the high res one at home (bandwidth at work is crap) and everything looks a lot better. Still, the detail in Nathan Fillion's digital face is pretty lacking.

MinisterofDOOM wrote:The low res trailer was partly to blame. I downloaded the high res one at home (bandwidth at work is crap) and everything looks a lot better. Still, the detail in Nathan Fillion's digital face is pretty lacking.

Not saying its a realistic model or implying its so great. Just a whole lot better than you suggested (even if it was an exaggeration). Its likely its an in-game render. Which means the assets they are using are likely limited. Game artists can easily do better. The question is, is it worth it, and does it conflict with any other part of the game (more complicated models will take up more space, making rendering more difficult and taking up more disc space. Sure, they could up the ante and pre-render the movie, but that would take up even more disc space.

Either way, its not a reflection of the most important aspect of the game. I doubt people who like the game play of the halo series will be disappointed. Hopefully.

Yeah, I hear you. If they quality was really as bad as the low-res trailer made it appear, though, it would be a different story. That's why I was so surprised by it.

I still will probably get this. Even though I'm not known for my love of the series, I have owned and finished all 3 Halo games. Don't see why this one should be any different. And it looks like the devs are doing neat things with the HUD with night vision and low-light settings and stuff.

Yeah, I'm particularly interested in how the dynamics will change as we will be playing ODST's rather than Spartans and Elites.

MinisterofDOOM wrote:I have owned and finished all 3 Halo games.

There are currently 4 Halo games.

Yeah, I was ignoring Halo Wars and referring to the main FPS series.

I do need to get that one, too, though. I liked the base building system.

C-Kwik wrote:Yeah, I'm particularly interested in how the dynamics will change as we will be playing ODST's rather than Spartans and Elites.

Hopefully in PvP it will prevent all that jumping Spartan crap. That's one of those reason I still prefer Rainbow Six to Halo for online shooting. And above Rainbow Six I'll take the original America's Army, too bad all the console releases were so awful.

Re-spawning is FTL.