Agree with your post on ODST Simon. I enjoyed the campaign but I think it's harder to "get it" if you play like a Spartan in Halo 3. The differences are subtle. It may have been more apparent to me as I'm a melee-heavy Halo player and such tactics get you killed in ODST pretty quickly on Heroic or higher difficulties.

As for Stealth kills, in Turok you smash a knife into a dinosaur's head, perform a whisk like action and then whip it out with a shower of claret. Halo's stealth kills won't be anything like as good :P

I just hope there will be plenty of variety although that might be hard. In MP for balance all stealth kills will need to take the same time, which might handicap them a bit.

Not to burst your bubble Optimus, but It might just be the blood that splashes around when you shoot him. The AR is also pretty inaccurate so I don't think he's actually hitting the grunt's breathing apparatus....

Yeah that's blood, but then it could be one of those cloud/angels, angels/clouds thing where the poor sods are us who don't see it. :D

Damn I need to go and get a copy of ODST for myself now I want that beta!

The new video looks pretty killer, especially the night sequence. Some great post processing and filters and the lighting engine is off the hook there. Great stuff, especially the sample firefight at the barriers. Those sequences did a good job of filling in the empty, bland, and lifeless worlds by filling them in with content, interesting events, that added a lot of action.I was referring to major platform releases, and I stand by what I said: the initial batch of screens I was discussing were some of the empty, bland, and boring shots I have seen for a major release this generation. I am not saying there are not worse games, but of the games selling over 2M it is at the back of the pack for the HD consoles **in those shots** The colors are muted, textures appear to have little if any filtering, and the environments are empty with no real enemies or decorations.

I never said the end product wouldn't look better, but I think it is fair to say those shots show all those qualities. They didn't even show dramatic lighting or the like (see the pools sequence shots someone posted from the beginning of Halo 3 -- beautiful and detailed trees, water, dramatic lighting, great backdrop, etc -- from Halo 3).I know it sounds insulting, but Bungie said the same thing in the vid doc => How can they change things without people accusing them of killing their sacred kitten.Reread what was written. It was sarcasm; i.e. "Graphics > Gameplay, so lets cut enemy count down from 40 to 20 and add in whizbang graphical acronymns."

I am not one to junk gameplay for graphics. If graphics are servicable I don't think gameplay should be neutered for prettier pixels as long as it doesn't impact gameplay. What is servicable is debatable, but I still play some older games. For market reasons you obviously need good graphics in a title like this, but they shouldn't cut back huge battles for extra pixels when the gameplay is aimed at big battles.

You can also see a bird in the far, FAR background cast a dynamic shadow. Bungie totally re-wrote the shadow engine. Halo 3 had very poor shadowing--Halo Reach may have the best shadowing tech for dynamic objects on a console.I will back you up here and then add some as I think you are being too generous.

First is general blueprint. If you are going to do 4 player split screen every aspect of your engine needs to scale. Gameloop, physics, AI, graphics, sound, etc. There is a reason a game like KZ2 didn't just toss some coop in--you really need to plan, and it impacts what technology you use. If you are just edging by at 30Hz with SP you cannot just say, "Lets add in another splitscreen and cut resolution down." Your tech NEEDS to depricate nicely and your art needs to do this in same.

So as Deft said it isn't just about cutting down resolution and turning off some effects. Imagine with 4 player split screen: You have 4 players on TOTALLY different parts of a map. That means the same console needs ALL of that loaded into memory. It also means it needs to be actively calculating EACH area--in SP you could get away with stall states or doing very loosy routines for stuff not in the player sphere. This means you need to design assets to fit into memory and run. You also need the AI to be workable. Little things like sound are huge, too. Now you have 4 players generating sound, so your engine needs to be able to scale downward in sample quality and number of channels. The graphics are also a challenge because both your engine AND art need to scale. Cutting resolution isn't enough, so when you start turning off some shadows and shaders and texture resolution does the game still remain playable? And did you leave enough processing power to split the screen 4 ways, do 4 distinct viewports? Not trivial at all in terms of performance.

So you need to have art assets that work with this + have an engine where you picked shaders and techniques that work with this.

So undoubtable allowing split screen SP and 4 way MP does have a HUGE impact on graphics. It doesn't mean a game cannot look good--far be it--but there is a reason Uncharted 2 looks the way it does. It is more linear and doesn't need to consider the difficulty of scaling to mp splitscreen for SP content.

So should Halo Reach drop splitscreen SP and 4 way MP? NO. The gameplay is the primary issue. People bought ODST like gangbusters. The fact Reach looks a TON better will make most consumers VERY happy. It need not be the "best" technically. Bungie gets it: one major reason people love Halo is it is social. Hence why it has been a major mover in console online play and they really pushed out a lot of social tools (Bungie.net, Forge, Theater, 4 player SP coop!!, 4 play MP on one box, 2 player SP on one box, etc) that you don't see other games even attempting. -- BFBC2 would gain a LOT with 4 player coop for SP. But I don't think people understand how subtle and significant these features resonate with gamers for long term appeal.

Like I said weeks ago Bungie gets it.

The important thing: you can finally run.