The fact that 343 got back to you guys and already have tracked down the problem along with a fix that is being tested and in the works makes me so grateful for the work you guys do.
I do worry about series X stuttering in some games it's not in all games but it's been in a few. It has never been properly addressed I wonder if it's a hardware thing I hope not
This is what I call a review! You even helped 343 fix their cut scenes 👍. I haven't been so excited for a game since I lined up at midnight as a teenager for Halo 2 and 3.
Knowing how many players and critics play games with TV sound, I always appreciate John's focus on the audio design and music in games he covers - don't stop championing surround sound, it's truly a game changing experience. One I'd argue is more impactful than the jump you get in video quality going to a more expensive TV (coming from somebody who recently got a C1 OLED)
This is something that I can’t agree with enough. For me it was Ghost of Tsushima. The moment I calibrated my surround sound system properly and started playing it, it was just a whole new experience. Once you have tasted the surround sound of a properly integrated game, the other games with poor sound design just feel lacking.
Agreed that's why I am very happy that the next-gen consoles have dedicated hardware for audio and hopefully devs actually take advantage of it like Returnal's 3D audio. People made fun of Mark Cerny when he said they could ask for a picture of our ear to make personalized HRTF profiles but that would actually be revolutionary!
I use 11.1 yamaha amp with Dali danish speakers for Atmos and in general Xbox games haven't had a sound delay on my set up. I would assume his issue is his sound bar is not processing the sound fast enough. You should be able to allow for any delay in m/s with a decent sound set up anyway so it should be a non issue then.
@@sora6573 The animation for that game is poor though outside of combat. The character can't properly negotiate height in the environment. Just a bad flaw in the engine design in that regard.
@Gaea11$1000+ in microtransactions before even being out of beta. What other word is there for it? Yes I know you don't have to buy anything, but they are counting on it, a company with ethics would not have any microtransactions until the game is out of beta and all their planned multiplayer changes are added, and to have I dunno an HDR toggle for AMD gpu users so it doesnt look washed out on non-hdr screens. Performance tweaks etc. Its got the smell of a Perfect World MMO
@@Healcraft No one if forcing you to pay for Micro transactions, just play the game do the weekly's and you will level up and get the gear. ( there are no pay wall guns and no Pay wall gear) All you young players are the same, want to play three games and end the night with a Golden gun, Rose Skin and Gallahorn - Halo is the real deal for FPS no gimmicks no god guns, no god gear - get good or get gone. Looks like your leaving.
They imo really need to fix those shadows or the lack of any shadows on objects from large distances at least as a PC option. It really ruins the visual fidelity which is a shame because the textures and models in this game r quite incredible. They also have to fix the weird framerate miss match on animations compared to the fps the player is getting like when reloading a weapon.
@@mindrover777 So is horizon zero Dawn. I played that on PC and get higher framerates and it looks far better in terms of lighting with those higher framerates. Here’s hopping they do a metro exodus in terms of full raytraced global illumination for PC at least and this raytracing update that’s planned fixes those lighting issues. If not… well I can continue to say the visuals r dull and disappointing from a distance (clearly in smaller spaces like the interior it looks great thou). DLSS would be nice too.
@@dustraider2940 Where? I didn’t see that option. All my graphics settings were on max as far as I was aware and at 120FPS the animation looks like it’s going at 15FPS (probably cause my monitor hates this mis matched framerate and it’s tearing in a single position or something).
Forgot to mention it feels like the colours r off as well. Guess it’s because that blue hue they talked about every object glowing with kinda like how crysis 2 had this issue.
Just a John appreciation comment: you are a wonderful, professional and very talented presenter/storyteller. I hope we'll get to enjoy your work for many years to come.
What we've really discovered here, more studios need to get DF to critic the game before release during development so they can get all this stuff ironed out. DF, you guys are truly the professionals.
This got to be one of the few modern attempts at iconic franchises that don’t butcher the feel of the original but even add to it almost. Such a breath of fresh air.
It didn't innovate enough to be interesting for me. Standard Call of Duty style push-forward gameplay, regenerating shield rather than resource pickups. Shotgun fucking blows. Shooters which mess up the shotgun really irritate me.
@@Ahov "Standard Call of Duty style push-forward gameplay, regenerating shield rather than resource pickups" how fucking slowly did you play to feel like CoD where you're peeking, shooting, peeking, push forward, etc...?
I like the clean and simple presentation a lot, reminds me of how many classic games from the older generations looked, such as ninja gaiden or Metroid prime
My dissapointment is lack of co op and forge and it's much larger than 1% unfortunately. That being said I will play the campaign through for sure on PC and am keen.
343 Industries Head: Ok boys!! Congratulations!! We finished the game! Time to relax and enjoy your holi..... 343 Grunt: _Sir, sir.... Digital Foundry released a video reviewing our game_ .... 343 Industries Head: Ok boys!! Holiday's cancelled. Ready your notes and coffees!!!
Great job! I wish you guys covered HDR more as lately these games have had a washed out look that lacks in the contrast ratio department . It's very evident in the clip where John discussed the armor from the demo. The Demo has a very stong black level and pops were the current looks way to faded.
True and especially because barely anyone covers HDR in games well, so it's always a mystery whether the implementation is fucked or if it's just due to wrong settings that can be fixed manually.
Yep so many games suffer with this...ive resulted in running AC VALHALLA at limited colour space on my OLED so contrast pops more, luckily its actually ok like this, hope I dont have to with infinite
Why does it look like a 10 years old game remastered in 4k? I don't like the artistic approach. Everything looks artificial and colors are faded, flat and not vibrant. Look at the grass. It's so depressing to look at. There's no point in HDR as color palette is limited.
Probably hard for them to talk HDR as everyone will have a different experience based on their setup. Though it would be nice if they went into depth on the lvl of HDR customization available to draw attention to those devs who only add a simple on or off.
Excellent technical review! You basically covered it all. I look forward to another tech review once Co-Op Campaign is released next year which could potentially also include any updates between now and then. Great work John and Digital Foundry team!
There are 0 reasons why this game should not be 60 FPS in quality mode. It's 100% an old gen game. There are old gen games that look WAY better than Halo: Infinite.
@@CrashBashL Disagree. Multiplat games that aren't multi world and are last gen games themselves have been releasing at 4k 30 1440p 60 with a 1080p DRS. That's been the norm. No one complained. He compliments this game for running 60/120 modes, and a 1440p 120 mode at that, and suddenly there's a complaint. It doesn't matter what they "should be" running. What they have been running makes this impressive.
@@CrashBashL all games have different art styles and are made in different engines. It’s going for a halo art style. Are there more realistic looking games or better? sure. But to say there’s zero reason it shouldn’t run at 4k 60 is just dumb. It’s a huge open world game maybe? With good graphics. 4k 60 just a couple of years ago was hard on top end PC’s. Now modern AAA titles that have huge open worlds. “Have no reason to not run at 4k 60FPS” on a console lol.
@@braedonlock3359 I've been playing the Infinite multi-player on PC it looks pretty good to me and plays fantastic which is more important than anything. The game isn't anything that will blow you away graphically bit its definitely good enough and packing where it counts the most. Gun play. It feels like a great Halo game.
im about to hit the big 30 and i remember my Uncle getting me the first Halo for christmas all those years ago. Die hard fan ever since. I am fired up on some serious nostalgia for this new campaign.
03:42 Good job on the editing here. I appreciate that you showed the comparison multiple times to let the viewer pick out different spots. Sometimes in other videos there are comparison shots but they are much too quick not allowing time to compare.
This game shows big visual potential in some areas but it does feel like they were really held back by the last gen console and a messed up development timeline from completely incompetent project management. I am really hopeful the next gen only campaign will look a lot better whenever that finally comes out, especially if Joe Staten leads it beginning to end
Not weird at all, crisis was made in an age where micro transactions didn't exist. Development was fully committed to making games run at their absolute best. Crisis is a great example because they have always pushed the limits of technology. Now we have development teams devoted solely to cosmetic creation and mictronsaction based match making systems. Its closer to "what's the bare minimum we can we ship and get away with while keeping players engaged enough for the daily cosmetic resets"
@@Str8Wildcat i think the issue with the halo campaign was more the management didn't know what to do and went down the wrong directions and just really wasted the dev team efforts until like a year ago
I also enjoy the wide linear design in games like this and the Last Of Us 2. My problem is instead of finding my own way to the end I search every inch before I go to the end .
Love that search though. Been doing it since Dragon Warrior on the NES finding treasure chests up around secret paths beside castles at the edge of the screen. Been an “every inch must be combed” since then.
DF at his best really. Thanks for speaking about the lighting of the game. I couldn't explain why I felt the game visual were se flat and lacked shadows. Now I know it wasn't just me.
Great video, and the game looks like fun! What a strange looking game though. Some areas look fantastic, but other don't look as good as their previous game on last-gen hardware.
I have a friend who bought far cry 6 played it about 10 hours (hasn't played for weeks)but won't admit it was below average and regrets it. I wouldn't even pirate that garbage for free he should have taken my advice now he doesn't have the budget for another game he wants.
"If you stop and look at things". Oh I will. I've always loved admiring textures up close as I play games. Water, trees, leaves, rocks, steel, dirt, whatever. I really take the time to look at the beauty of a game. And even more fun today due to AAA graphics, top of the line telivisions like OLED and QLED. Things like reflections, lighting, ray tracing, are so beautiful to look at up close.
You too? I’ve been doing that since the PS1/N64 days, even though textures back then were super pixelated or blurry. I’ve always been a stop and smell the roses kind of guy in games and have enjoyed admiring the incidental details these devs craft.
@AJ ! Same, the Rare games really had a cool look. Never forget how impressed I was seeing the Killer Instinct arcade cabinet at the Theater. Halo has always had phenomenal textures. This one is no different.
Are you me? I do this very same thing. Modern games (or any game at that) look gorgeous on my LG C9 4K OLED. I admire game’s visual fidelity all the time when playing.
@@AndyTolly123 it was awful no thought same terrain bland and a pathetic excuse for a campaign clearly the worst halo ever made...if people are happy with that nonsense that's the end of the halo franchise higher youre expectations...blockbuster game?? Absolutely far far from it..if it wasn't called halo it would of been slated its as simpler as that
The music really has a big impact on how you feel, a lot of games are missing good music like this. Brings the game up another level. The gfx look great as well, makes me feel the way I used to when playing a big game on a new system.
“We’re looking forward to working closely with AMD to bring raytracing to Halo Infinite,” says Noah Benesch, a product marketing manager at Xbox. “Raytracing is one our top development priorities post-launch and look forward to sharing more soon.” What do you think of this? I didn't hear any acknowledgement of this so not sure if that was intentional.
@@arbiter- I agree, but if their chief criticism is lighting, and the company announced months ago they would be working on that, it might be worth a quick shoutout. Also I’m just interested to hear if 343 gave them any feedback directly.
Me too. I skipped out on the Xbone and only played Halo 4 last year via the MCC on Game Pass pc. FH5 has been such a treat. I ended up liking it much more than I ever thought I would have. According to my profile I have 6 days and 20 hours of game time so far and there's still plenty to do and cars to collect. I'm really looking forward to sinking some time as Master Chief. Halo is back baby.
Great tech review as always! I love how you often leave room for the sound aspect of games in your reviews (like you did in Last of us 2) which is hugely important to me. Well Done! :)
I kind of wish the grapple hook physics would take into account that grunts and jackals are feather weights compared to the chief so you should grapple them to you not the other way around. Might feel confusing to have it so varied and I get why they did it the way they did. I just chuckle as a grunt stays grounded as you come hurtling towards him 😀
Chief would pull every enemy type except Brutes and Hunters to him rather than the other way around. Not saying it's a bad thing. It would be funny to just yoink an Elite out of cover.
@@athenian221 At least the game has exaggerated physics as based on everything else and how crap it looks even on PC and series X i would have skipped it however the gameplay at least looks fun to a degree. compared to the varied maps of MP though it is highly disappointing that this open world all looks so samey and so do the interior structures. This was a problem on original Halo Combat Evolved and 20 years on it really should not be.
Doom Eternal's meathook was originally have the Slayer pull demons towards him. but the designers at ID felt that it wasn't as fun as him being pulled to the demons, so its similar in that it's most definitely a game design choice
Halo has never been known for its visuals. Rdr2 doesn't 12 different AIs that have to act differently in battle. Halo has always been a sandbox first fun type of game.
There are plenty of places where halo excels over red dead 2. The verticality of this game is on another level. The physics in halo are superior. The combat itself in halo is no contest, pretty much the best to ever exist in any game. Enemy ai is also better than anyone else in the industry. There is much more, if you actually spent time playing instead of whining in the comments, it would be obvious to you
Honestly at this point if I'm a dev in a big video game company and I still have a couple months in front of me I would get in touch with digital foundry and ask them feedback about my lighting/shadowing pipeline!
Big devs who do their jobs right don't need DF's input, see Insomniac's, Guerrila's latest games. These issues with odd lighting were far and few in between on PS4 and the fact that they complained about TLoU2 shows that the lore wasn't the only thing that fell by the wayside during that game's development. I don't remember glow-y NPCs being a feature or even common place in their PS3 games or U4:ATE (which was a PS4 exclusive). Even in TLoU2 issues with lighting weren't likely very common overall, just more prevalent than in their previous titles (I can't speak from personal experience as I will not buy that game because they turned it into a zombie shooter which they said they wouldn't do).
@@VariantAEC I have trouble distinguishing characters in fast action games and believe the lighting on models DF talks about is likely an intentional choice for legibility. Especially important in multiplayer. I don't think Halo Infinite looks amazing but a lot of that has to do with the art direction, not the technical competence of the developers. You can't even compare this world visually to the splendor of Horizon Zero Dawn, which I agree looks way better but that's not just a lighting issue.
I am SO glad that you guys called out the VRS artefacts. I logged a ticket a few days ago because even though i’m playing on a 1440p monitor with VRS in performance mode it looks sub 1080p at times
If you’re on console it doesn’t matter what monitor you’re using bud. Performance mode is going to automatically downgrade the resolution quality to reach 120FPS.
@@5000Seabass yeah it has nothing to do with monitor resolution and everything to do with poor VRS implementation pal, they basically apply VRS on edges and shadow terminators while they should be applying it to surfaces. Perf mode is 1440p anyways and you can see it in the frame but edges and terminators look aliased af because of the VRS making it look effectively lower res than 1080p in menu. You can actually still see the VRS artifacts in quality, just much less easily. Obvs perf mode turns down other visuals settings, its just annoying that the VRS implementation doesnt look as good as it could. This is all in menus too so not like its under load.
@@NizarElZarif exactly, perf mode is targeting 1440p but if it scales to 1080 with VRS up to 2x2 pixels, you essentially have 540 pixels rendering sometimes…which is definitely not a hardware issue
As great as the gameplay looks to be, you can't help but notice that the game has clearly been shackled and affected by the long development time. Six years is a LONG time in terms of development in general, but must have been especially difficult considering the technological advancements that have been made in the video games space in that time. Some aspects look very mis-matched, to my unprofessional eye at least, as if they changed certain elements throughout the process (which they no doubt did) but had legacy tech and systems that made it to the end and couldn't be changed or improved. As a result, some parts look current gen, and some parts look very underwhelming. When the video cut to Crysis 3 and Red Dead, these issues became even more standout. The shadow cascading is incredibly distracting especially, as well as the general, I guess flat-ness to the appearance at times. I'm glad the game plays and sounds brilliantly, and looks good enough (especially in the interior areas)... it's just a shame that it couldn't be a little more impressive on the tech side.
...Yet, the tech was there. Just look at 2018 Slipspace showcase. Something must have gone wrong during development, because modern PC and Xbox surely can handle all of that. Hopefully they will enable some of the stripped-away features in future patches, to make this game look up to date. And also add new features (raytracing should be confirmed, for example). You are very right by the way!
It's also the art direction. The game looks like it was designed to target younger players compared to past Halos, and hence the Fortnight / Minecraft colours and plasticky blockiness of everything. Oh, that and when they slapped open-world on a Halo title.
Excellent video as always! The shadows issue is interesting, and certainly hits the overall presentation pretty hard. Obviously despite the visual quirks, I’m very hyped for this game. It still looks great given the scale if you ask me, and it’s nice to see it performs at a near flawless 60 fps on Series X. Strange about the VRR not working properly.
@@cinematicpassages8884 Hahahah PS fanboys crying because Xbox dominated 2021 while PS5s best exclusive was made by the very same Xbox studios you claim “have no soul” 😂
It's pretty funny how Crysis 3's graphics still look so much better than Halo Infinite's and almost makes it look last gen when they did that sudden switch. 343i is really falling behind in that front.
@@wheretheyhaveribs55 Many open world games look better than Infinite, even from last gen. RDR2, Far Cry 6, Horizon Zero Dawn, Ghost of Tsushima just to name a few.
Best implementation of Dolby Atmos I've ever heard in a game. Astoundingly well-done audio in Halo Infinite if you have the theater setup to appreciate it
Glad you brought up the Dolby atmos delay issue. It drives me nuts in my 65cx. I hope they fix this because I have to run in Dolby digital since the delay in atmos is crazy. Please fix this!
I have mixed feelings about this. It is beautiful in certain aspects but incredibly unpolished in others, especially for such an important title. The foliage interaction, the weird-looking reload animations, the warping effect on Chief's hands and the downgrade in visuals with respect to the 2019 E3 trailer are honestly not acceptable and should be fixed immediately.
At first I thought the warping was supposed to be from heat..then I saw it at night. The bullets in the skewer and the charging pin on the BR and AR also move separately from the guns. Very weird.
The technical promises from 2018 Slipspace tech demo and even E3 2019 trailer (for the interior showcases) have not been totally fulfilled. Globally, what really does pop to my eyes: - Subpar lighting technology - Consequentially subpar look in indirect lighting situations - Lack of fully dynamic volumetrics - Lack of phisically based camera DoF/Bokeh - Apparent lack of per-object motion-blur and camera motion-blur (this is not as bad as the first) - Lack of screen space global scene AO - Terrible cascades shadow maps, totally missing granular shadows in the distance - Infamous LoD - very surprised that John did not mentioned it - Lack of biomes and dynamic weather effects I have also noticed that, at least in the first 4 missions, the lighting in the cutscenes has been clearly re-worked compared to the latest campaign reveal - to obtain less contrasty/misterious/dark moods and globally lit up the environments. Which is a Real shame, shading-wise too (overall very flat look). With these premises, the game STILL manages to look Beautiful somehow. This means the artistical efforth the team had put behind each element and sequence is really really well-thought and noteworthy. Cannot wait to play the campaign, and see what future updates (Ray Tracing first of all) and DLCs (new biomes?) will bring to the game.
The worse part is that the game already runs like shit on modern GPUs with soo many features/technologies seemingly removed/turned off. Imagine the performance, when you somehow turn those features/technologies on. 343i should really look into the performance aspects of the game. Its not at all satisfactory.
imagine having a youtube channel tell you what to fix in your game (especially a thing that shows in the beginning and should be obvious), and then people praise them for fixing it, the absolute state of developers.
I think the lighting is affecting the overall look of the game, as well as the shadows. Other than that its the only thing that would make it look better.
absolutely, the textures are really high res. But the lighting engine doesnt make it shine, the shadows sometimes look flat and even fake on trees for example. Hope they keep working on that
@@Superhornet331 texture are very high res but vrs is lowering their image quality a lot I think it's a mistake implementing it, wut good does a high quality texture do when u fuck it up with vrs. It looks like they only look truly good when you get close to them.
@@samuelkdu Keep in mind that is an open world game just like Cyberpunk. Now compare how the two perform in general, and on the older consoles they're releasing on.
Gameplay looks amazing, but gotta be honest, the open world looks pretty damn bad at a distance. 18:10 is just an absolute mess. Hopefully they can fix those shadows at least.
@@alsopsarchive5384 The game looks incredible & John just said as much. Especially given the game runs at 120fps & has to run on a base Xbox One. There isn't a game with better textures. "Oh no! I can't see a shadow from that leaf from a half a mile away!" Yes, your generation of gamers are spoiled, ungrateful brats who need to be stuck with nothing but an Atari 2600 to play on for a few years.
Okay, so FREAKING WoW!!! I Just "fished" the campaign/main story line and image I'll now be thrown back into the open world to take over the MF'n universe What A GAME. I'm Literally floored at what 343 have been able to pull off with this title from a narrative standpoint and everything else combining; MAKES AN UNPRECEDENTED HALO 💦 DREAM!!! "There was no online or local co-op at launch. That said, cheers to my Halo ride or die ngga Bthomas. You were there with me every step of the way as it always has been. Thank you 343 for allowing me to carry on the memory of a friend with such a meaningful history grounded in Halo. Now your Halo brings together All of The Games in remarkable fashion in the MCC and Halo Infinite stands tall and proud amidst them all too. Halo Infinite brings tones from Halo, Reach, ODST, Halo 2, Halo 3 along with new and amazing Freedom, Excellent Traversal, the ability to Expand and Grow Your Abilities and the UNSC's presence (and therefore your level of support) is out of this world and beyond anything I could have dreamed up, much less ever hoped for. Thank you to everyone involved and for enabling experience across race, gender, alternative biased and even life itself.
The gaming industry used to make huge multimedia titles with stories that were meant to rival movies..... Now we get games that are hardly finished. And if they have a campaign at all you got to pay extra for it...
@@Suikojunkie I think game development has been kind of going downhill in certain areas since the Wii. My theory is that developers and publishers learned that there is a huge market in designing and marketing games towards more casual players.
I got the weird feeling a lot of the graphical issues will not be patched. I only feel that way due to them not taking a stance on the whole TAA debacle on PC it gives me the feeling the PC release became an afterthought.
the TAA is SO FUCKING BAD. especially if you're using a monitor with a low MPRT (motion clarity). You can see the game blur visibly whenever you move the screen =(.
They use a very low res volumetric light buffer, 1/8th of a resolution or something. I hate when developers do that. The demo had higher res buffer and the light itself wasn't as intense.
I haven't finished watching yet, the video is quiet long, which is a great thing imo. :) It's superb as usual. Watching John's breakdown of shadowing issues in open areas of the game, i cannot help but think, why someone like John, who is not a developer and never was one to extent of my knowledge, can catch things like that and 343 cannot? I don't know how easy it was, but his breakdown of the problem looks rather comprehensive, the problems laid bare. I was looking at the footage and just feeling that something is off, that the game doesn't look consistently good, too often something feels wrong with how it looks. And yea, it makes sense now. Dynamic objects seems to be lit by arbitrary lighting that does not account for ambient lighting and distant outdoor objects lack proper shadowing. On top the excellent problem breakdown, possible solutions presented right away, it's not like Halo Infinite is in uncharted territory here, there are many examples from other games. Why does 343 struggles so much with this game... they probably have immense resources available to them, this supposed to be the premium Xbox title and yet... This is tiresome at this point tbh. I can only imagine that early in game's development cycle there was some... lack of vision which led to eventual clustefuck in development process that in turn led to game having those almost bizarre for the project of this magnitude problems with it's visual presentation. Doesn't mean that the game is bad ofc, but it's kinda sad still.
You clearly know very little about dev.... 343 didn't missed that shadows were lacking LOL They chose to make that sacrifice in exchange for other things. In developpement, you got a bucket, and when it's full , its full, its a constant game of trading what goes in the bucket what is out. (now imagine when u got 4 different buckets for diff XBOXs and PC) Like John said in the video, the frametimes they don't spend on these long distance shadows is spent elsewhere : in long distance active AI, in physics for the vehicles, ragdolls, simulation,etc. "Where it counts" as John said ;)
Its basics. Any dev knows about these things so they obviously know but decided to gimp the lighting alot for whatever reason. Be it performance, future raytracing or just the artstyle they are going for (last one would be incredibly stupid).
@@wolfy63000 Something like baked sky light AO per vertex is almost free performance wise and would improve the look a lot. I rather feel for they had issues with technical direction when it came to the final game and it was too late to make bigger changes on the aspects that didn't pan out for whatever reason, either due to art pipeline or tech. Developing th engine alongside the game is always more complicated than starting from a established code base.
Its pretty eye opening to not see them clowning and laughing about low shadow quality, no VRR, no Raytracying, not really being able to tell if its day or night. The grass being the worst in any modern game. 400% zoom texture pop the games resolution dropping below 1080p. All of the flaws have been summed up to its crossgen so its ok. What happened to games just scale?
Such a great review, love the time taken for the music and sound. Great sound and music really have a massive impact on the experience for me personally. And they are often overlooked in reviews. Cant wait to play this game!
A new engine in this day and age is a monumental undertaking. I wouldn’t have bothered and invested those 6 years on the game only. They could have used unreal engine.
For real. If you've ever played Arma 3 before you would know they desperately need a new engine for Arma 4, but as far as I am aware Bohemia is still working on their Enfusion engine and hasn't even begun working on the game. Also look at CIG and Star Citizen. Their development moves at a drunk snail's pace, but I think that their heavily modified version of Cryengine is something that has consumed a huge amount of their time, and they still aren't done with it. I'm no developer, that's true, but from an outside perspective I just don't see why you would want to spend all the time and money it takes to create a new engine.
Overall Halo 5 in many ways just looks better. There are comparisons between the two and physics have been severely downgraded compared to blowing up the warthog for instance in Halo 5 which just looked so much cooler with wheels flying off etc. I would have fired this team and asked The Coalition Studio to make Halo instead personally. Cutscene lighting quality is a joke compared to Halo 4 and 5 too. This project has been rushed far too much and Halo fans just deserve much better from a trillion dollar company than this. It's pretty obvious the issue really is Gamepass in that Xbox don't need to care too much about quality as people will play it anyway at least until the next AAA release to gamepass.
@@DEVILTAZ35 imagine how awesome this game would have been if throwing a grenade at enemies resulted in lost limbs/decapitations, craters in the ground with volumetric dust/mud being thrown up and or felled trees combined with uprooting and branches going flying in different directions combined with accurate physics. Destructible objects would add massively to the game. Many of us have Nvidia gpus that can do havok based physics at minimal costs it’s so disappointing hardly anyone uses it. Even the physics from hl2 is superior to a lot of modern games. It just feels to me that many devs go for a quick cash grab than actually expend meaningful effort to please fans. I just don’t see it being a performance based trade off, many of us have 30 series cards that can absolutely tear through the most demanding of rendering requirements. We are being sold 2013 tech in 2021/22 which kind of sucks to be honest. With the average gpu power available for exploitation why can’t we be treated to something very special by a game that has been in development for 6 years and is backed by a trillion dollar company who actually implements the direct x api. Why can’t we have dynamic per pixel lighting, even the stencil shadow volumes from doom 3 look superior to this, why can’t we have accurate rendering of individual bullets with properly modelled physics of each bullet in flight impacting and ricocheted from various surfaces. The dev could have Reached legendary status by pouring their soul and love into the game. 6 years of sacrifice has the potential to completely transform the fortunes of the Xbox and help ms get one over on the PS with the most talked and raved about game for the last ten years. It can be done the devs just need to dream and aim higher. Again my reaction to this game is as follows :( Devs these days are spoilt brats, just look at cdpr and cyberpunk, ten year later the majority of the hundreds of millions invested in their shares was probably squandered on cokenhookers while they rocked up at work half emancipated from the antics over the weekend, barely able to type in a few lines of code due a severe headache and proceeding to take the day off early, well because they can and because they already made their money and there is no incentive to try. It’s all about love and wanting to achieve greatness. Many of these devs certainly have the skills they just need the enthusiasm.
@@arronking1758 Granted the real problem for a long time was not really GPU power, but rather the CPU. Big companies has to optimized their games on xbox one and ps4 hardware, so they haven't take advantage of CPU and SSDs to their fullest potential. But thankfully that is getting sorted with the newer consoles (if they are readibly available). But at the moment this is the answer: Cater to the Majority. Because the majority don't actually own new mid or high end devices. Whiles yes, many did get access rx 5000 or 6000 / RTX2060 or 3060 cards, but a lot more users still own rx 460-480 and GTX 10 series cards, or even lower. Let's not forget folks on the console side still don't get access to current gen consoles, so are stuck with either a ps4 or xbox one. Some pretty much gave up on the best consoles and went straight to the cheaper alternatives like the Series S (at least starting too according to how well that console sold during black Friday) You can't sell a product that people aren't able to run it. In the world of economics, that suicide.
love the game . Still, I think they will never top Halo 3 with the "finish the fight" marketing. that stuff was amazing 32:40 PS1 tech style is back baby!
The campaign really needs multiple Biomes like the reveal trailer. Imagine if it snows and the game becomes like the Assualt on the Control room. I'm genuinely curious how the game will review now that it's seperate. Still wish the MP was 1 package so the MTX wouldn't be how it is. Especially since GP exists. But MS knew what they were doing, Campaign in GP to fulfill their "promise" and MP f2p to get less flack for MTX and bigger base.
I think they said that halo will be a game that grows, as in they’ll be constantly adding to it. Since it’s free with gamepass, I assume it’ll get dlc after dlc add on and constantly improved graphics. Then I’m guessing it’ll move away from last gen. I mean, there’s still ray tracing to be added…so that will be a massive graphical upgrade as well
@@Suavellous That's basically how games are being made now. Back in the days of the ad hoc, you built games to full completion. Nowadays, with fast connections and compression tools, they can ship the "Foundation" of a game, with some half assed story elements and simply add whole DLCs every "Season".
Great Video as usual! Just two quick notes on Audio: 1) The Atmos Delay is very real, but switching to DTS:X eliminates most of the delay and still gives you Spatial Sound. 2) I have only played the Multiplayer so far and wasn't that thrilled with thee Audio in general. It seem to lack bass a bit and the height channels aren't used that effectively IMHO.
@@rolandrohde I definitely felt what you were talking about though. They made it very clear the multiplayer was very E-sportsy, and it has all that audio mixing they do to make sure that everything is balanced around being able to hear everything going on around you no matter the situation. I’m hoping the campaign sound design has more of the shock and awe factor to it, and not the sound compression and mixing focused on balanced competitive play.
Great review! It's unfortunate that the final game doesn't use the lighting solution from the 2019 trailer. I wonder if they were having trouble hitting target performance on consoles for the open world with the long view distances and had to reduce the visual quality. I would probably do the same in that sort of situation, unless I had a ton of time to incorporate new graphics research and the confidence/skills on hand to pull it off. But then again I'd try to get that all sorted in pre-production.
Hmmm there’s a lot of open world games on last gen running on PS4/Xbox One that look amazing & (sorry to say) better than the next gen Series X open world Halo Infinite visual wise.
@@lxXSuddenDeathXxl non of those games hit the same resolution and performance as Halo infinite. But alas Halo infinite is truly just a last gen game updated on a current gen console. I suspect we will see what current gen consoles can do late next year
@@Olivion17 To which i would reply to saying I'd rather have a slightly lower resolution and have a much nicer look open world. It's absolutely not worth the trade off to have a super clear yet boring looking game.
like the other guy said it's a ring, it'd be bright as fuck at night I imagine. Like a full moon except it's an entire arch in the sky bouncing light back down on you.
@@MintyLime703 But The Ring is broken at this point in the lore, as John discussed, so the OPs point still applies. And why even have a day-night cycle if you are just going to make it "day" all the time..
32:00 this is definitely an optimization imo. I guess most of the things you mention were cut so that they work on the xbox one. Although surely they have different render paths for different hardware ? so... why no SDF shadows/occlusion ? I'm not sure why they changed the DOF method either, as you pointed out it can't handle sudden transitions between very different depths. There are plenty of papers describing methods that give better results, so I'm really curious as to why they pedalled back here. Lots of questionable lighting direction too... I liked the moody, contrasted atmosphere in the original trailer much more.
Im wondering if those are squarely engine problems moving the game from linear corridor/openish levels to an actual real time streaming open world map. Indoor to outdoor is easy to push lighting when it's separated by loading screens, but when you're moving in and out of structures it becomes exponentially more difficult.
I would say so, Tiger engine is also derived from BLAM just like slipstream is, but Destiny 2 handles it's lighting and shadows in an "open world" setting better than this game.
I honestly don’t understand…when they showed that 2018 Master Chief reveal trailer, all those features were there and it looked really great…and then you look at the washed out final game same scene and all those ambient occlusion and dynamic lighting and bokah depth of field was significantly lowered, making it jarring compared to the 2018 one. Like…if you ALREADY achieved it in 2018…why lower these features and why mess with the composition of the scene? The pilot’s eyes look like they’re about to pop out of his skull in the final version, lacking shaders to make it look more natural like in the 2018. Game looks good…but…if they could of just kept the same fidelity in the 2018 trailer on the ship, as John has stated, this game would of looked a lot more “next gen” than the compromised cross-gen presentation here.
Yea it's very strange isn't it? Especially since the game started development on the Xbox one so the Series X should be able to handle those features no problem. Maybe it was intentional? The game does have a slightly animated vibe to it so maybe those features were taken out for a reason. Hard to say really. It certainly does seem odd considering they delayed the game a year to make it look better.
Because they make the game look the best they can when showing vertical slices to the public, and then start making cuts to manage the game as a whole in order to get it to run well, especially running up to release. This is really just par for the course for development.
@@daystyrfer7887 Right, I already know that…but…I mean, the 2018 trailer wasn’t like brain melting technology or visuals going on…sure, it was very beautiful for the look it was going for…but just like John admits in this review, Halo 5’s real time cutscenes running on Xbox One was technically more impressive in some aspects…so…if they could achieve H5’s visuals, I’m confident the visuals in that 2018 trailer, even as a VS, could be achieved. That’s why it’s disappointing. They should of kept it. No idea why it was significantly drawn back, since they already achieved H5’s impressive cutscene fidelity in realtime…
@@wizardsandwarriorz since last year they said that there was a disaster in 343 i, I suppose it has to do with how little optimized the graphics engine is. Although it also seems strange to me that bf 2042 and cod vanguard are graphically significantly worse than their predecessors being that they were specially designed for the new generation, my hypothesis is that there is some problem with the new consoles and not with the old generation
It's a given all the Halo fans are gonna flood the comments and claim everything is excellent and gloss over all the problems. The biggest eye-roll of the video was how it praised the generic space music and spent time listing the composers and playing excerpts of the underwhelming soundtrack. I'm sure it works well within the game, but it sure doesn't STAND out by any means. I remember them touting how this was supposed to be some next-gen masterpiece too. The killer app for Xbox Series X. Yet it's clearly a long delayed last gen game. At least Sony is doing it right. They have dedicated games for the PS5 and are not shackled by last-gen hardware. Games like Halo and Gears of War used to push the bleeding edge, but they have become increasingly middle-of-the-road and even feel like generic third party cross platform games with none of that special exclusive treatment.
Gears 5 has very good visuals. I think this game looks pretty good too. I also really like the soundtrack. It’s not the best looking game ever but I would imagine it will get upgrades over time. I think there can be middle ground between “this game is garbage PS5 is the best” and “this game is perfect.” But then again nuance isn’t something that people always care about these days.
So here’s the thing.. I’m gonna play the shit out of this campaign and am loving the multiplayer and there are a lot of positives… but… it’s taken them six years with literally an unlimited amount of funds and they still don’t even have proper shadows? Cutscene discrepancies that they have to be told about by a RUclips channel and the whole debacle of the original trailer forcing them to delay the game an entire year just for it to look in some ways worse? I think the game overall will be anywhere from an 8-10 based off opinion and I know I’m gonna love it.. but it’s time for halo to get a new developer. This game will be a great base to work off of but really only one biome in six years? I just don’t really understand what they were doing. It screams incompetence even if the game turns out well.
Because it isn't six years of work done here. 343 was making a direct sequel to Halo 5 when before it was going to be released in 2018. Someone at XB finally realized Halo 5 's story was unpopular wit the majority of fans and thusly scrapped the game. And decided to do what 343 are calling a soft reboot of the Halo franchise with this new Halo ring (Zeta Halo) and scrapped the war with Cortana in favor of the Banished. This new direction completely skips Halo 5's story and takes place some 18 months after defeating Cortana. Now told only through hidden Audio tapes scattered through out the map. Halo Infinite is going to be a Live Service game now where 343 can finish the game through content updates (not just adding in co-op) but story content as well. Likely new biomes added to the map like snow and swamp areas. ( I imagine). In perspective what you are looking at is more like 2 years of work and one (extra year) of polish.
@@AIIEYESONME so everyone hated halo 5 and they have to do a soft reboot after spending a few years on it already. Kind of sounds like incompetence to me still lol. Let’s not forget that the master chief collection was completely broken when they launched it too. They aren’t good devs.
@@pheaseyyincompetency? lol, they wish things were that smooth. So ok in order not to sound like a hater or Sony fanboy whateverthefuck. I'm going to give forth a TL:DR version of what I've been reading from various sources from around the web over these long years. Frankenstein More like it's as if a giant ass corporation scrambled to throw a bunch of strangers together to work on something most employees had no previous ideas on the IP itself. And throw in temp contract workers that outnumber the full time employed ones. throw in a micro managing brown nosing yes men staff to lord over them. All fucking each other over in order to gain attention from big daddy Microsoft. And you'd have a clusterfuck, delays plagued poor imitation of a studio like Bungie. Seriously, over the years I've read enough bits and pieces about Halo Infinite's time trapped in development hell. That now I'm surprised it turned out to be anything to write home about at all. From a studio that was assembled from necromorphing different programmers and various devs from around the globe. Almost all strangers who didn't trust each other's true motivations, and contract workers assigned to the same projects bc the separated dev teams LITTIRALLY didn't know what the project lead (which changed hands numerous times) was assigning to other temp contract workers that came and went sometimes without turning in all their work. So there was a lot of repeated tasks and assignments. A case of a giant Corporation that had more money then skilled employees. More money then time, more money then passion or respect for their single IP that launched a whole new brand into the console space. XB = Halo! and throwing more money at the problem didn't fix shit. Al that to say it took one guy. Phil Spencer to come on board with XB. mosey on over to 343 to see what was up. And look at what they had made so far. And tell them, WTF it's 2018!! Didn't you hear, know no one ever asked for a sequel to Halo 5? Start over and this time make it Halo. But not too old samey Halo, something new, but nothing like you guys have been doing with 4 and 5. We're lucky just to have what we got. And with Phil Spencer firmly committed to their franchise, we just might get some good story and map expansions. Like a snow level!! Combat evolved indeed.. Lol
My biggest problem is that they're just milking the game, and have been doing so for over a decade now. 20 years later, and we're still fighting little groups of grunts, jackals, elites, brutes. Over and over and over. On yet another ring world, where the Assault Rifle still sucks, and the BR is still the go-to. There's a severe lack of vision here. All the "changes" are window dressing. And the terrain looks terrible. As noted, the lighting and lack of shadows is appalling.
They tried changing up the enemies... it was not received well. Also, you clearly haven't played the game to think the AR sucks... people are commenting on it being too powerful for a Halo AR?
@@rickygforce4217 I'd argue that recent games haven't been received well not because of changing up enemies, but because the story wasn't compelling. You can only kill the chief and cortana and then bring them back to life so many times before it gets boring...
Same, it's kinda lame that it's all forest or interior, but I guess they'll be adding more SP content over time, so hopefully that gives us some different biomes, like what the multiplayer maps have.
This game brought me all the way back to the first game. The nostalgia and gameplay were awesome. Listening and watching the grunts.... 🤣.And I played it at 30FPS, and had a blast.
I remember when people told me VRS was going to be some godlike performance boost and "no one will ever notice it!" Yeah, right. I knew that crap was going to suck.
I can honestly say I fully enjoyed Halo 5, it looked great and played great on my old Xbox One S. I was a PC and Sony Playstation gamer so never really played OG Halo games, 5 introduced me to the game and I went back and got the MCC. I'm more PC these days and have really liked the look and feel of Infinite Multiplayer, so hoping the campaign lives up to expectation
I wonder if some of these small improvements could be added to the current gen version over time. I know 343 has mentioned ray tracing down the line but perhaps there could be smaller tweaks in the meantime.
The fact that 343 got back to you guys and already have tracked down the problem along with a fix that is being tested and in the works makes me so grateful for the work you guys do.
Do you have a timestamp to that?
@@cynthiaandoh9575 around 6:50
Just shows how valuable a resource DF is and how much clout it has.
I do worry about series X stuttering in some games it's not in all games but it's been in a few. It has never been properly addressed I wonder if it's a hardware thing I hope not
@@hemandy94 Appreciate it
This is what I call a review! You even helped 343 fix their cut scenes 👍. I haven't been so excited for a game since I lined up at midnight as a teenager for Halo 2 and 3.
Never knew you're halo fan
@@kmcarno9323 i think he said that he was an xbox guy
@@MustafaKhan-hz5mr I'll watch video where he said that.
Best thing about this is 46 minutes
@@kmcarno9323 it's my favourite game of all time ☺️ I love Xbox. I play all the PS exclusives too though.
Knowing how many players and critics play games with TV sound, I always appreciate John's focus on the audio design and music in games he covers - don't stop championing surround sound, it's truly a game changing experience. One I'd argue is more impactful than the jump you get in video quality going to a more expensive TV (coming from somebody who recently got a C1 OLED)
This is something that I can’t agree with enough. For me it was Ghost of Tsushima. The moment I calibrated my surround sound system properly and started playing it, it was just a whole new experience. Once you have tasted the surround sound of a properly integrated game, the other games with poor sound design just feel lacking.
Agreed that's why I am very happy that the next-gen consoles have dedicated hardware for audio and hopefully devs actually take advantage of it like Returnal's 3D audio. People made fun of Mark Cerny when he said they could ask for a picture of our ear to make personalized HRTF profiles but that would actually be revolutionary!
I use 11.1 yamaha amp with Dali danish speakers for Atmos and in general Xbox games haven't had a sound delay on my set up. I would assume his issue is his sound bar is not processing the sound fast enough. You should be able to allow for any delay in m/s with a decent sound set up anyway so it should be a non issue then.
@@sora6573 The animation for that game is poor though outside of combat. The character can't properly negotiate height in the environment. Just a bad flaw in the engine design in that regard.
I’ll put it on my list.
Man, John is so good at his craft. DF is lucky to have him.
good at shilling predatorial AAA games? yeah...
@Gaea11$1000+ in microtransactions before even being out of beta. What other word is there for it? Yes I know you don't have to buy anything, but they are counting on it, a company with ethics would not have any microtransactions until the game is out of beta and all their planned multiplayer changes are added, and to have I dunno an HDR toggle for AMD gpu users so it doesnt look washed out on non-hdr screens. Performance tweaks etc. Its got the smell of a Perfect World MMO
@@Healcraft No one if forcing you to pay for Micro transactions, just play the game do the weekly's and you will level up and get the gear. ( there are no pay wall guns and no Pay wall gear)
All you young players are the same, want to play three games and end the night with a Golden gun, Rose Skin and Gallahorn - Halo is the real deal for FPS no gimmicks no god guns, no god gear - get good or get gone.
Looks like your leaving.
The rest of the DF team absolutely shits on Xbox vs PS5 reviews lol
@@gamerspeaks711 well said.
I love the sound in this game. The music is amazing and the sound of trees moving with the wind is amazing!
They imo really need to fix those shadows or the lack of any shadows on objects from large distances at least as a PC option. It really ruins the visual fidelity which is a shame because the textures and models in this game r quite incredible. They also have to fix the weird framerate miss match on animations compared to the fps the player is getting like when reloading a weapon.
It's an open world game with loads of assets.
@@mindrover777 So is horizon zero Dawn. I played that on PC and get higher framerates and it looks far better in terms of lighting with those higher framerates. Here’s hopping they do a metro exodus in terms of full raytraced global illumination for PC at least and this raytracing update that’s planned fixes those lighting issues. If not… well I can continue to say the visuals r dull and disappointing from a distance (clearly in smaller spaces like the interior it looks great thou). DLSS would be nice too.
You can set the FPS of first person animations to max on PC.
@@dustraider2940 Where? I didn’t see that option. All my graphics settings were on max as far as I was aware and at 120FPS the animation looks like it’s going at 15FPS (probably cause my monitor hates this mis matched framerate and it’s tearing in a single position or something).
Forgot to mention it feels like the colours r off as well. Guess it’s because that blue hue they talked about every object glowing with kinda like how crysis 2 had this issue.
Just a John appreciation comment: you are a wonderful, professional and very talented presenter/storyteller. I hope we'll get to enjoy your work for many years to come.
What we've really discovered here, more studios need to get DF to critic the game before release during development so they can get all this stuff ironed out. DF, you guys are truly the professionals.
They'd be a great consultancy but I'd rather them keep making great videos for us!
-_____________________________-
It's sad that the devs can't even do that themselves!!!
@@Andrew-wb2zq they could do both!
If studios are relying on feedback from RUclipsrs to fix their game AFTER it's been launched then they aren't doing their jobs properly.
This got to be one of the few modern attempts at iconic franchises that don’t butcher the feel of the original but even add to it almost. Such a breath of fresh air.
Doom is the only other one that comes to mind
@@GuyFromJupiter doom was probably the best soft reboot/revival in video game history
It didn't innovate enough to be interesting for me. Standard Call of Duty style push-forward gameplay, regenerating shield rather than resource pickups. Shotgun fucking blows. Shooters which mess up the shotgun really irritate me.
To be fair they butchered it quite a lot before Infinite.
@@Ahov "Standard Call of Duty style push-forward gameplay, regenerating shield rather than resource pickups" how fucking slowly did you play to feel like CoD where you're peeking, shooting, peeking, push forward, etc...?
I like the clean and simple presentation a lot, reminds me of how many classic games from the older generations looked, such as ninja gaiden or Metroid prime
Very simply: Im excited for 99% of the this game. The 1% is reserved for the disappointment that there isn’t a snow biome.
Yeah it really is a shame they didn't at least give us like, 2 or 3 biomes for this campaign, I bet they'll add them in expansions
My dissapointment is lack of co op and forge and it's much larger than 1% unfortunately. That being said I will play the campaign through for sure on PC and am keen.
@@malazan6004 Yeah, the lack of Co-op is quite unfortunate.
The subtle way his pistol pivot with every step is so dam satisfying, as is the way enemies respond to taking bullets. Can't wait to play this.
They basically lied about this if it's so limited, they said in an article on halo waypoint it would have different environment types
343 Industries Head: Ok boys!! Congratulations!! We finished the game! Time to relax and enjoy your holi.....
343 Grunt: _Sir, sir.... Digital Foundry released a video reviewing our game_ ....
343 Industries Head: Ok boys!! Holiday's cancelled. Ready your notes and coffees!!!
Wobbling textures bring back PS1 memories
Great job! I wish you guys covered HDR more as lately these games have had a washed out look that lacks in the contrast ratio department . It's very evident in the clip where John discussed the armor from the demo. The Demo has a very stong black level and pops were the current looks way to faded.
True and especially because barely anyone covers HDR in games well, so it's always a mystery whether the implementation is fucked or if it's just due to wrong settings that can be fixed manually.
Yep so many games suffer with this...ive resulted in running AC VALHALLA at limited colour space on my OLED so contrast pops more, luckily its actually ok like this, hope I dont have to with infinite
Why does it look like a 10 years old game remastered in 4k? I don't like the artistic approach. Everything looks artificial and colors are faded, flat and not vibrant. Look at the grass. It's so depressing to look at. There's no point in HDR as color palette is limited.
Probably hard for them to talk HDR as everyone will have a different experience based on their setup. Though it would be nice if they went into depth on the lvl of HDR customization available to draw attention to those devs who only add a simple on or off.
@@vadimkrylov it's doesn't!! It's you being a crybaby in RUclips
Excellent technical review! You basically covered it all. I look forward to another tech review once Co-Op Campaign is released next year which could potentially also include any updates between now and then. Great work John and Digital Foundry team!
60FPS on Quality mode? Thats very impressive of Series X with that sort of open world scale. Cannot wait to try it out
There are 0 reasons why this game should not be 60 FPS in quality mode.
It's 100% an old gen game.
There are old gen games that look WAY better than Halo: Infinite.
@@CrashBashL old game? Isn’t this the style Xbox fans are used to with game pass? They shouldn’t notice any difference in terms of visuals.
@@CrashBashL Disagree. Multiplat games that aren't multi world and are last gen games themselves have been releasing at 4k 30 1440p 60 with a 1080p DRS.
That's been the norm. No one complained.
He compliments this game for running 60/120 modes, and a 1440p 120 mode at that, and suddenly there's a complaint.
It doesn't matter what they "should be" running. What they have been running makes this impressive.
@@CrashBashL all games have different art styles and are made in different engines. It’s going for a halo art style. Are there more realistic looking games or better? sure. But to say there’s zero reason it shouldn’t run at 4k 60 is just dumb. It’s a huge open world game maybe? With good graphics. 4k 60 just a couple of years ago was hard on top end PC’s. Now modern AAA titles that have huge open worlds. “Have no reason to not run at 4k 60FPS” on a console lol.
@@braedonlock3359 I've been playing the Infinite multi-player on PC it looks pretty good to me and plays fantastic which is more important than anything. The game isn't anything that will blow you away graphically bit its definitely good enough and packing where it counts the most. Gun play. It feels like a great Halo game.
im about to hit the big 30 and i remember my Uncle getting me the first Halo for christmas all those years ago. Die hard fan ever since. I am fired up on some serious nostalgia for this new campaign.
Tommy! Great to see you around, you may recognize my name
@@theantsaretakingover Get out of here S.T.A.L.K.E.R! , i bet you cant wait for DF to cover Stalker 2 also lol
And what are you giving your uncle now?
@@itstommylove I cannot haha, time is flying by and we’re getting closer and closer!
same here dude it feel weird to say ive been playing halo for 20 years
03:42 Good job on the editing here. I appreciate that you showed the comparison multiple times to let the viewer pick out different spots. Sometimes in other videos there are comparison shots but they are much too quick not allowing time to compare.
It’s pretty weird that Crysis 1 has better foliage movement then a game releasing in late 2021
This game shows big visual potential in some areas but it does feel like they were really held back by the last gen console and a messed up development timeline from completely incompetent project management. I am really hopeful the next gen only campaign will look a lot better whenever that finally comes out, especially if Joe Staten leads it beginning to end
Not weird at all, crisis was made in an age where micro transactions didn't exist. Development was fully committed to making games run at their absolute best. Crisis is a great example because they have always pushed the limits of technology. Now we have development teams devoted solely to cosmetic creation and mictronsaction based match making systems. Its closer to "what's the bare minimum we can we ship and get away with while keeping players engaged enough for the daily cosmetic resets"
@@Str8Wildcat i think the issue with the halo campaign was more the management didn't know what to do and went down the wrong directions and just really wasted the dev team efforts until like a year ago
Looks like the lightning feature is remove for some reason. Maybe ray tracing was planned? Hmmm
I also enjoy the wide linear design in games like this and the Last Of Us 2. My problem is instead of finding my own way to the end I search every inch before I go to the end .
Love that search though. Been doing it since Dragon Warrior on the NES finding treasure chests up around secret paths beside castles at the edge of the screen. Been an “every inch must be combed” since then.
I play like you. I think that's how they should be played too
Until this day, Halo 3's water impresses me.
Halo 3(Xbox 360) just impresses me. I booted it up not too long ago on a 48inch tv and it still looked good...
It’s still really great looking. Halo 3 is my favorite of the series.
zooming in on the textures was surprisingly detailed
Yes when i saw that wet ground with puddles i was like damn that actually looks like real life
*cuts back to crysis 3* my brain: why does crysis 3 look better wtf?!?
DF at his best really.
Thanks for speaking about the lighting of the game. I couldn't explain why I felt the game visual were se flat and lacked shadows. Now I know it wasn't just me.
Great video, and the game looks like fun! What a strange looking game though. Some areas look fantastic, but other don't look as good as their previous game on last-gen hardware.
This!
Halo has been a mediocre looking game since whenever. It's fun you get from playing it only thing that is worth something.
@@krzysztof6591 Halo 1 was stunnning and 3 as well, even Halo 4 pushed the xbox 360
@@krzysztof6591 Halo 4 was the peak of the Xbox 360's graphics, but otherwise the franchise isn't particularly known for its graphics.
@@plinkvevo it's known for its art style
The Virgin Far Cry vs the Chad Halo "Open World"
I have a friend who bought far cry 6 played it about 10 hours (hasn't played for weeks)but won't admit it was below average and regrets it. I wouldn't even pirate that garbage for free he should have taken my advice now he doesn't have the budget for another game he wants.
"If you stop and look at things". Oh I will. I've always loved admiring textures up close as I play games. Water, trees, leaves, rocks, steel, dirt, whatever. I really take the time to look at the beauty of a game. And even more fun today due to AAA graphics, top of the line telivisions like OLED and QLED. Things like reflections, lighting, ray tracing, are so beautiful to look at up close.
You too? I’ve been doing that since the PS1/N64 days, even though textures back then were super pixelated or blurry. I’ve always been a stop and smell the roses kind of guy in games and have enjoyed admiring the incidental details these devs craft.
This game looks bland
@AJ ! Same, the Rare games really had a cool look. Never forget how impressed I was seeing the Killer Instinct arcade cabinet at the Theater. Halo has always had phenomenal textures. This one is no different.
Are you me? I do this very same thing. Modern games (or any game at that) look gorgeous on my LG C9 4K OLED. I admire game’s visual fidelity all the time when playing.
I'm about 4 hours into the campaign, and I'm enjoying it more than I thought it would.
Looking back the campaign was rubbish wasn't it?
@@AndyTolly123 it was awful no thought same terrain bland and a pathetic excuse for a campaign clearly the worst halo ever made...if people are happy with that nonsense that's the end of the halo franchise higher youre expectations...blockbuster game?? Absolutely far far from it..if it wasn't called halo it would of been slated its as simpler as that
@@abcdefg3214 campaign was great
The music really has a big impact on how you feel, a lot of games are missing good music like this.
Brings the game up another level.
The gfx look great as well, makes me feel the way I used to when playing a big game on a new system.
Agreed with the music, super in touch with Halo and kicks ass. I CANNOT agree with the GFX though, explosions and FX in this game look pretty bad.
“We’re looking forward to working closely with AMD to bring raytracing to Halo Infinite,” says Noah Benesch, a product marketing manager at Xbox. “Raytracing is one our top development priorities post-launch and look forward to sharing more soon.”
What do you think of this? I didn't hear any acknowledgement of this so not sure if that was intentional.
At the end of the day, the game just isn't finished.
@@Spokker they said it's a 10 year game soooo yeah it's not finished.
not much to say about something that doesn't exist yet
@@arbiter- I agree, but if their chief criticism is lighting, and the company announced months ago they would be working on that, it might be worth a quick shoutout. Also I’m just interested to hear if 343 gave them any feedback directly.
LOL JUST A SHIT LIE. THIS SHIT LOOKING GAME WITH RT WILL JUST MAKE IT LOOK SHITTIER
Thorough job as always, ty to the DF team for the effort put into this one.
I am so very ready for this campaign. Other than Horizon, I haven’t looked forward to an Xbox game this much since Halo 3.
@@NemesisX94 because he likes the game... Lemme guess you're a Sony guy?
Me too. I skipped out on the Xbone and only played Halo 4 last year via the MCC on Game Pass pc. FH5 has been such a treat. I ended up liking it much more than I ever thought I would have. According to my profile I have 6 days and 20 hours of game time so far and there's still plenty to do and cars to collect. I'm really looking forward to sinking some time as Master Chief. Halo is back baby.
@@NemesisX94 Dumb question. SNEED AND FEED SOYNY
@@NemesisX94 this may be a shock to you. But Maybe there’s people out there who find zero interest in Sony games. Crazy right?
@@thirtythird985 I'm one if them
Great tech review as always!
I love how you often leave room for the sound aspect of games in your reviews (like you did in Last of us 2) which is hugely important to me.
Well Done! :)
I kind of wish the grapple hook physics would take into account that grunts and jackals are feather weights compared to the chief so you should grapple them to you not the other way around. Might feel confusing to have it so varied and I get why they did it the way they did. I just chuckle as a grunt stays grounded as you come hurtling towards him 😀
20 years ago something like that wasn't complicated for gamers to understand and the game mechanics took things like that into account.
Chief would pull every enemy type except Brutes and Hunters to him rather than the other way around. Not saying it's a bad thing. It would be funny to just yoink an Elite out of cover.
That's some Kojima level attention to detail you have Danny.
@@athenian221 At least the game has exaggerated physics as based on everything else and how crap it looks even on PC and series X i would have skipped it however the gameplay at least looks fun to a degree. compared to the varied maps of MP though it is highly disappointing that this open world all looks so samey and so do the interior structures. This was a problem on original Halo Combat Evolved and 20 years on it really should not be.
Doom Eternal's meathook was originally have the Slayer pull demons towards him. but the designers at ID felt that it wasn't as fun as him being pulled to the demons, so its similar in that it's most definitely a game design choice
Damn that shot of RDR2 took me off guard, that’s a great looking game and really put into perspective how (relatively) weak the Halo visuals are.
Halo has never been known for its visuals. Rdr2 doesn't 12 different AIs that have to act differently in battle. Halo has always been a sandbox first fun type of game.
There are plenty of places where halo excels over red dead 2. The verticality of this game is on another level. The physics in halo are superior. The combat itself in halo is no contest, pretty much the best to ever exist in any game. Enemy ai is also better than anyone else in the industry. There is much more, if you actually spent time playing instead of whining in the comments, it would be obvious to you
@@Sparatan18608 Not true at all, but ok. Let's just forget Halo 1 & 2 for example.
Honestly at this point if I'm a dev in a big video game company and I still have a couple months in front of me I would get in touch with digital foundry and ask them feedback about my lighting/shadowing pipeline!
Couple months wouldn’t be enough time imo. I know what you mean though!!
Obviously professional game developers know more about this stuff than Digital Foundry.
Big devs who do their jobs right don't need DF's input, see Insomniac's, Guerrila's latest games.
These issues with odd lighting were far and few in between on PS4 and the fact that they complained about TLoU2 shows that the lore wasn't the only thing that fell by the wayside during that game's development. I don't remember glow-y NPCs being a feature or even common place in their PS3 games or U4:ATE (which was a PS4 exclusive). Even in TLoU2 issues with lighting weren't likely very common overall, just more prevalent than in their previous titles (I can't speak from personal experience as I will not buy that game because they turned it into a zombie shooter which they said they wouldn't do).
@@VariantAEC I have trouble distinguishing characters in fast action games and believe the lighting on models DF talks about is likely an intentional choice for legibility. Especially important in multiplayer. I don't think Halo Infinite looks amazing but a lot of that has to do with the art direction, not the technical competence of the developers. You can't even compare this world visually to the splendor of Horizon Zero Dawn, which I agree looks way better but that's not just a lighting issue.
@@saintsalieri
That should be an accessibility option not forced on all players at the detriment to presentation.
I am SO glad that you guys called out the VRS artefacts. I logged a ticket a few days ago because even though i’m playing on a 1440p monitor with VRS in performance mode it looks sub 1080p at times
don't forget that on top VRS there is DRS at play which can reduce the resolution to 1080p
If you’re on console it doesn’t matter what monitor you’re using bud.
Performance mode is going to automatically downgrade the resolution quality to reach 120FPS.
@@5000Seabass yeah it has nothing to do with monitor resolution and everything to do with poor VRS implementation pal, they basically apply VRS on edges and shadow terminators while they should be applying it to surfaces. Perf mode is 1440p anyways and you can see it in the frame but edges and terminators look aliased af because of the VRS making it look effectively lower res than 1080p in menu. You can actually still see the VRS artifacts in quality, just much less easily. Obvs perf mode turns down other visuals settings, its just annoying that the VRS implementation doesnt look as good as it could. This is all in menus too so not like its under load.
@@NizarElZarif exactly, perf mode is targeting 1440p but if it scales to 1080 with VRS up to 2x2 pixels, you essentially have 540 pixels rendering sometimes…which is definitely not a hardware issue
The jackal close up looks insanely detailed and beautiful. Amazing work from the character artists!
As great as the gameplay looks to be, you can't help but notice that the game has clearly been shackled and affected by the long development time. Six years is a LONG time in terms of development in general, but must have been especially difficult considering the technological advancements that have been made in the video games space in that time. Some aspects look very mis-matched, to my unprofessional eye at least, as if they changed certain elements throughout the process (which they no doubt did) but had legacy tech and systems that made it to the end and couldn't be changed or improved. As a result, some parts look current gen, and some parts look very underwhelming. When the video cut to Crysis 3 and Red Dead, these issues became even more standout. The shadow cascading is incredibly distracting especially, as well as the general, I guess flat-ness to the appearance at times. I'm glad the game plays and sounds brilliantly, and looks good enough (especially in the interior areas)... it's just a shame that it couldn't be a little more impressive on the tech side.
...Yet, the tech was there. Just look at 2018 Slipspace showcase. Something must have gone wrong during development, because modern PC and Xbox surely can handle all of that.
Hopefully they will enable some of the stripped-away features in future patches, to make this game look up to date. And also add new features (raytracing should be confirmed, for example).
You are very right by the way!
the game looks little better than halo 5.
Six years is a long time? *laughs in Star Citizen*
BLASPHEMY! The game is the PERFECT NEXY GEN EXPERIENCE what are you TALKING about?
It's also the art direction. The game looks like it was designed to target younger players compared to past Halos, and hence the Fortnight / Minecraft colours and plasticky blockiness of everything. Oh, that and when they slapped open-world on a Halo title.
Excellent video as always! The shadows issue is interesting, and certainly hits the overall presentation pretty hard. Obviously despite the visual quirks, I’m very hyped for this game. It still looks great given the scale if you ask me, and it’s nice to see it performs at a near flawless 60 fps on Series X. Strange about the VRR not working properly.
Tbh I would expect future updates to focus more on next-gen stuff. Like, adding ambient occlusion on PC and Series S/X but not on One S/X
Oof, that cut from Crysis 3 back to Halo in the beginning is brutal.
This game looks so weird. It looks incredible but also dull and flat at the same time
Yeah, there are situations where the rendering techniques they use just fall apart as they can't cover some lighting conditions.
Xbox exclusive in a nutshell bruh 😂...the xbox game studios have NO SOUL 😉
@@cinematicpassages8884 Hahahah PS fanboys crying because Xbox dominated 2021 while PS5s best exclusive was made by the very same Xbox studios you claim “have no soul” 😂
It's pretty funny how Crysis 3's graphics still look so much better than Halo Infinite's and almost makes it look last gen when they did that sudden switch. 343i is really falling behind in that front.
It's not a open world.
Exactly. Shadow of the Tomb Raider had the best graphics of any game ever BUT it's not open world.
Open World eats resources. Open world needs to die.
Idk if it’s an engine thing either. Halo 5 looked better in many ways.
@@wheretheyhaveribs55 Then RDR2?
@@wheretheyhaveribs55 Many open world games look better than Infinite, even from last gen. RDR2, Far Cry 6, Horizon Zero Dawn, Ghost of Tsushima just to name a few.
Best implementation of Dolby Atmos I've ever heard in a game. Astoundingly well-done audio in Halo Infinite if you have the theater setup to appreciate it
I personally think Gears 5 sounds even better in Atmos. Try the Hivebusters DLC if possible!
@@antoniosalviano9585 hive busters was a masterpiece in every way absolutely stunning
Glad you brought up the Dolby atmos delay issue. It drives me nuts in my 65cx. I hope they fix this because I have to run in Dolby digital since the delay in atmos is crazy. Please fix this!
Biggest downside is no campaign co op. That really really sucks.
I thought it was going to come later on.
@@ALilCancer yeah, but after six years of development, why isn't it coming on release?
Thanks now when I’m playing I’ll be able to see Masterchiefs gloves wobbling and nothing else haha.
I have mixed feelings about this. It is beautiful in certain aspects but incredibly unpolished in others, especially for such an important title. The foliage interaction, the weird-looking reload animations, the warping effect on Chief's hands and the downgrade in visuals with respect to the 2019 E3 trailer are honestly not acceptable and should be fixed immediately.
I think this is what you will see from microsoft going forward
@@Lanse1984 343*
Totally agree!
At first I thought the warping was supposed to be from heat..then I saw it at night. The bullets in the skewer and the charging pin on the BR and AR also move separately from the guns. Very weird.
The technical promises from 2018 Slipspace tech demo and even E3 2019 trailer (for the interior showcases) have not been totally fulfilled.
Globally, what really does pop to my eyes:
- Subpar lighting technology
- Consequentially subpar look in indirect lighting situations
- Lack of fully dynamic volumetrics
- Lack of phisically based camera DoF/Bokeh
- Apparent lack of per-object motion-blur and camera motion-blur (this is not as bad as the first)
- Lack of screen space global scene AO
- Terrible cascades shadow maps, totally missing granular shadows in the distance
- Infamous LoD - very surprised that John did not mentioned it
- Lack of biomes and dynamic weather effects
I have also noticed that, at least in the first 4 missions, the lighting in the cutscenes has been clearly re-worked compared to the latest campaign reveal - to obtain less contrasty/misterious/dark moods and globally lit up the environments. Which is a Real shame, shading-wise too (overall very flat look).
With these premises, the game STILL manages to look Beautiful somehow. This means the artistical efforth the team had put behind each element and sequence is really really well-thought and noteworthy.
Cannot wait to play the campaign, and see what future updates (Ray Tracing first of all) and DLCs (new biomes?) will bring to the game.
The worse part is that the game already runs like shit on modern GPUs with soo many features/technologies seemingly removed/turned off. Imagine the performance, when you somehow turn those features/technologies on. 343i should really look into the performance aspects of the game. Its not at all satisfactory.
imagine having a youtube channel tell you what to fix in your game (especially a thing that shows in the beginning and should be obvious), and then people praise them for fixing it, the absolute state of developers.
I think the lighting is affecting the overall look of the game, as well as the shadows. Other than that its the only thing that would make it look better.
absolutely, the textures are really high res. But the lighting engine doesnt make it shine, the shadows sometimes look flat and even fake on trees for example. Hope they keep working on that
@@Superhornet331 texture are very high res but vrs is lowering their image quality a lot I think it's a mistake implementing it, wut good does a high quality texture do when u fuck it up with vrs. It looks like they only look truly good when you get close to them.
Vrs also is doing more damage than good imo. Maybe there is a problem also with texture streaming that's what I think I'm noticing 43:20
definitely lighting tech is the weakest link in this game.
Really curious to see how the future RT patch will change this for the better!
It looks like Minecraft.
Fantastic tech review video. I really enjoyed this. Time well spent.
Even with whatever pit falls this game might have in terms of its technical makeup, im still extremely excited to play this.
ahhhh i remember feeling the same way about cyberpunk
@@samuelkdu yeah but the difference, i hope, is that its just visual, Not actually gameplay wise as 77, fingers crossed
@@samuelkdu Keep in mind that is an open world game just like Cyberpunk.
Now compare how the two perform in general, and on the older consoles they're releasing on.
@@leonfrancis3418 semi-openworld similar to HALO:CE when you land in the ring..
right the same complaints for BL3 about graphics, we need to set boundaries between art style to graphics
Great review! I hope they can implement the suggestions for shadows in the distance as you suggested. It’s like a night and day difference!
Man the grenade throw animations have been such an eyesore. I thought it was just me.
All the explosions look like shit lol
Gameplay looks amazing, but gotta be honest, the open world looks pretty damn bad at a distance. 18:10 is just an absolute mess. Hopefully they can fix those shadows at least.
I'm excited to play but I agree that looks absolutely awful
It's nowhere near as bad & dramatic as you just made it sound. You're just spoiled.
@@nonyabusiness6084 spoiled by games looking good? Lmao That specific shot looks like a 360 game, stfu.
@@alsopsarchive5384 The game looks incredible & John just said as much. Especially given the game runs at 120fps & has to run on a base Xbox One. There isn't a game with better textures.
"Oh no! I can't see a shadow from that leaf from a half a mile away!"
Yes, your generation of gamers are spoiled, ungrateful brats who need to be stuck with nothing but an Atari 2600 to play on for a few years.
Okay, so FREAKING WoW!!! I Just "fished" the campaign/main story line and image I'll now be thrown back into the open world to take over the MF'n universe
What A GAME. I'm Literally floored at what 343 have been able to pull off with this title from a narrative standpoint and everything else combining; MAKES AN UNPRECEDENTED HALO 💦 DREAM!!!
"There was no online or local co-op at launch. That said, cheers to my Halo ride or die ngga Bthomas. You were there with me every step of the way as it always has been. Thank you 343 for allowing me to carry on the memory of a friend with such a meaningful history grounded in Halo. Now your Halo brings together All of The Games in remarkable fashion in the MCC and Halo Infinite stands tall and proud amidst them all too.
Halo Infinite brings tones from Halo, Reach, ODST, Halo 2, Halo 3 along with new and amazing Freedom, Excellent Traversal, the ability to Expand and Grow Your Abilities and the UNSC's presence (and therefore your level of support) is out of this world and beyond anything I could have dreamed up, much less ever hoped for. Thank you to everyone involved and for enabling experience across race, gender, alternative biased and even life itself.
The gaming industry used to make huge multimedia titles with stories that were meant to rival movies..... Now we get games that are hardly finished. And if they have a campaign at all you got to pay extra for it...
This is our own fault tbh we keep on buying. (Not you necessarily i mean gamers as a whole)
@@Suikojunkie I think game development has been kind of going downhill in certain areas since the Wii. My theory is that developers and publishers learned that there is a huge market in designing and marketing games towards more casual players.
thanks for focussing on audio a bit as well, hope it sticks as something to comment on in future vids
I got the weird feeling a lot of the graphical issues will not be patched.
I only feel that way due to them not taking a stance on the whole TAA debacle on PC it gives me the feeling the PC release became an afterthought.
the TAA is SO FUCKING BAD. especially if you're using a monitor with a low MPRT (motion clarity). You can see the game blur visibly whenever you move the screen =(.
That's usually how it goes.
7:24 What's up with the blown out super blocky lighting in the final version?
They use a very low res volumetric light buffer, 1/8th of a resolution or something. I hate when developers do that. The demo had higher res buffer and the light itself wasn't as intense.
I haven't finished watching yet, the video is quiet long, which is a great thing imo. :) It's superb as usual. Watching John's breakdown of shadowing issues in open areas of the game, i cannot help but think, why someone like John, who is not a developer and never was one to extent of my knowledge, can catch things like that and 343 cannot? I don't know how easy it was, but his breakdown of the problem looks rather comprehensive, the problems laid bare. I was looking at the footage and just feeling that something is off, that the game doesn't look consistently good, too often something feels wrong with how it looks. And yea, it makes sense now. Dynamic objects seems to be lit by arbitrary lighting that does not account for ambient lighting and distant outdoor objects lack proper shadowing. On top the excellent problem breakdown, possible solutions presented right away, it's not like Halo Infinite is in uncharted territory here, there are many examples from other games. Why does 343 struggles so much with this game... they probably have immense resources available to them, this supposed to be the premium Xbox title and yet... This is tiresome at this point tbh. I can only imagine that early in game's development cycle there was some... lack of vision which led to eventual clustefuck in development process that in turn led to game having those almost bizarre for the project of this magnitude problems with it's visual presentation. Doesn't mean that the game is bad ofc, but it's kinda sad still.
The game looks incredible. You're being very overdramatic. Stop that.
You clearly know very little about dev.... 343 didn't missed that shadows were lacking LOL They chose to make that sacrifice in exchange for other things. In developpement, you got a bucket, and when it's full , its full, its a constant game of trading what goes in the bucket what is out. (now imagine when u got 4 different buckets for diff XBOXs and PC) Like John said in the video, the frametimes they don't spend on these long distance shadows is spent elsewhere : in long distance active AI, in physics for the vehicles, ragdolls, simulation,etc. "Where it counts" as John said ;)
Its basics. Any dev knows about these things so they obviously know but decided to gimp the lighting alot for whatever reason. Be it performance, future raytracing or just the artstyle they are going for (last one would be incredibly stupid).
@@wolfy63000 Something like baked sky light AO per vertex is almost free performance wise and would improve the look a lot. I rather feel for they had issues with technical direction when it came to the final game and it was too late to make bigger changes on the aspects that didn't pan out for whatever reason, either due to art pipeline or tech. Developing th engine alongside the game is always more complicated than starting from a established code base.
@@nonyabusiness6084 No co-op on launch
No Slayer
No Team Slayer
No Ranked
No Forge
Enjoy paying 60$ for a 10 hour campaign.
I haven’t been hype for a Halo since Reach. My body is beyond ready for this campaign.
Its pretty eye opening to not see them clowning and laughing about low shadow quality, no VRR, no Raytracying, not really being able to tell if its day or night. The grass being the worst in any modern game. 400% zoom texture pop the games resolution dropping below 1080p. All of the flaws have been summed up to its crossgen so its ok. What happened to games just scale?
Such a great review, love the time taken for the music and sound. Great sound and music really have a massive impact on the experience for me personally. And they are often overlooked in reviews. Cant wait to play this game!
A new engine in this day and age is a monumental undertaking. I wouldn’t have bothered and invested those 6 years on the game only. They could have used unreal engine.
For real. If you've ever played Arma 3 before you would know they desperately need a new engine for Arma 4, but as far as I am aware Bohemia is still working on their Enfusion engine and hasn't even begun working on the game. Also look at CIG and Star Citizen. Their development moves at a drunk snail's pace, but I think that their heavily modified version of Cryengine is something that has consumed a huge amount of their time, and they still aren't done with it. I'm no developer, that's true, but from an outside perspective I just don't see why you would want to spend all the time and money it takes to create a new engine.
Overall Halo 5 in many ways just looks better. There are comparisons between the two and physics have been severely downgraded compared to blowing up the warthog for instance in Halo 5 which just looked so much cooler with wheels flying off etc. I would have fired this team and asked The Coalition Studio to make Halo instead personally. Cutscene lighting quality is a joke compared to Halo 4 and 5 too. This project has been rushed far too much and Halo fans just deserve much better from a trillion dollar company than this. It's pretty obvious the issue really is Gamepass in that Xbox don't need to care too much about quality as people will play it anyway at least until the next AAA release to gamepass.
@@DEVILTAZ35 imagine how awesome this game would have been if throwing a grenade at enemies resulted in lost limbs/decapitations, craters in the ground with volumetric dust/mud being thrown up and or felled trees combined with uprooting and branches going flying in different directions combined with accurate physics.
Destructible objects would add massively to the game. Many of us have Nvidia gpus that can do havok based physics at minimal costs it’s so disappointing hardly anyone uses it. Even the physics from hl2 is superior to a lot of modern games. It just feels to me that many devs go for a quick cash grab than actually expend meaningful effort to please fans.
I just don’t see it being a performance based trade off, many of us have 30 series cards that can absolutely tear through the most demanding of rendering requirements. We are being sold 2013 tech in 2021/22 which kind of sucks to be honest.
With the average gpu power available for exploitation why can’t we be treated to something very special by a game that has been in development for 6 years and is backed by a trillion dollar company who actually implements the direct x api. Why can’t we have dynamic per pixel lighting, even the stencil shadow volumes from doom 3 look superior to this, why can’t we have accurate rendering of individual bullets with properly modelled physics of each bullet in flight impacting and ricocheted from various surfaces. The dev could have Reached legendary status by pouring their soul and love into the game. 6 years of sacrifice has the potential to completely transform the fortunes of the Xbox and help ms get one over on the PS with the most talked and raved about game for the last ten years. It can be done the devs just need to dream and aim higher.
Again my reaction to this game is as follows
:(
Devs these days are spoilt brats, just look at cdpr and cyberpunk, ten year later the majority of the hundreds of millions invested in their shares was probably squandered on cokenhookers while they rocked up at work half emancipated from the antics over the weekend, barely able to type in a few lines of code due a severe headache and proceeding to take the day off early, well because they can and because they already made their money and there is no incentive to try. It’s all about love and wanting to achieve greatness. Many of these devs certainly have the skills they just need the enthusiasm.
@@arronking1758 I couldn't agree more as my comment above echoes the same sentiment.
@@arronking1758 Granted the real problem for a long time was not really GPU power, but rather the CPU. Big companies has to optimized their games on xbox one and ps4 hardware, so they haven't take advantage of CPU and SSDs to their fullest potential. But thankfully that is getting sorted with the newer consoles (if they are readibly available).
But at the moment this is the answer: Cater to the Majority. Because the majority don't actually own new mid or high end devices. Whiles yes, many did get access rx 5000 or 6000 / RTX2060 or 3060 cards, but a lot more users still own rx 460-480 and GTX 10 series cards, or even lower. Let's not forget folks on the console side still don't get access to current gen consoles, so are stuck with either a ps4 or xbox one. Some pretty much gave up on the best consoles and went straight to the cheaper alternatives like the Series S (at least starting too according to how well that console sold during black Friday)
You can't sell a product that people aren't able to run it. In the world of economics, that suicide.
love the game . Still, I think they will never top Halo 3 with the "finish the fight" marketing. that stuff was amazing
32:40 PS1 tech style is back baby!
Indeef
Absolutely true.
The campaign really needs multiple Biomes like the reveal trailer. Imagine if it snows and the game becomes like the Assualt on the Control room.
I'm genuinely curious how the game will review now that it's seperate. Still wish the MP was 1 package so the MTX wouldn't be how it is.
Especially since GP exists. But MS knew what they were doing, Campaign in GP to fulfill their "promise" and MP f2p to get less flack for MTX and bigger base.
Definitely
I think they said that halo will be a game that grows, as in they’ll be constantly adding to it. Since it’s free with gamepass, I assume it’ll get dlc after dlc add on and constantly improved graphics. Then I’m guessing it’ll move away from last gen. I mean, there’s still ray tracing to be added…so that will be a massive graphical upgrade as well
@@Suavellous ahh so Infinite is like a Games as a service without being said as a Games as a Service..
I'm thinking they may add it in DLC.
@@Suavellous That's basically how games are being made now.
Back in the days of the ad hoc, you built games to full completion.
Nowadays, with fast connections and compression tools, they can ship the "Foundation" of a game, with some half assed story elements and simply add whole DLCs every "Season".
Great Video as usual!
Just two quick notes on Audio:
1) The Atmos Delay is very real, but switching to DTS:X eliminates most of the delay and still gives you Spatial Sound.
2) I have only played the Multiplayer so far and wasn't that thrilled with thee Audio in general. It seem to lack bass a bit and the height channels aren't used that effectively IMHO.
That’s the multiplayer, I think they sacrificed quality for their balancing.
@@5000Seabass
We will know soon
@@rolandrohde I definitely felt what you were talking about though. They made it very clear the multiplayer was very E-sportsy, and it has all that audio mixing they do to make sure that everything is balanced around being able to hear everything going on around you no matter the situation.
I’m hoping the campaign sound design has more of the shock and awe factor to it, and not the sound compression and mixing focused on balanced competitive play.
That grass movement is disturbing 😳
Great review! It's unfortunate that the final game doesn't use the lighting solution from the 2019 trailer. I wonder if they were having trouble hitting target performance on consoles for the open world with the long view distances and had to reduce the visual quality. I would probably do the same in that sort of situation, unless I had a ton of time to incorporate new graphics research and the confidence/skills on hand to pull it off. But then again I'd try to get that all sorted in pre-production.
Hmmm there’s a lot of open world games on last gen running on PS4/Xbox One that look amazing & (sorry to say) better than the next gen Series X open world Halo Infinite visual wise.
@@lxXSuddenDeathXxl non of those games hit the same resolution and performance as Halo infinite. But alas Halo infinite is truly just a last gen game updated on a current gen console. I suspect we will see what current gen consoles can do late next year
@@Olivion17 they do on the One X / PS4 Pro consoles…..
@@MabuseXX name one game
@@Olivion17 To which i would reply to saying I'd rather have a slightly lower resolution and have a much nicer look open world. It's absolutely not worth the trade off to have a super clear yet boring looking game.
Thank you for showing the differences in the final game vs the E3 showcases
Who’s playing the E3 showcase version?
And to think. There were many an Xbox fanboy defending how the game looked in that showcase and that it was "a slightly older build."
Man these are some of the BRIGHTEST looking night levels i have ever seen...
It's a ring world....
@@frostycarp4 wouldnt looking up at space still look dark though? correct me if i'm wrong
like the other guy said it's a ring, it'd be bright as fuck at night I imagine. Like a full moon except it's an entire arch in the sky bouncing light back down on you.
@@MintyLime703 But The Ring is broken at this point in the lore, as John discussed, so the OPs point still applies. And why even have a day-night cycle if you are just going to make it "day" all the time..
@@MintyLime703 its still weird to me because
1) the intial reveal trailer still shows how deep and dark nights can get on this ring world.
32:00 this is definitely an optimization imo. I guess most of the things you mention were cut so that they work on the xbox one. Although surely they have different render paths for different hardware ? so... why no SDF shadows/occlusion ? I'm not sure why they changed the DOF method either, as you pointed out it can't handle sudden transitions between very different depths. There are plenty of papers describing methods that give better results, so I'm really curious as to why they pedalled back here. Lots of questionable lighting direction too... I liked the moody, contrasted atmosphere in the original trailer much more.
Im wondering if those are squarely engine problems moving the game from linear corridor/openish levels to an actual real time streaming open world map. Indoor to outdoor is easy to push lighting when it's separated by loading screens, but when you're moving in and out of structures it becomes exponentially more difficult.
I would say so, Tiger engine is also derived from BLAM just like slipstream is, but Destiny 2 handles it's lighting and shadows in an "open world" setting better than this game.
I can't believe John dropped the sword and picked up Pulse carbine @45:18
These Shadow Cascades building up 3m in front of the player are simply not acceptable on an Xbox Series X in 2021
PHENOMENAL Analysis guys! Hats off as always! Props for including sound design and awesome DF Music Player :D :D
Add timestamps please
Fantastic review as always John some really good analysis on the lighting in particular I'm surprised myself at the cutscenes after Halo 5.
I appreciate this review of both the game and the new engine! Super excited to see them patch all of this!
All the graphical issues I complained about in the beta that the superfans said would be fixed in the final are still here. Every single one.
The fact that as a 32 year old contractor I’ve cleared my schedule for 2/3 days and declined jobs…thanks 343 for making me feel like a kid again!
Haha yeah me too although it's just for a day.
I got Wednesday to next Monday with nothing in my schedule. So I can grind the campaign
I don’t think that’s something to be proud of
@@rockendude103 If he has enough cushion let the dude live a little bro.
@@matthewtamayo9747 I guess but make sure you are set before you do anything like this.
I honestly don’t understand…when they showed that 2018 Master Chief reveal trailer, all those features were there and it looked really great…and then you look at the washed out final game same scene and all those ambient occlusion and dynamic lighting and bokah depth of field was significantly lowered, making it jarring compared to the 2018 one.
Like…if you ALREADY achieved it in 2018…why lower these features and why mess with the composition of the scene? The pilot’s eyes look like they’re about to pop out of his skull in the final version, lacking shaders to make it look more natural like in the 2018.
Game looks good…but…if they could of just kept the same fidelity in the 2018 trailer on the ship, as John has stated, this game would of looked a lot more “next gen” than the compromised cross-gen presentation here.
Yea it's very strange isn't it? Especially since the game started development on the Xbox one so the Series X should be able to handle those features no problem.
Maybe it was intentional? The game does have a slightly animated vibe to it so maybe those features were taken out for a reason. Hard to say really. It certainly does seem odd considering they delayed the game a year to make it look better.
Because they make the game look the best they can when showing vertical slices to the public, and then start making cuts to manage the game as a whole in order to get it to run well, especially running up to release. This is really just par for the course for development.
@@daystyrfer7887 Right, I already know that…but…I mean, the 2018 trailer wasn’t like brain melting technology or visuals going on…sure, it was very beautiful for the look it was going for…but just like John admits in this review, Halo 5’s real time cutscenes running on Xbox One was technically more impressive in some aspects…so…if they could achieve H5’s visuals, I’m confident the visuals in that 2018 trailer, even as a VS, could be achieved. That’s why it’s disappointing.
They should of kept it. No idea why it was significantly drawn back, since they already achieved H5’s impressive cutscene fidelity in realtime…
To look especially at the differences with the original 2018 Slipspace reveal, It is indeed very disappointing.
@@wizardsandwarriorz since last year they said that there was a disaster in 343 i, I suppose it has to do with how little optimized the graphics engine is. Although it also seems strange to me that bf 2042 and cod vanguard are graphically significantly worse than their predecessors being that they were specially designed for the new generation, my hypothesis is that there is some problem with the new consoles and not with the old generation
It's a given all the Halo fans are gonna flood the comments and claim everything is excellent and gloss over all the problems. The biggest eye-roll of the video was how it praised the generic space music and spent time listing the composers and playing excerpts of the underwhelming soundtrack. I'm sure it works well within the game, but it sure doesn't STAND out by any means. I remember them touting how this was supposed to be some next-gen masterpiece too. The killer app for Xbox Series X. Yet it's clearly a long delayed last gen game. At least Sony is doing it right. They have dedicated games for the PS5 and are not shackled by last-gen hardware. Games like Halo and Gears of War used to push the bleeding edge, but they have become increasingly middle-of-the-road and even feel like generic third party cross platform games with none of that special exclusive treatment.
Gears 5 has very good visuals. I think this game looks pretty good too. I also really like the soundtrack. It’s not the best looking game ever but I would imagine it will get upgrades over time. I think there can be middle ground between “this game is garbage PS5 is the best” and “this game is perfect.” But then again nuance isn’t something that people always care about these days.
What's clear @36:30 is that the Slipspace Engine was put on ice, and the entire game ported back onto the Halo 5 engine.
I always appreciate the honest and measured analysis and critique from John.
Less review, more analysis just the way I like.👍
So here’s the thing.. I’m gonna play the shit out of this campaign and am loving the multiplayer and there are a lot of positives… but… it’s taken them six years with literally an unlimited amount of funds and they still don’t even have proper shadows? Cutscene discrepancies that they have to be told about by a RUclips channel and the whole debacle of the original trailer forcing them to delay the game an entire year just for it to look in some ways worse?
I think the game overall will be anywhere from an 8-10 based off opinion and I know I’m gonna love it.. but it’s time for halo to get a new developer. This game will be a great base to work off of but really only one biome in six years? I just don’t really understand what they were doing. It screams incompetence even if the game turns out well.
Honestly hard to disagree...
Yep, well summed up. It is disappointing for the series x flagship title!
Because it isn't six years of work done here. 343 was making a direct sequel to Halo 5 when before it was going to be released in 2018. Someone at XB finally realized Halo 5 's story was unpopular wit the majority of fans and thusly scrapped the game. And decided to do what 343 are calling a soft reboot of the Halo franchise with this new Halo ring (Zeta Halo) and scrapped the war with Cortana in favor of the Banished. This new direction completely skips Halo 5's story and takes place some 18 months after defeating Cortana. Now told only through hidden Audio tapes scattered through out the map.
Halo Infinite is going to be a Live Service game now where 343 can finish the game through content updates (not just adding in co-op) but story content as well. Likely new biomes added to the map like snow and swamp areas. ( I imagine).
In perspective what you are looking at is more like 2 years of work and one (extra year) of polish.
@@AIIEYESONME so everyone hated halo 5 and they have to do a soft reboot after spending a few years on it already. Kind of sounds like incompetence to me still lol.
Let’s not forget that the master chief collection was completely broken when they launched it too. They aren’t good devs.
@@pheaseyyincompetency? lol, they wish things were that smooth. So ok in order not to sound like a hater or Sony fanboy whateverthefuck. I'm going to give forth a TL:DR version of what I've been reading from various sources from around the web over these long years.
Frankenstein
More like it's as if a giant ass corporation scrambled to throw a bunch of strangers together to work on something most employees had no previous ideas on the IP itself. And throw in temp contract workers that outnumber the full time employed ones. throw in a micro managing brown nosing yes men staff to lord over them. All fucking each other over in order to gain attention from big daddy Microsoft. And you'd have a clusterfuck, delays plagued poor imitation of a studio like Bungie.
Seriously, over the years I've read enough bits and pieces about Halo Infinite's time trapped in development hell. That now I'm surprised it turned out to be anything to write home about at all. From a studio that was assembled from necromorphing different programmers and various devs from around the globe. Almost all strangers who didn't trust each other's true motivations, and contract workers assigned to the same projects bc the separated dev teams LITTIRALLY didn't know what the project lead (which changed hands numerous times) was assigning to other temp contract workers that came and went sometimes without turning in all their work. So there was a lot of repeated tasks and assignments.
A case of a giant Corporation that had more money then skilled employees. More money then time, more money then passion or respect for their single IP that launched a whole new brand into the console space. XB = Halo! and throwing more money at the problem didn't fix shit.
Al that to say it took one guy. Phil Spencer to come on board with XB. mosey on over to 343 to see what was up. And look at what they had made so far. And tell them, WTF it's 2018!! Didn't you hear, know no one ever asked for a sequel to Halo 5? Start over and this time make it Halo. But not too old samey Halo, something new, but nothing like you guys have been doing with 4 and 5.
We're lucky just to have what we got. And with Phil Spencer firmly committed to their franchise, we just might get some good story and map expansions. Like a snow level!! Combat evolved indeed.. Lol
Sooo excited for this. Combat Evolved has always been my favorite campaign - bring on the spiritual successor!
a Tech review without PC isnt a tech review, just a random Ingame footage of a random Game. DF bring back more PC content please.
My biggest problem is that they're just milking the game, and have been doing so for over a decade now.
20 years later, and we're still fighting little groups of grunts, jackals, elites, brutes. Over and over and over.
On yet another ring world, where the Assault Rifle still sucks, and the BR is still the go-to.
There's a severe lack of vision here. All the "changes" are window dressing.
And the terrain looks terrible. As noted, the lighting and lack of shadows is appalling.
War...war never changes...
They tried changing up the enemies... it was not received well.
Also, you clearly haven't played the game to think the AR sucks... people are commenting on it being too powerful for a Halo AR?
@@rickygforce4217 I'd argue that recent games haven't been received well not because of changing up enemies, but because the story wasn't compelling. You can only kill the chief and cortana and then bring them back to life so many times before it gets boring...
I'm disappointed at the lack of biomes in Infinite.
Same, it's kinda lame that it's all forest or interior, but I guess they'll be adding more SP content over time, so hopefully that gives us some different biomes, like what the multiplayer maps have.
Gotta keep the live service component interesting
This game brought me all the way back to the first game. The nostalgia and gameplay were awesome. Listening and watching the grunts.... 🤣.And I played it at 30FPS, and had a blast.
DF team. Can you go into specifics on your opinion on the Dolby Atmos delay? It also heavily affects Dolby Digital. Huge annoyance and disappointment
I remember when people told me VRS was going to be some godlike performance boost and "no one will ever notice it!" Yeah, right. I knew that crap was going to suck.
TAAU is the real deal though, this game has an excellent implementation, at least on PC that I've experienced.
07:22 John doing what John does best - putting side-by-sides in the wrong order 😛
?
I can honestly say I fully enjoyed Halo 5, it looked great and played great on my old Xbox One S. I was a PC and Sony Playstation gamer so never really played OG Halo games, 5 introduced me to the game and I went back and got the MCC. I'm more PC these days and have really liked the look and feel of Infinite Multiplayer, so hoping the campaign lives up to expectation
5 isn't a bad game in itself. It's just a not very good 'Halo' game.
26:05 RDR2 vs Halo...ouch...
I wonder if some of these small improvements could be added to the current gen version over time. I know 343 has mentioned ray tracing down the line but perhaps there could be smaller tweaks in the meantime.
Hopefully!
Halo: Quality or Performance Mode?
PC Players: YES
I love how DF teaches developers how to fix their games, even showing the tools they have on the engine.