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Halo Infinite Campaign - The Digital Foundry Tech Review

Before you play Halo Infinite, what is your favorite Halo campaign so far?

  • Halo: Combat Evolved

    Votes: 71 33.0%
  • Halo 2

    Votes: 26 12.1%
  • Halo 3

    Votes: 46 21.4%
  • Halo 3: ODST

    Votes: 17 7.9%
  • Halo Reach

    Votes: 45 20.9%
  • Halo 4

    Votes: 5 2.3%
  • Halo 5: Guardians

    Votes: 5 2.3%

  • Total voters
    215

oldergamer

Member
Yeah... It looks sort of nice in places but really rough in others.

I'm glad Ps5 doesn't have a variable rate shader equivalent as it only hurts picture quality. We are supposed to be getting better visuals as time goes by, not worse. Vrs is trash, add it to screen space reflections for the list of techniques that should die.
Not this bs blanket statement again. It depends which vrs mode is used. If you are going to complain about it, at least have a clue what its doing or how it works!
 

oldergamer

Member
Some of those technical issues - 30 FPS updates in cutscenes, interpolation errors, 5 second freezes, missing lighting on characters - aren’t exactly small issues. They actually seem like pretty major presentation issues.
Those all seem pretty small in the grand scheme of things.
 

Haggard

Banned
The visuals sure don't live up to the massive budget and development time but as long as the gameplay is as good as the reviews make it out to be that's secondary and falls into the "good enough" category.

However, the asset diversity with that one biome and that ever same forerunner architecture sure isn't something to marvel about and the question "what have several hundred people actually produced all these years?" comes to mind. Just how much did they have to scrap/redo when the fuckery of the management became public last year because they couldn't bring it up to snuff within that one year delay?
 
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ZehDon

Member
Those all seem pretty small in the grand scheme of things.
Game launches in less than two days, and they have vertex wobble, stuttering cut-scenes, and mistimed animations riddling their cinematic story and gameplay. This is a AAA developer with a massive budget and the biggest franchise for Xbox. First impressions count.
 
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Md Ray

Member
Mehh didn't look amazing so hope its fun.

VRR not working kind of kills 120 fps for me as those dips will be felt

Those 5 second mini lockups are super weird.

Its on Game Pass so will try it but hopes are down just a notch honestly.
Someone correct me if I'm wrong. VRR didn't seem to work even on the PC version (win store app) on my RTX-based PC.
 

Exanthus

Banned
Well, Campaign DLC is the last thing I want. To have Halo tied to this game for a decade would be the worst case scenario. I want them to immediately start working on a next gen SKU and leave this game, this engine and last gen consoles behind. They are already a year late. It's time to move on.

Halo Infinite PvP can be the thing they support for 10 years like Fortnite or Warzone. Campaign needs to ditch last gen consoles asap.

They could stop supporting the older consoles. Didn't Destiny 1 do this for one of there expansions? they could do the same here
 

Shmunter

Member
Someone correct me if I'm wrong. VRR didn't seem to work even on the PC version (win store app) on my RTX-based PC.
So VRR needs to be actually called upon in each individual game? Not automatically triggered by the gfx api or some such?

Makes you wonder if any past game will actually work when Sony rolls out VRR…heres VRR, but sorry, no games use it.
 
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CuNi

Gold Member
Well, Campaign DLC is the last thing I want. To have Halo tied to this game for a decade would be the worst case scenario. I want them to immediately start working on a next gen SKU and leave this game, this engine and last gen consoles behind. They are already a year late. It's time to move on.

Halo Infinite PvP can be the thing they support for 10 years like Fortnite or Warzone. Campaign needs to ditch last gen consoles asap.

Sadly or fortunately they already said it will be the halo platform moving forward so I'd say it'll be DLCs till next console release. I hope they will ditch old gen consoles at some point, can't imagine the outrage if this game ends up being hold back my last gen consoles till the end of current gen life cycle.

Though on pc at least we can expect mods to fix most graphical issues some when after launch, as usually
 

BbMajor7th

Member
I think the one thing that I'd really like to see improved is the lack of distant shadowing. It's a shame they couldn't squeeze in some signed distance fields or pre-baked AO, or just even some creative level design to hide it - those wide open vistas give me Skyrim vibes. Otherwise, I think it looks pretty good overall and even great at times.
 

Sosokrates

Report me if I continue to console war
I brought this up in another thread recently but why would they draw, animate and render those wildlife herds and different biomes if they didn’t plan on using them? It was a real time trailer running on Xbox one x so clearly all the work was done already. Why downgrade it 3 years into the dev cycle?

This reminds me of the Mass effect Andromeda expose by Jason. He said the team was given 5 years to reboot Mass effect. They spent the First 3 years on prototyping procedurally generated planets before realizing that it won’t work. Then they had 18 months to start from scratch and ship andromeda. I wonder if the same thing happened here and we are seeing something that was built in the last 2-3 years instead of the last 6 years.
Happens all the time in tech demos. E.g sorcerer apprentice by quantic dream, gears2, half life 2, etc

Also, are you going to be playing this game?
 

Sosokrates

Report me if I continue to console war
I wonder if one of the reasons why development took so long is because instead doing seperate halo releases in the future, every few years another section of zeta halo will be unlocked and the 6yrs of dev time has gone into building the framework to make this possible.
It could mean new halo campaign content could be released in shorter intervals.
Also maybe slipspace and infinite was designed to take full advantage of SeriesX/S, but because of the initial section of the zeta halo having to run on Xbox one there was not enough time and the lagacy of xbox one made current gen engine implementations impossible.
Hopefully the next section of zeta halo is xbox series/pc/cloud exclusive.

Also I would not be surprised if the next section of zeta halo was not broken up and completly open because of the SSD in current gen.
 
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Vasto

Member
Its really good to see how 343 is taking feedback from them and will working on fixes. Game looks great, just wish it would have had the ray tracing at launch because looking at the design of the indoor areas I think it would have looked amazing.
 

sinnergy

Member
I wonder if one of the reasons why development took so long is because instead doing seperate halo releases in the future, every few years another section of zeta halo will be unlocked and the 6yrs of dev time has gone into building the framework to make this possible.
It could mean new halo campaign content could be released in shorter intervals.
Also maybe slipspace and infinite was designed to take full advantage of SeriesX/S, but because of the initial section of the zeta halo having to run on Xbox one there was not enough time and the lagacy of xbox one made current gen engine implementations impossible.
Hopefully the next section of zeta halo is xbox series/pc/cloud exclusive.

Also I would not be surprised if the next section of zeta halo was not broken up and completly open because of the SSD in current gen.
Yes, it’s basically the Fortnite , world of war craft approach ..
 

Hoddi

Member
Someone correct me if I'm wrong. VRR didn't seem to work even on the PC version (win store app) on my RTX-based PC.
VRR works fine on my PC but the in-game Vsync breaks it and causes stutters. Disabling it in-game and enabling it in the driver panel makes VRR work normally (at least in the Steam version).
 

M1chl

Currently Gif and Meme Champion
Wonder hoe much MS payed for new Engine, which definitely not going to get used anywhere else.

I like the sharpness of it, but not much else...
 

SlimySnake

Flashless at the Golden Globes
Wonder hoe much MS payed for new Engine, which definitely not going to get used anywhere else.

I like the sharpness of it, but not much else...
well they spent 3 years between 2015 and E3 2018 working on the engine. I dont know if all the 750 employees worked on the engine, but I am assuming the entire team worked on that slipstream demo trailer so id say probably a good $150 million. ND games used to cost around $20 million when they had 150 or so employees and took 2 years to make the Uncharted games. GOW3 took 3 years and $40 million and they had around 250 devs. Costs have risen since but 750 devs is a lot of employees and every year is probably around $50 million.
 
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MikeM

Member
Seems obvious they are playing on the "120FPS" mode?

They don't bother to mention it. That looks like garbage, but 120FPS modes are pretty stupid for single player games.

They really exist for xCloud, is the thing MS doesn't talk about.
Doom Eternal would be an example where 120fps is a huge benefit.
 
Not this bs blanket statement again. It depends which vrs mode is used. If you are going to complain about it, at least have a clue what its doing or how it works!

This is clearly the finer granularity highest tier implementation, as evidenced by the shot that looked like a negative in the video that was aimed at showing the shading rate differences in different portions of the screen.

Outside of Gears 5, there hasn't been a single implementation of VRS using Xbox's hardware solution that doesn't exhibit an unacceptable level of artefacting. And even Gears 5 wasn't immune to the problem.

The issue is that Direct X's hardware VRS was sold as a feature that absolutely does not impact image quality, and this is true for still images with no other post-processing going on. But the evidence presented here with the scene looking better when the sharpening filter intensity is reduced shows that MS's VRS implementation doesn't seem to play nice with other post-processing effects and on its own seems to produce significantly perceptible artefacting in motion.

COD dev's software VRS done in compute shaders provided better flexibility than Xbox's hardware approach and thus provided consistently better results in motion. So it seems like hardware VRS (as per the DX implementation) was a bit of a turkey, and all the fanboy crowing about it pre-launch was laughably premature.
 
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