How Halo 4 Tricks You With Its Scenery

Halo 4 is generally regarded as a beautiful game with a lot of breathtaking scenes. However, there's a lot of tricks and compromises behind those scenes. Let's see what some of them are!
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[@Zenlore6499]

I love the “outdoors” section of the Dawn, cuz its low res textures are ALSO playing with perspective. They’re painted to look different from far away, then stripped down and scaled up when you’re supposed to be there!

[@DionStabber]

The Xbox 360 had less than half the power of the Nintendo switch, which struggles at keeping a consistent frame rate in Pokémon. I have yet to see a Switch game as broadly graphically impressive as Halo 4, it was truly amazing what they got out of that console.

[@makotoyuki9498]

Pokémon is just a product of crap optimization. While the Switch is capable of running games at solid frame rates that look better, the new Pokémon games are just a disaster. They are not to graphically intense to run on the switch, but still run terribly.

[@jetpackdog3427]

@@makotoyuki9498 Hell, even sonic frontiers manages to look good on switch, even if it's not as detailed as other versions.

[@__-ni1kz]

Pokémon runs like ass because Gamefreak doesn’t care, they get their money no matter the quality. Check out the port of Alien Isolation for an example of great optimization on the switch.

[@gustavomartins364]

@@makotoyuki9498 the switch is more powerfull tha 360, wtf?

[@gustavomartins364]

Also halo 4 looks worst tha halo games.

[@JayS96Bruh]

Something I ALWAYS found jarring in Halo 4 is the cutscene at the end of Dawn, where you fire the missile into the covenant carrier. The carrier has always looked so incredibly small to me. Especially when compared to the one on Exodus in Halo Reach or even Truth and Reconciliation on CE. I always assumed it was a forced perspective thing that just wasn’t quite nailed down.

[@bloodgulchpatrick]

It is, actually, a scaled down cruiser in lore too. Kinda funny how the covies just scale up and down the warship and it still works.

[@falloutgamer347]

Same with the ship that crashes into the dawn at the very end and is torn apart. You end up flying trough a hole on the hull and it seems like its the size of a large plane, not a fearsome alien warship

[@Alex20114]

The CRS-class light cruiser, which is the class of ship attacking the Dawn, actually is supposed to be smaller in canon.

[@jurassicarkjordanisgreat1778]

@@bloodgulchpatrick yeah because the storm covies are lesser in power so they got lesser stuff

[@Alex20114]

@@Nighterlev Kind of like this one except this one was the inspiration and not the result. The most well known class is the CCS-class, AKA the one that has been with the Halo franchise from day one with the Truth and Reconciliation, and the CCS-class is actually canonically designed as a more powerful CRS-class.

[@OhChrumbs]

The reason for the image at the start that blocks off the hologram room is to stop the game from having to render the actual room. Modern games only have to actually render what is currently on screen, so putting that room behind a static image means it's no longer on screen and won't be rendered. This is the same principle behind the chief's helmet cutting off 5-10% of the screen in 4, it means theres less screen space the game has to actively render.

[@pododododoehoh3550]

Thats genius, never thought about the helmet thing

[@iTzKneecap]

Is the helmet thing confirmed as true?

[@Konim96]

Honestly, I think the helmet thing barely makes a dent on rendering, if at all. I remember back when Halo 4 just came out, 343 said they added it for immersion, to make it look and feel like we are actually inside a helmet. They got rid of it in multiplayer last I remember, so if it were about rendering they would have left it in multiplayer as well.

[@iTzKneecap]

@@Konim96 Yeah, I remember them saying that too. I doubt what this dude said is true, it's probably just an assumption made then stated as true because it sounds possible enough.

[@SlightlyLucyy]

The helmet on screen is actually rendered real time, have you noticed how light sources interact with it?

[@ericbooth3393]

Halo 4 suffered from texture quality issues all throughout but the moment I loaded that game up after it came out.. I was totally blown away by how beautiful 343 managed to make the scenery and landscape look. Not quite as blown away as I was with Reach and it’s skyboxes/out of bounds area but it was quite close, an honourable attempt at creating something next-Gen on an aging console. Just as the story is based on an aging Spartan trying to keep up with the next generation 🧐 You could barely tell on the 360 until you looked at the texture of an elite or grunt. Were it not for Generalkidd I never would’ve known just how low poly certain sections were.

[@NecroticGamer117]

>trying to keep up with the modern generation Boi most of the Spartan IV's pale in comparison to the soldiers of old. The UNSC went soft in a time where the only enemy who could compare to the original Covenant were the Banished. Only reason why Infinity went down was because they got jumped by a fleet on a scale not seen since the Covenant dominated...they got slapped in the face after bullying Remnants for so long

[@ericbooth3393]

@@NecroticGamer117 Oh I don’t disagree. That’s just the underlying narrative tone of Halo 4. Cortana is aging and almost insane, Chief lost 5/6 years in space, humanity has moved on since the destruction of the covenant. Doesn’t mean he still ain’t the man. He is still trying to prove that he is #1 despite the UNSC attempting to replace him and the other Spartan II’s. The infinity being destroyed by the Banished is the reason I’m not a huge fan of Halo Infinite. Was a good game in many ways but to open with that cutscene and not even know what led up to that moment, was stupid.

[@ericbooth3393]

@@Nighterlev Which was a bold but dumb mistake in my opinion. The game looked beautiful but the textures of character models were so terrible I almost couldn’t believe it. I thought the Spartans were the only model in that game to actually look reasonable for a triple A title.

[@ericbooth3393]

@@Nighterlev I thought Halo 3 looked great for the time. Games like Half Life 2 several years earlier blew it out of the park but the only thing that bothered me about Halo 3 was the cutscenes and animations of characters. I was personally never looking at rocks

[@colbyboucher6391]

@@Nighterlev While you're not wrong, somehow H4's texture work just looks... worse. It's hard to explain.

[@Jakey_-iz9tw]

They managed to trick us into seeing the dawn as 10x bigger than and an entirely different type of ship compared to what it was in halo 3

[@wumbosaurus9121]

I'd say more like 100x bigger. If the in-game ship was whole, it would be longer than the Infinity

[@wumbosaurus9121]

To add to that, the entirety of the Halo 3 FUD would fit into the outdoor playable area of Halo 4's FUD

[@ryatt9365]

That inconsistency bothered me far more than all the ugly art style changes. It's not just inexplicably changing the way something looks (which is still bad), it's literally a completely different ship. They decided they 100% wanted the mission to play out one way, they saw the mission would not be possible the way they wanted if they used the ship that Chief was in in canon, so they just changed it to a different ship. It's so stupid. One of many perfect examples of 343 showing absolutely no regard for previously established canon.

[@SlightlyLucyy]

Hello, Game Designer here! I can tell you that the most likely reason they had to use a plane to cover the hologram of the ship is because the Cryotube and the Hologram possess different transparent materials and one of the most frequent bugs when rendering layered transparent objects is "Sorting". Which is when the renderer doesn't know which of the transparent objects is closer to the player camera and as a result will incorrectly draw one image over the other. It can be worked around given enough time, but what they ended up doing was clearly much faster.

[@MisterChief711]

That actually explains so many visual issues with transparent objects in games

[@thepunisherxxx6804]

Their renderer already handled large way more complex areas with cortana and all the forerunner tech, translucent bridges. That isn't it. They had the graphics jacked up to 11 in those small corridors and to look nice for the opening cutsceene. More likely it was there to cull the next room so it wouldn't be rendered, freeing up more resources for the opening to look as good as possible on the old 360 hardware. Halo 4 desite the old tricks still looks very impressive.

[@SlightlyLucyy]

@@thepunisherxxx6804 So Cortana isn't actually transparent in Halo 4, but she is partially less opaque - which in rendering is an important distinction - but regardless, my point still stands that you'll be very hard pressed to find two transparent objects being rendered in positions in the game world where you can see one through the other, because as I mentioned, that's very difficult to even now, let alone back in 2012. You'll also notice that you can stand in the hologram room and look in the direction of where you came from and where you are about to go, if there was a performance/rendering issue with having all that space loaded in, that wouldn't be possible and they'd shut the door behind you. Also there are much larger, much more detailed vistas in Halo 4 then that one corridor, a testament to 343's work for sure.

[@edwardcornell1263]

I love using the jet pak in halo 4. You get three results. Either fly so high you die, get out of bounds message, or cannot get back down. I ha e gotten all three.

[@marcktop]

its fun that 343 did all of that just to not compromise the gameplay experience, even on 4 player splitscreen coop the gameplay still felt smooth, wish more triple A titles made the sacrifice of quality for that smoother gameplay

[@inductivegrunt94]

I mean, it's not like they have the ability to make high-quality backgrounds since it's the first game they made, so it's understandable. But what they did is still really good regardless of its limitations.

[@sporemariomaster]

It was the first Halo game they made. 343 was constructed from industry veterans. It was not their first experience in game development

[@CaillouThePimp]

@@sporemariomasterJust because they’re industry veterans doesn’t mean that they’re guaranteed to work well together. It was they’re first project they did together as a studio.

[@halocemagnum8351]

I think the big bottleneck was the capabilities of the Xbox 360

[@sporemariomaster]

@sharpner35 I know that they were working together for the first time and that lead to a ton of issues among the teams but I am saying they weren't incapable of making a high-quality product.

[@rm25088]

I still think halo 4 looks fantastic. Especially Cortana and her big old "features". Seriously though, its a good looking game for being 11 years old.I still enjoy it. The game play and missions I think are great. The story is meh, but it has some of my favorite level design. Riding on the mammoth destroying stuff is fun. Running through the jungle killing knights and hoping on a scorpion and destroying covenant was fun. Also getting to use the mantis for the first time had me like holy shit. But then 5 came out and infinite. We don't talk about that.

[@Lmaokekw975]

something about 343 and low quality fits perfectly

[@jyapp4489]

Honestly, I always get a kick out of seeing this type of stuff from game devs. Its so cool the type of illusions they can make with the tools they have.

[@AmeHart]

Love seeing skyboxes and camera tricks in games. Would love for you to show off more ! I remember back when I played Call of Duty i would take the camera out of the map a lot and look around. Fun stuff.

[@gonebutyea]

THANK YOU SO MUCH FOR MAKING THIS VIDEO! I played every Halo game and have been a HUGE fan of the series. When Halo 4 came out (and to this day) I loved it! I think 343 did a decent job with it. Sure it wasn't Halo 2/3/Reach quality, but it was still good imo and that's coming from someone who HATES Halo 5 (and dislikes the Halo Infinite campaign and hates Halo Infinite MP). My BIGGEST complaint about Halo 4 honest to God? The way they use JPEGs in a lot of areas. I understand they improved quality of things up close compared to Reach, but I do believe the out of bounds areas were just straight up trash. Many areas you see the grainy aspect of the picture. I really preferred how Halo 2 and especially Halo 3/Reach made their out of bounds GIANT low poly areas. The low poly aspect is much more immersive than pixelated JPEGs. In the 2nd mission Requiem, those waterfalls and forests were bad but especially the floating pillars how some were 3D and others were clearly frozen images. It's not about graphics, it's about immersion. Giant low poly terrain > JPEGs

[@RetroPlus]

I remember playing this game for the first time and being genuinely blown away by the scale and detail of the skyboxes, the environmental design is top tier in this game

[@Janjibro66]

Im one of the few that never thought Halo 4 was visually impressive on the 360. I remember thinking the game looked a little more detailed than any Halo game before it but that all the texture work was so shoddy up close. Something I always loved about Halo 3 was admiring the architecture of forerunner structures up close because textures in Halo games always looked so clean, shiny and 3 dimensional like you could get absorbed into the world. Halo 3 wasn’t the most detailed game ever but whatever was on screen always had such a level of polish to it that it looked so clean and beautiful anyway. Halo 4 was the opposite. It felt more like a video game. Everything viewed up close looked so low res and ugly, levels were smaller and although rocks and cliffs appeared to be more detailed than ever from afar everything looked more cartoony than ever and it was the first Halo game where you didn’t feel like you were in a real place.

[@chipsdubbo5.56]

Even Halo CE has more texture than you think on the original Xbox when you zoom in on rocks or metal

[@AbcdEf-lz6oe]

Huh? How could people agree with this. There’s a significant tell tale difference in the graphical quality of Halo 4 vs Halo 3. As much as I dislike the jarring change in art style, the graphics are definitely a step up compared to Halo 3.

[@WHITEPERSUAS1ON]

I def noticed this. You can really feel it in MCC. For 360 it looked amazing, but when you upscale, Halo 3 looks amazing and Halo 4 shows a bit more of its tricks

[@ReaverSenpai]

the hologram room is a hologram, nice.

[@GucciPasta]

my recommendation for future content for this channel, would love mod reviews and custom campaign reviews as well. h4 needs more attention in the modding community

[@roguespartanstudios117]

Even if it still looks nice it just never will be the same to me. Nice video!

[@xXKaloKingXx]

Halo 4 on the Xbox 360 was a miracle

[@Spartanunit5]

Up close Halo 4 was absolutely beautiful, they had to make some concessions to have what was arguably next gen graphics on the models up close.

[@marknunya3107]

Halo 4 & Halo 3 will always, for me at least, look beautiful graphically. Some of the design decisions in H4 weren’t my favorite, but the effects, models, and environments were amazing.

[@Tlohtzin123]

That's something I never liked about Halo 4's graphics engine: Shaders and textures. Halo 4's 3D models definitely have more polygons than previous games, but heck, everything looks dull and pixelated. The shaders are ugly, they look like plastic with pixels on them, I remember how even the lens flares looked crap in Halo 4 Day 1, and the skyboxes looked so unattractive and flat, because as soon as you stared at them you saw that they were low resolution PNGs of objects. While Halo Reach for example always looked low poly, but gosh, its textures were unique for the time, no matter how much you zoomed in on things you saw amazing detail, and the level of the worlds/skyboxes were gigantic, plus they were fully modeled in 3D, which left a lot of freedom to get off the glitched map and explore for hours!

[@foxtrotsierraproductions8626]

The Pelican for example have a way to strong curvature and AO layed on top

[@ProGremlinPlayer]

Impressive how they managed to still make these hard to notice despite all of this. at least for the 360's resolution.

[@PelemusMcSoy]

In a weird way, the lower resolutions on older consoles were a blessing for hiding the distant low poly models. I noticed it most when playing Super Mario 64 and Ocarina of Time in 1080p; I had never noticed that Mario and Link had low poly models before when the camera got too far away, but the crisper resolution exposes the changes.

[@KaptainKarizzma]

Very cool stuff! Great job as always dude!

[@cwags3618]

Keep making these videos. They are good

[@Kirbylight2]

I don’t know if it’s true or not, but I’ve read somewhere that Halo 4 was supposed to be a launch title for the Xbox One, but was dropped

[@4realm8rusirius]

Bamboozled

[@erendripaeger9875]

Tricked, backstabbed...

[@Alex20114]

Probably not a reduction of resources, the fact that the real room is still there means it still takes up resources. Actually, to render both should take MORE resources than just one or the other. The outside area, however, is almost certainly for resource saving with how it is rendered in low quality. the Infinity being as large as it is would take a pretty big chunk of resources, so it makes sense not to render the whole thing in game, especially since we pretty much never see it in full outside cutscenes.

[@nihren2406]

I mean yeah, it's a very common method of resource saving. Only model what you need, what can be seen, and anything that you don't need to model out, just make a billboard for it. As an example, if a character is wearing a hat and the hat is never removed, would you model out the hair underneath? Probably not, you're just using resources you don't need to, so you only model the hair that's sticking out from under the hat, and if a player removes the hat via some mod or program, there'll be nothing there. Heck, the character might not even have a scalp because that was unnecessary. And the same can be said for environments and backdrops.

[@Up8Y]

I mean, it's very likely it's there to take advantage of geometry occlusion.

[@Sk8erBoiALX]

A lot of games only render what's currently on the screen. So even though the room is still there, it's not rendered as long as the texture is in front of it while the camera is looking in the direction of the room. General Heed is able to show it when flying through the texture because at that moment the room is on-screen and the game renders it. Or it's because he's using dev tools to fly through the levels and in a lot of dev modes 3D objects and geometry can be rendered forcefully, even if they're not currently in the view field of the camera.

[@Alex20114]

@@Sk8erBoiALX I didn't even consider dev tools, he normally shows or says when they are used, so I've come to assume things are being run as normal as far as triggers unless it is stated he set the triggers off himself.

[@nivo3672]

i actually think halo 4 and past halo games look better than infinite, not because of realism and better textures but everything seems more consistent. Games nowadays go for realism but we don’t have the technology to make it consistent whereas back then everything was more artistic than realistic because realism wasn’t the goal

[@rm25088]

i agree. As nice as i think infinite looks, every time i play halo 4 I am still blown away. The game is 11 years old about. Even bungie halos like 3, odst, and reach still look pretty decent.

[@mrpiratefox4497]

Nah they dont, none of them. The closest is Halo 2A campaign but its held back because of the old ass animations. Everything in Infinite looks better, from lighting to textures, models reflections, animations, etc, only drawback can be shadow resolution but in all the past halo games dynamic shadows just stop existing meters in front of you

[@nivo3672]

@@mrpiratefox4497 Graphically infinite is far better and more realistic but that’s not what i mean. Better doesn’t mean more realistic textures, better lighting etc. I’m talking from an artistic perspective. The older games just had a polished, consistent feel that weren’t trying to look realistic

[@adamspeiser6449]

Objectively, Infinite is higher quality with textures and models (unless you're on my computer). I do agree though that some of the other Halo games may "look better" than Infinite. That is a subjective statement that cannot be wrong, and I will say that I do like how Halo Reach, for example looks compared to Infinite. There are even some objective things you could say are higher quality, such as the explosions and vehicle sound effects. In the end though, what looks better is not the same as what is higher in terms of quality (though quality is also subjective depending on how you look at it.)

[@mrpiratefox4497]

@@nivo3672 Infinite literally went back to Bungie's designs even when it doesnt make fucking sense just to please fanboys, its the same artstyle

[@dominiksvagr7531]

Most of what you talk about is LOD, the further you are the worse it looks. This principle can be used on en entire levels even making them fully invisible if neccesary. These LODs are relative to the current cameras distance.

[@akend4426]

Interesting fact: While Forward Unto Dawn was scaled up significantly in Halo 4, it was solely for the sake of gameplay, as the opening level couldn’t have been implemented in the Halo 3 design without a lot of backtracking. For their part, 343 Industries has stated that the Halo 3 version of the Dawn is the canonical one.

[@bluray7358]

This stuff isnt limited to halo 4. All of this is very common across the video game industry. Why do more work then you need too? Why render things fully and take up computer recources when you can do cheap tricks to get the better frames.

[@rm25088]

343s best halo hands down. I had a blast with legendary. I think I might fire up the old xbox right now and play a few missions.

[@6Twisted]

Makes you appreciate Unreal Engine 5 with Nanite and Lumen. All this hacky optimization is done automatically and optimally.

[@TheRealAmericanMan]

I can confirm the reason for “covering” the Hologram room with the matte is to free up more resources for that ultra high particle density early on as well as Cortana’s heavily detailed model

[@Willsr14]

I've always found it weird how the covenant cruisers on the first mission are absolutely tiny compared to their lore scale, as well as the UNSC frigate you're on, it's much bigger and a totally different design that what the Forward Unto Dawn actually was. You can see by moving left/right that the silhouette of the cruisers shifted as if there were just a hundred or so metres away, rather than thousands as the size of these ships should suggest

[@ChouRaiyuki]

The FUD's size I think is a lot like what CE did with the Autumn on the Maw and the TNR. Both playable interior sections are much bigger than the actual ship (I hadn't known till recently as well that the TNR's indoor sections are all actually in an area UNDER the outdoor area you play in before the lift scene

[@Confusingperson]

Those cruisers are a different class than the ones we are used to see, that is the CRS cruiser it is tiny, but the cruisers from the original halos are CCS class cruisers you might be thinking about, they were the main ships until the covenant broke.

[@ravenwulf8]

Those are CRS light cruisers, which are canonically a measly 300 meters long, the length of three liches essentially

[@gietpudemee9155]

@Daft Painter These are the CRS/Zanar-pattern Light Cruisers, they are a 300m long ship very simular in design to the 1782m long CCS, only having differently colored lights (and even that can depend). While the CRS itself was a 343 excuse for these small looking models (btw they aren't small but moreso just far away, actually they're roughly three times bigger than a actual CRS), the idea of tiny looking Covenant ship exists since Halo Fall of Reach, with the Unrelenting being a Covenant Cruiser lookalike while only being a third the size of the Commonwealth (a Paris class Frigate), which actually makes it even smaller than the CRS...

[@VideoGameMantis]

I keep forgetting how good some games looked in 2012. Halo 4's environments were probably the best thing about the art direction.

[@andyn46]

There were some truly exceptional looking late 7th gen games. While a lot of those are PS3 games, Halo 4 looked amazing at the time. I remember being blown away

[@ChouRaiyuki]

It's interesting because I think H2 was comparable in this regard as you have things like the low poly marines on Cairo, the MAC stations and the Sentinel factory, and heck really even the skybox of Delta Halo and Regret are noticeably like this a well.

[@TheDapperCat]

I have to say I don't think it's accurate to call these changes of techniques from Halo 3/Reach to Halo 4 "compromises" as it implies something is being lost or taken away, but stuff like the ship not being rendered on all sides (industry known as back face culling) and more use of lower poly models and textures far away, and especially the use of 2d textures layers instead of full 3d for out of bounds scapes is a sign of better optimisation over the previous games, whereas before using a models as massive as a UNSC ship that's modelled on all sides or using full 3d geometry with decent, low end HD resolution textures is a waste of resources as the player within normal means would never see the backend of said models, or details in OoB geometry you only see from a limited, distant perspective. Not talking about art direction but in terms of visual fedelity, stuff like texture quality and poly counts, especially with cutscene models or performance capture ones, Halo 4 was pushing the limits of what the 360 could do, in some cases it seems like 343 were making the game intentionally to look better scaled up for potential next gen hardware, aka future proofing and thus they would have had to be a lot better about resource management to keep the performance stable. As others pointed out as well, the texture covering that hologram room is probably done as anything not visible to the player camera shouldn't render and probably to keep performance in check as that in-game cutscene uses the performance capture model for cortana, it probably helped a lot.

[@mcazares48]

I still firmly believe Halo 4 is overall a good game. Only because the greatest call of duty game released alongside it, Halo 4 wasn't as popular.

[@JohnSSSSS]

lol no

[@CallsignYukiMizuki]

This is pretty much common practice in game dev and you pretty much answered yourself already. Mainly; it helps saves on resources / LOD and it sells off the illusion. Unlike film, you really have to do a lot more with less when it comes to game dev. Whereas in film, a gun can be "unoptimized" by having over a million tris and UVs filled with empty spaces, games dont have that luxury. The same gun may only have 2k tris max, the UVs are completely packed and tighter than Kowloon and most of the gun's details are done via bumps / normals. To point out the forest / trees in particular, those are a bitch to do, especially when youre doing it in a more realistic style. So rather than placing a gajilion high poly trees in the background, not only is it easier for the game to render a single image, its also a lot more simple for the artist to make and for the tech artist to implement

[@CloneCommander5929]

Invisible walls and kill timers.

[@ShadowDragon-cw7wb]

Halo 4 should have been delayed a year so it can launch on the one. Unfortunately, 343 wanted to rush it hence the many bugs it has and the download disk it needs. To bypass the limitations, they used the "return to battlefield" restriction, doors forcing you out of previously traveled areas and texture deepfakes to reduce load on the system.

[@JohnSSSSS]

gameplay would have been garbage either way

[@_Siptah]

It’s also why it was the shortest lived halo title of the franchise Xbox one came out and the following year halo 4 returned with all the others with the release of The Master Chief Collection.

[@ideadlift20kg83]

Nice video! I hope they remaster it a bit to replace the 2d stuff, it was a cool trick but kind of immersion breaking when playing it now on PC and Xbox one etc xD

[@spark_bears]

Nice! Always cool to see under the hood of a video game. Degenerate Triangle makes for a great Monitor name.

[@finkamain1621]

I never understood why they even made Halo 4 for the Xbox 360 when they could have waited a year for it to possibly be an Xbox One launch title

[@adamspeiser6449]

At least it came out on the MCC not too long after. Disappointing that it was mainly performance rather than enhancements, but it was something.

[@JDotLoc]

Same with halo 2, the 360 launched the year after

[@TheMAZZTer]

It's difficult to say about a lot of these things. Some of these optimizations may have been done prematurely even if not needed, just because it's good practice as long as you're building something the first time around. In many cases development time is more important than optimizations (especially if those optimizations aren't necessary) so you see things like In Amber Clad with a full model. The hologram room thing strikes me as something done to hide dynamic loading of the map during a cutscene (not sure if Halo 4 does that, if not maybe it was planned at some point). For me some of these things highlight how difficult it can be to port console games to PC. A cutscene long enough to cover dynamic loading on console may not be on PC with the computer's specs. A low poly preview of the outdoor section may look OK at 1080p but start to look bad at 4K. Etc.

[@aeronautisch]

"The first rule of program optimization: don't do it. The second rule of program optimization (for experts only!): Don't do it yet." --Michael A. Jackson.

[@cyberspectre8675]

If anything, these things point to Halo 4 being a better-optimized game than Halo 3 or Reach. The earlier games are still better games, but the work that went into Halo 4 is impressive.

[@SoulbentAnime]

Everyone is doing great GeneralHeed! But we all want to know how you are doing?

[@thelizardking3807]

Awesome video idea, it would be cool to see more examples

[@MosiahWhite]

I bet the wall you talked about in the beginning (texture billboard) was used to trigger the game into culling the room behind it to save performance. So once you go past it/it's removed, the game engine begins rendering it proper. That's just my guess.

[@ChouRaiyuki]

TBH I could also see it being a placeholder in some earlier build where the section behind it really WASN'T loaded until after you get cortana.

[@emilefoxhall3155]

Shows how with each Halo game, the scenery gets cheaper and cheaper. An example, Halo Infinites pelican when it flies away, it shrinks till nothing. They've actually been doing this since bungies games.

[@mattday7337]

One of the few smart moves 343 made. There is literally no benefit to having the actual pelican model stay full sized and fly off

[@DanielBlaney]

If you understood how near and far clip planes work and how having a really far out far clip plane causes Z Fighting (flickering) you would get why they did this.

[@gaigescott3184]

I love you General Heed!! You give the best behind the scenes knowledge of my favorite video game series. Keep on keeping on! Edit: removed an unneeded comma.

[@disturbedhalo117]

Can you put it back in as a meme?

[@shrimpguy6900]

halo 4 was very pretty. I think the best all time lighting in halo was halo 3 as far as realism goes but halo 4 has some very pleasant scenes

[@RosheenQuynh]

I think I knew back in 2012 when I was in Forge on the space map (name escapes me) and a rock looked gross up close. First time I ever saw that in a game, I think...

[@MaleiCKSalah]

As much as I didn't like Halo 4 as a Halo game, this was some good game dev techniques

[@CaptainRexC67]

Imo Halo 4 tried too hard to be graphically detailed ‘at a glance’ but the second you zoomed in with a scope on anything, the quality dipped massively. This wasn’t as noticeable in pre H4 games, and I remember being suprised when I discovered this at launch. Still didn’t stop me enjoying the game and playing it to death though.

[@joshfoustcommunity8928]

I love these out of bounds scenery objects, even though halo 4 was held back because of the Xbox 360, it’s very impressive that 343 managed to pull this off, and it comes to show their talent with games! I still think halo 4’s graphics are a lot better then halo 5’s graphics, I feel like halo 5’s campaign did to many compromises! either stuff was not enough detailed, or too detailed, plus too many changes! Halo 4 is a masterpiece, while halo 5 is a week, and buggy mess, if the execution was better in halo 5, it could’ve been a masterpiece!

[@adamspeiser6449]

Everyone is entitled to their own opinion, and I personally think that Halo 5 looked better, at least in terms of most kinds of objects and the character models. The crazier part was that apparently from what I have seen, Halo 5 was supposed to look even better and did in the public tests for the game I think. The difference was that it ran at 30fps like the 360 Halo games. Crazy to think about how it could have looked even better than it did. Not saying that Halo 4 looked bad because it looked pretty good even back in the day, but there were definitely higher quality moments in Halo 5 than Halo 4, in my opinion.

[@chaotic_9x687]

The missile controls at 3:43 are loaded in because the block shield controls use the same prefab.

[@ErikLosLobos]

I think it's impressive. It's one of the most beautiful looking games on the 360. If they have used tricks to achieve it I think that all the more admirable

[@RuukuLada]

Occlusion culling is probably the explanation for the first one

[@HydratedBeans]

My greatest wish is that Halo 4 was initially planned for 3 years of dev time and a Xbone launch title.

[@nintendonerdjoseph]

I noticed the lower quality "outdoor" assets on the Dawn even on the 360 version. In Halo games, I often zoom in real close to textures and far off details out of curious habit. Unfortunately, I have not been able to unsee it since!

[@adlerains12]

I'll only say one word about the low res png: "FRUSTRUM"

[@VlIl]

porting these games over to PC, Next GEN and expecting the hole game to be remade is just not possible. Crazy enough they got all games running ported into 1 game the MCC. Back on 360 that wasnt such deal to have issues with 4k resolution

[@angryjoe98]

Keep im mind that halo 4 was a 720p game on 360 witch was super high resolution back then and to increase the resolution cuts where made. I always found halo 4 to be in one of the best magic, tricks old consoles have pulled off the way they used to 2D and 3D together in background, and knew exactly where to make cuts in quality was super impressive for the time. That’s what makes halo4 look almost a generation different than halo 3. I personally feel halo 4 looked better than halo 5 in so many ways.

[@eklypse21]

I have played through H4 once. Then threw it away

[@bmxdude1337]

Don't blame ya

[@3mpt7]

So, there's this part where I jump up and down in Spartan Ops, and I'm met with all these jagged torn-off textures in my face. Then there's a part in Halo 5 where I'm supposed to be running down a cliff-face, and when I turn around, there's this impressively blurry, low resolution structure holding the whole thing up. And then when I played Infinite...ugh. Halo 4's campaign could have been released on four discs. It could have had its levels reworked for the Xbox One. It could have focused on level, enemy, environment, character, story, and vehicle design rather than textures and lighting effects. In Amber Clad delivering tanks and troops was practical, hence the full model. The Infinity (carrier) crashing was dumb, for big dumb action, hence the half-model.

[@wuvvbernardo9353]

Once you see it it’s hard to unseen that’s the point of these low quality graphics of H4 I even prefer Halo3 than Halo 4 or 5 Doesn’t hurt my eyes playing Halo3 for 4 hrs straight meanwhile playing Halo5 4 hrs straight makes my eyes watery and dizzy 😵 H3 doesn’t have that kind of feeling

[@smugsona]

this is like that one meme where everything is just cake

[@He11cth3r3]

The best thing in halo 4 is…

[@JohnSSSSS]

when the campaign is finally over and you can do literally anything else.

[@ErikLosLobos]

story

[@blazingblade013]

Ayyy what’s up

[@dylives7667]

As if getting tricked with the reveal trailer wasn't enough.

[@Ironclad17]

All of these are examples of things you'd never actually see in game though. Even on better hw you're going to use lod scaling so you can focus resources on things the player is actually able to see.

[@sreeser3512]

If the goal of all this was to improve Halo 4's performance, I shudder to think what it would have been like with long-distance 3D modeling for most of the landscape like 2 and 3 did. 4 ran pretty badly as it was - even with all these texture tricks, the constant super-quick deletion of enemy bodies and weapons (sometimes literally before they hit the ground in campaign), and the iffy lighting quality, the poor Xbox 360 still dipped below 30fps rather often.

[@BrokenCircle1]

I love how Halo 4 'needed' to make compromises yet Reach looked better.

[@ghislain110]

I love your videos but, please can you make smoother moves with the camera ? It's hard top focus when it doesn't stop to spin around 😬 I think it would be much better. Thank you !

[@Declan_ChristoTube_VA]

The 2D vs 3D backgrounds always struck me as one of the key definers between Bungie vs. 343 era Halo. It may not be fair to say as Halo 4 is definitely more graphically demanding than Bungie's Halo's, but the change always felt like 343 was cutting corners wherever Bungie put in lots of time and effort. Their overuse of hard invisible and death barriers didn't help either...

[@afanoflafear]

Must admit, Halo 4's graphics were ahead of its time, games released for current gen consoles don't even look as good.

[@Alphonse365]

So this is the reason they had to used that color filter... to "hide" the low quality sceneries

[@PelemusMcSoy]

I could give you over forty thousand reasons why I know that level isn't real. I know it because the distant textures are actually low poly models covered in simple textures. I know it because we can only explore a fraction of what we see. But for all that, I'll never actually know if it looks real. If it feels real.

[@firingpin3520]

I’d love for you to check out my Halo VR fan game and check out some behind the scenes :)

[@XDLugia]

Halo 4's texture work is both its biggest strength and its biggest weakness when it comes to graphical fidelity. Halo 4 is easily the best looking Halo game on Xbox 360 with its higher resolution and crisp looking textures compared to the other Halo games on the Xbox 360. However, play Halo 4 on an Xbox Series X/One X or a high end PC at 4k, and you will see how those textures are actually very low res despite being crispy and detailed. Halo 4 also doesn't use a detail alpha texture layer in the same way like all past games does, so the game ends up looking very bad in high resolution. Even Halo 1 and Halo 2 looks way better than Halo 4 due to their use of said alpha textures (look at the rocks).

[@o-pitamask4698]

The views are currently at 24,999

[@zanesnep]

What scenery?

[@Ahartic]

i always knew it but i couldnt ever put my finger on it

[@AverageMuslimEnjoyer2006]

Better than Halo 5, my opinion

[@Banana-Boi]

Campaign? Yeah. Multiplayer? I like H5 more.

[@AverageMuslimEnjoyer2006]

@@Banana-Boi Halo 5 gameplay is better tho

[@adamspeiser6449]

@@AverageMuslimEnjoyer2006, it was meant to be more balanced and equal. Halo 4 had more casual fun in my opinion with its loadouts. Halo 5 had fun game modes, but the main slayer variants had everyone start with the same stuff. Not to mention that you could strategically obtain power weapons when they spawned and you could not run away forever and jump the people following you since your shields did not regen as you sprinted. Using teamwork was very important in Halo 5.

[@AverageMuslimEnjoyer2006]

@@adamspeiser6449 true tho

[@xxrocketshark216xx4]

To be fair most games are better than Halo 5

[@robotsix6268]

If 343 didn't have to compromise with the limitations of the 360, would Halo 4 have been a better game?

[@Pancakes741]

Halo 3 in game world always felt more immersive and alive to me than 4 did maybe this is the reason why although the graphics were slightly better in 4 it just felt plasticky and fake if that makes sense where as halo 3 felt complete and like you could actually go anywhere and everything was scaled right and explosions were wow

[@Porsche911RSR-0]

halo 5 also felt plasticky and fake for me

[@MaxwellAerialPhotography]

Halo 4 was honestly ruined by the decision to release on 360 and not wait just one year for the Xbox One. It wasn’t just animations and textures that were compromised, but far more impactfully, the AI was severely compromised in order to run on the 360.

[@LionStein]

Are we just going to gloss over the fact that the research station in an asteroid belt is orbiting a Halo? (The first Halo encountered it seems) and it was just…not noteworthy?

[@Chris-mc2bq]

Halo 4 had the best graphics of any game on the 360. Prove me wrong...

[@stinbray1120]

Yo

[@cypressgold]

The covi carrier explosion quite literally made me laugh the first time I played this game. It's awful.

[@okamijuggalo]

Cross gen games always hold back the development that could have been achieved

[@bunnyisblack]

how do you make these videos? How are you allowed to fly outside? Trainers that I've used don't allow you to do that.

[@jonny45k44]

Imagine Halo on Unreal Engine 5.1

[@psykology9299]

Halo 4 wouldve been better if they stuck with H3 graphics and gave us more game