James Delahunty
1 Jun 2007 5:03
Bungie's Frank O'Connor has eased concerns of many gamers that have seen the beta for Halo 3 which launched two weeks ago. He spoke with Next-gen.biz on Tuesday about the work Bungie has left to do on one of the year's most anticipated titles. While many have praised the graphics and gameplay of the Halo 3 beta, some were left disappointed, especially when comparing the graphics against the blockbuster title, Gears of War.
"Well to be honest, we’ve seen them [the graphics] praised too. Multiplayer is by necessity a more sterile iteration of our graphical style and will always be tuned for performance and elegance rather than jamming the screen full of pixels," O’Connor said.
He continued: "We think that the final aesthetic look of our game will be judged at launch in September and in part based on the more intense single player spaces. We're also focused on maintaining the Halo character and atmosphere in our visual design – we're competing with ourselves, and not simply trying to match the aesthetic of other games. We think that folks will be happy with Halo 3’s graphical polish come September."
He reminded Next-gen that the game has not been seen in its complete form and that there will be changes in the months ahead. "We have a long time to polish and iterate on the largely complete game at this point. We’ll be working on some big ticket items as well as making sure that the little details, like decorators and shaders are all in place. Lighting and atmospherics are going to be big keystones in our look and feel, and those really haven’t been shown except in multiplayer to this point," he said.
Microsoft is looking forward to the launch of Halo 3, confident that its success will meet and even pass that of Halo 2, which generated $125 million in sales in 24 hours and boosted the uptake of Xbox Live subscriptions. The company believes that this is "the game" that will convince more people to invest in an Xbox 360 console.
Source:
Next-gen.biz