yes but it was about the “tech debt” they had to clear, in the sense getting rid of those pesky old dependencies from as long as 20 years ago. The engine might be in a much better state right now (but still faaar from robust if we consider the game is gonna last a whole gen), and Idk fam, throwing it out again and starting all over is gonna require a looot of onboarding and time and money. And we still haven’t seen the fruits of Forzatech translating to an open world RPG yet, I think we should wait there.
Tech debt, as explained in the article, relates to fundamental issues with the deep lying engine itself. That it’s full of ad hoc workarounds that can’t be changed as everything that went since was based on their being there – and the end result is everything ends up being difficult and taking longer than it should. ‘Tech Bankruptcy’ is how the state of the engine was described.
It may be in a better place now than it was, but if it’s still shit why would they persist with it when they now have a clean slate?
I don’t really get your commitment to it to be honest. We know it caused issues for development. We know it has produced a game that looks OK but not great on a system that can deliver much more. We know MS has a wealth of options now that they didn’t have then.
Seems obvious to me that they would at least take a breath to explore those options.
EDIT:
I mean just imagine a Halo game that had visual fidelity approaching Forza Horizon 5 levels. I don’t know why that would not be appealing.
I think dropping X1 in the future will solve many issues, remember Halo Infinite is mostly a X1 game, it appears without any doubt if you see the DF analysis, also with the game now shipped, I think we can say with confidence most engine problems were solved, they only needed a thing called TIME. XD
Materials and textures in general are top notch, while the lighting still needs major works, also they need to optimize it for newer platforms, because it lacks many pc features (another highlight of X1 as target platform) and XSS suffers the most.
I agree a Halo game with FH games polish would be incredible, but if you think about it, there is no open world game with that level of detail, because a racing game is fundamentally different from an action/shooter, you don’t need to drop out of the car and interact with the world.
Materials and textures are top notch – that’s not a weakness of the engine. But the engine has weaknesses.
You can’t just assume that the lighting ‘needs more time’ when it was the #1 criticism of the presentation, they have had a year and the issues are still there. We are likely looking at a hard limitation of the engine itself, not that they just needed another few months, that they had hit a brick wall in what could actually be achieved.
The cross gen arguments don’t hold, as while I am sure this did present limitations, things like shadow draw distance is a simple indication of a technical limitation. If it was just that making the game work on Xbox One meant compromises for Series X then that would scale. They would draw in close on xbox One and way out into the distance on Series X. They draw in comically close to the camera on Series X – that is indicative of a bottleneck in the engine.
I disagree that the game going from ‘unacceptable’ to ‘OK’ over the year proves that the engine issues have all been solved. Quite the opposite. The fact is that there are dozens of games already out on Series X that are able to do more with the hardware than slip space does. The game looks fine now, and I have no major beef with its presentation, but I honesly don’t get how anyone can’t see that it is underdelivering with the hardware it is running on.
I started this reply before your follow up on my edit re. Forza Horizon 5, but to add –
Forza Horizon 5 is an open world game, in fact more open world that Halo Infinite. The engine has also/is also being adapted for Fable so is clearly capable of delivering an interactive world.
I said ‘approaching’ for a reason – yes, you would expect some difference, but while Fable or a hypothetical Forzatech Halo would have some challenges a racing game wouldn’t (much more interaction being run on the CPU), it would also have some advantages in being released from the extreme texture streaming issues.
If you watch some of the technical lectures online Turn10 have given, they actually attest to a game like Forza needing to LOWER level of detail over something a game like Halo can acheive because of the speed they need to traverse.
We will wait and see why Fable delivers, as this will be the indication of what a hypothetical FT Halo could, but I would expect some areas compromsied and some actually advanced.
I mean, lighting is greatly improved compared to 2020, it has still issues, but if you remember, the game has been launched at any cost, they even delayed a core component like coop and another of the utmost importance for the game lifespan, forge, so they clearly made some compromise and considering polish is always the first thing to be compromised, I think they cut short the finer things like distant objects lighting and shadows level of detail. I don’t think it’s an engine bottleneck, otherwise the game would still be flat like last year and it isn’t.
I mean, how many 3rd party cross-gen AND open-world games achieve 120fps? None. How many achieve 4K60fps? Few. Only that is a testament of the engine scalability and possible future iterations.
Turn10 and Playground are among the best in the world with their tech prowess, I won’t judge 343 with such a high bar, I think Halo Infinite is very good graphically wise considering the cross-gen nature, the scope of the game (first open world foray of the series), its nature (mostly multiplayer, never forget, think about COD campaign XD) and the objective development issues (they avoided disasters like Anthem and Cyberpunk, which is already a success on its own).
I’ve read some comments about the engine from Jason Schreier and ex Halo Infinite campaign level/gameplay designer . It basically comes down to this .
Either they kept using slipspace which is “technically bankrupt” and slower to use but get that “Halo” feel in Infinite OR They move to Unreal Engine which is technically better and faster but lose that “Halo” feel in Infinite .
343 chose slipspace . We dont really know if this was the better decision or not . No one knows .
What’s done is done, but they have another choice now:
From what they have said, the plan seems to be to continue to release expansions to Infintie over the Xbox Series generation. Obviously these will continue to be in Slip Space.
But they have ahead of them 7-8 years to get their ducks in a row for what the next-next generation Halo is going to be.
That is plenty of time to split off a team and explore all options, committing to a full 7-8 years (the kind of time games like GTA and RDR get) to developing a game that builds on the blueprint they have laid out here and expands it to meet the original vision.
Should they persevere with Slipspace, or should they perhaps take the time to make another engine MS owns (no need to pay a cut to Epic for Unreal now that they own multiple high quality engines themselves) deliver that ‘Halo’ feel while far exceeding the quality that slipspace can deliver?
Only they know what is feasible, but I would want them to be at least looking at all options at this stage, and decidating a bit of resource into prototyping out those options.
I think some of that is spin.
Loads of games have content cut to make a deadline. I thought Halo 5 used a brand new engine, never mind yet another new one of this game. All corps will use temporary workers for workflow issues or to cover sickness or maternity leave?
Lighting is not really greatly improved. They’ve upped the contrast a bit, used a sharpening filter to get rid of some of the softness, and made some material changes that play off the light more and these things have combined to a less ‘flat’ look. The same issues actually persist, they just don’t look as bad due to other improvements to the overall look of the game.
The shadows are a simple indication of the limits of the engine on given hardware, as it is a draw distance. There is nothing stopping it being pushed further out if the engine could manage it on the hardware, it is where it is because that’s as far as they can get it.
Turn10, Playground (and for that matter id and BGS) are all part of the same family. It’s not a matter of judging one against the other, its looking at how the different parts of Xbox can support one another to realise their visions.
EDIT: I would add to this that, while every XBGS team should have the freedom to use whatever engines and tech works for them, there would be benefits in moving as many teams to engine sharing as they can, since this allows better efficiency and sharing of innovation between them.
It no doubt helps development of both id and Machinegames titles that they both use idTech. It certainly helps that both Turn10 and Playground share ForzaTech. It means that any innovation with the tech one team comes up with both automatically have access to.
If MS could get 343i and even other internal teams onto ForzaTech or idTech, this would no doubt have benefits down the road. I’m not saying MS should enforce this, obviously Coalition and Ninja Theory are all about Unreal, and BGS isn’t going to abandon Creation, but wherever possible it would help.
They banned Brad Sams from r/halo last year I think. The problems is the subreddit got much much worse than it was last year. I mean they even got shutdown temporarily because it was so toxic, and everyone knew about that. So wanting to post there, even to show people at 343 or r/halo that they were wrong would just make things worse.
I’m not saying what 343 did last year was right, because it wasn’t, but yes it is best to avoid r/halo enterely, because it is much worse than it was last year.
I don’t think it’s Slipspace that is “technically bankrupt”. That’s a reference to the tools used in previous Halo games. SS was meant to provide a clean slate in many respects (not all, apparently).
Those tools are still present in SlipSpace .
I get the impression of the biggest issue with 343 is that it’s a bit of a rudderless ship. You have a ton of talent there that can make great stuff but if the orchestrator can’t have them working together properly then that talent doesn’t shine through.
I actually had a problem when 343 kept saying that they’re going to shape their multiplayer off of player feedback to the point where it seemed like they threw their hands in the air and didn’t know what to do. I definitely agree with listening to player feedback but they need to have their own vision.
The multiplayer gameplay is fantastic but it’s everything around it that is a mess and I think that has to do with leadership.
Staten was able to shape single player into a more refined and fun experience. Previous rumors / leaks claimed that he trimmed the fat in many respects and made some parts optional (my guess is the FOBs) for a better flowing experience.
They need someone like him to shape multiplayer. They didn’t need to wait for community feedback to see that the Battle Pass, progression, customization, playlists, and challenges were all heavily flawed. If someone came in at the same time as Staten and said, “we need more of this, axe that, tweak this, etc” way back earlier this year they could have avoided a lot of the issues they’re seeing now.
The one thing that was done right was for MS to give them (and Playground Games) more time. I hope this is the case with Starfield, which seemed like a game that was destined for this Holiday season before COVID changed everything.
…have you played this game?
Haha, yeah, literally just put my controller down from a quick session.
It’s not an impressive engine, however fantastic the game may be.
So you attribute none of how fantastic the game plays is to it’s engine?
Let’s not say ‘none’, but a game is not its engine. It’s perfectly possible to make a masterpiece or a flaming dumpster fire on any engine.
Haven’t had the chance to dig into the article, but it’s the problem the engine or the fact that it was being developed alongside the game and made things extremely inefficient as a result?
This.
How would anybody on this forum know this? Nobody here has used it or looked at the code.
who said this?