Halo 3 graphics will improve - Bungie

I have no doubt Halo 3 will look awesome. Halo 1 and 2 were some of the benchmarks for the Xbox and honestly when Halo 1 came out I had never been blown away by the technology in a game before like I had with Halo 1. I was almost fumbling the controller the first time i'd played it. It was almost like it'd never played a video game before....and then I jumped into the seamless vehicle sections....that stuff just blew my mind. To this day no game has come close to how impressed I was with Halo 1.

Imo consistency and art design are way more important than high poly counts and shiney graphics. The texture detail in Halo 3 looks amazing (just like gears) but it doesn't have that stupid sheen/gloss that was covering almost everything in Gears of War. I think Halo 3 will be much better at setting atmosphere and getting the player immersed (not to mention the gameplay).

Also Gears had like what....9 - 11 fairly short levels and 1 on rails vehicle section. Halo 3 will crap all over that sort of content. You will be getting a lot more game for your $. 1 vehicle? What a joke! Watch Halo laugh in the face of such amateur content! Don't even get me started on the guns...

It's funny people comparing Gears of War to Halo. As cool as Gears is it has nothing on the quick, precise gameplay of Halo. In gears i seriously felt like I was controlling a tank of a human and I realise that this is what the character was supposed to be a bit like but I didn't expect the controls to mimic this. It seriously felt like my character was on a grid (kinda like the orginal tomb raider). Like everytime I took a step foward it would be exactly 1 square fowards and everytime I took a roll to the side it would be exactly 2 squares to the side etc. This is seriously how it felt to me, the controls just didn't seem to offer the type of freedom I find in Halo....and yea this could have lots to do with the fact that 1 is a 3rd person shooter while the other is a 1st person one....but still I think Halo controls light years better than Gears.

When Halo 3 comes out...you'll all see...

Oh yea....I forgot about Halo AI. Best. AI. EVER!! Gears of War? What AI? I really hope they're cooking up some awesome AI in Halo 3 because to this day the only enemy i've ever come across that are actually fighting for their lives are the convenant. They have so much personality and smarts they might aswell be player controlled. Awesome stuff! Gears of War...yea it was fun for a couple of weeks, but Halo is one of those games that changed gaming for me (and I was already a long time gamer).

Yea I remember the first time I ran out onto that snow covered battlefield with the overturned warthog it basically changed the way I saw games because I had always wanted something where I was running around a battlefield but at any point in time (like in real life) I could get killed with a stray blast/explosion (and those plasma tanks were PERFECT for this). How many games have you played where all you have to worry about is a couple of guys running around a battlefield, but in Halo you have to worry about air attacks from the banshees, ground attacks from the ghosts and covenant and those huge explosions from the Plasma tanks. Honestly the enemies would display SO much variety in their attack patterns it still boggles my mind.....especially when I still haven't seen anything that even comes close to it! I swear sometimes I would sit there with a mate all day and just keep replaying that section over and over and over and over and over....seriously with different results each time and if you got a couple of soldiers to survive it they would say cool stuff and if you actually got them all to survive you would get special speech. Man I used to love discovering little trinkets like this. I used to treasure the NPC soldiers in Halo like they were real people. Again there was so much personality packed into each one of these marines

^ No Halo's gameplay is much much quicker, when you get up close in Gears of War the controls turn to mud, but in Halo they remain they same, the turning circle is much smaller in halo (also because it's in 1st person) so that makes for quicker close quarter kills. There may be more action in Gears because everyone is in your face but that's got nothing to do with the gameplay and more to do with peoples gaming styles. You chuck all halo players into a small square sized room and I guarantee there will be more fast paced action than Gears of War. Also the weapons in Gears of War combined with the action reload makes it much much slower, firstly the weapons in Gears of War have very small clips (sniper rifle and boomshot only hold 1 bullet at a time....seriously that's a joke) and secondly some weapons take ages to reload even when you do hit the action reload perfectly, again this makes for much slower combat because more time is spent ducking/dodging/taking cover than there is spent shooting at each other.

I think Halo art direction is one of the best i've ever seen. You have to remember Gears of War is a new property so everything in that game is alien or has a different style/look about it (it's actually quite similar to the Unreal look and this makes sense seeing as it's by the same devs). Halo actually has it's own type of architecture....it's actually got way more style and art than Gears of War and most other games for that matter. Look at the buildings in Gears.....they look like normal buildings that you see in real life and in games all the time, but the buildings in Halo....only look like the buildings in Halo. What about the vehicles? You're telling me the art direction was boring there aswell? The warthog and banshee are some of the most original and well designed vehicles i've used.....sure the warthog may just be a jeep at heart but it's look and feel are completely unique to the halo word. The covenant vehicles are in a league of their own, not only do they control like a dream but they actually seem to fit in with the whole look/style of the covenant, which is much different from maries look/style. Also if you pay attention you will see weird symbols all over the place in Halo...this seems to be some sort of Covenant writing, where else have you seen that? Nowhere! Also the enemies in Halo are way more original than the enemies in Gears of War. Lets see in Gears of War you have drones, boomers and theron guards which all basically look the same except a little bit of a different build and different armour, then you have the berserker which looks exactly the same is a bit bigger and has no armour, then you have the wretches and seeders which are just round balls that fire stuff (that's not art direction....that's laziness), the only enemies I think are in any way original is the corpser and the reavers, the brumark would've been cool but you don't even get to fight any and General Ram....hmm wonder which of the enemies he looks like? Seriously they all frickin' look the same....infact if i'm not too mistaken the main enemies in Gears of War seem to be a ripoff of the Brutes in Halo. Halo has a much more diverse range of enemies....I don't have to go into detail....if you've played Halo you'll know the grunts, jackals, elites, hunters, brutes and the flood are very diverse from one another. Yea sure you can complain about the corridors etc in Halo being all samey....but samey from what? Samey from Halo corridors? Atleast thy have a style of their own, in other games it's usually some office building corridor which is WAY more boring imo because it's something you see all the time and in every game. There were lots of parts in Halo that were completely original and a few parts which were repetitive but only within the Halo universe. The thing with Halo was when the action heated up....the levels and everything else meant nothing....the combat mechanics were so refined and solid that it was such awesome fun.

And i'm only talking about Halo 1 here....

Aww...that's all you got? hehe....yea i'm being a bit unfair on Gears but the whole duck/cover mechanic is designed for a slower type of game. It may not be less exciting....but it is a slower game....or methodic as you put it. Also as cool as chainsawing is i've noticed way too many glitches when it happens which makes the close up combat in Halo a lot more solid (especially when you get a different animation for all the weapons when you melee, and cuz the plasma sword is hella cool).