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Bungie has today released information regarding the Halo Reach trailer, mainly providing answers regarding whether it was an actual representation of how the final game would look.
In this week’s Bungie Weekly Update, they state “The Halo: Reach trailer was produced directly in our new game engine using real game assets. Because the game is still in the midst of development, which means things like frame rate are still in flux, we do something called a ‘frame dump’ that lets us spit out the content, frame by frame, and then compile it back as the video you all saw on Saturday. We can actually run this same cinematic right now, within the latest game build, but it’s not always at the consistent smooth frame rate of the final game (yet).”
I guess this was released in relation to the response by the disbelief of some gaming sites that wondered just how much truth was behind the use of a new engine, and how much of a true improvement it was over the engine used for both Halo 3 and Halo 3: ODST. It is nice to see that Bungie has taken the time to be entirely honest regarding the graphical discrepancies that some noticed within the trailer – at least we now know there is a reason behind it.
As for whether this can be what fans can expect from the title when it releases next year, they continue “This trailer absolutely represents our visual bar for the final game and is near identical to what you’ll see next Fall. The single biggest difference between this trailer and the final game will be the extra generous amount of anti-aliasing (the smoothing of “jaggies” or edges of pixels) present in what you’re watching right now but rest assured that Reach will be significantly improved in this department compared to Halo 3. (The extreme “AA” in the trailer was due to the “frame dump” mentioned above.)”
As a huge fan of the Halo franchise, I am really looking forward to seeing more footage from the title and was partly dissatisfied that the trailer shown at the VGAs didn’t let us see more. However, that makes me even more anticipated to see what Bungie has released to magazines which we’ll apparently be able to see in “just a few weeks.”
