- last post: 01.01.0001 12:00 AM PDT
"We had a number of visual improvements in Sprint 5, and the game’s starting to showcase the power of the PC platform. Lighting in particular has real richness now, with dark-black blacks and overbrightness effects that make you want to stop and stare at the walls in Ivory Tower. Bump mapped detail textures were implemented in this Sprint too, giving maps like Lockout a suitably gritty feel.
Thanks to the oodles of memory available on a typical PC (compared to the prodigious, but now five-plus year old Xbox 1), we’ve been able to suspend some of the usual in-game rules about the resolution of textures. The first-person weapon models have been retouched from the Xbox source art, and are now IMO the juiciest part of the game. Halo 2 Vista also maintains its highest level of texture detail – a.k.a. “cinematic LOD” – even at great distances. This gives the game a feeling of clarity currently unavailable on the console."