Halo 4: Here’s why it looks so good on the ancient Xbox 360

343 Industries on fire.

Posted By | On 30th, Sep. 2012

Halo 4 looks gorgeous and it’s quite intriguing because the game is running on a 7-year-old hardware, Xbox 360. In case, you’re not aware of how beautiful it looks, check out our gallery over here.

Most of the foundation was set by developer Bungie with Halo: Reach, however, 343 Industries have taken it one step further and have churned out, what is, arguably, the best looking Xbox 360 game so late in the console’s lifecycle.

How was this possible? We have an explanation for it (via Eurogamer).

“The one luxury we’ve had is time. “A significant amount of time has passed between Halo 3 and this, even Halo: Reach and this game. We also had a luxury that some teams don’t get, which is we had some time to prototype, pull the engine apart and look at what made it tick and see where we could make improvements, because we weren’t on this grind to build the very next sequel,” 343’s Frank O’Connor said.

“The second thing is technology. We have some great engineers working on these problems and they’ve written some amazing code to enable these things.

“So it’s a combination of technology and art and time. That’s all it is,” he concluded.

He also mentioned that there is still life in the Xbox 360, and they keep finding new ways to extract performance, as any good first-party developer should.

 The console is seven years old but we keep finding new tricks and new abilities to wring performance out of it,” he said.

“There’s still life in the old girl yet. This is already one of the longest generations we’ve had. And just in terms of being an element of your home entertainment, the Xbox 360 and the PlayStation 3 are essential. You have to keep it under your TV. I cannot get rid of my Xbox. The machine has so much utility it ends up being a hub for all these experiences and can still put out triple-A quality entertainment experiences as games. I love that.

“I get so much value out of that box in my house that I literally can’t understand any reason why I would want to take it out from under my TV even if it gets replaced by better hardware in the future. It will still be useful somewhere in the house.”

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