It’s a universal law of human snarkiness that the bigger the game launch, the more attention will be paid to any hitches, large or small. It’s also a universal law of videogames that the more you hype, the more trouble you tend to get into along the way, and so through a combination of both of these truths, Halo 3 has taken a few hits recently. Whether it be justifiable backlash, defective discs, both scratched and unreadable, or leaked endings, things haven’t gone without a glitch or two, and while nothing is going to stop the big green and gold behemoth at this stage in proceedings, certain things really should have gone better.
Also present in the list of Halo 3 ‘inconveniences’ is the story from earlier this week of the discovery that the game doesn’t output in a native 720p, but instead uses a vertical resolution 80 pixels smaller. Bungie has now officially responded to the claim by putting its hands up and admitting a fair cop. The explanation is that the resolution was dropped to an unusual 640p for the sake of the methods used to give Halo 3 its high dynamic range lighting effects, and you can find the full details over at Bungie’s site (Scroll down to “You owe me 80p!”).
What the developer resolutely refused to do however, was apologise or make excuses, and instead took a general attitude of “Does it really matter? The game looks good, okay?”, as you can read below.
In fact, if you do a comparison shot between the native 1152×640 image and the scaled 1280×720, it’s practically impossible to discern the difference. We would ignore it entirely were it not for the internet’s propensity for drama where none exists. In fact the reason we haven’t mentioned this before in weekly updates, is the simple fact that it would have distracted conversation away from more important aspects of the game, and given tinfoil hats some new gristle to chew on as they catalogued their toenail clippings.
Such a flagrant disregard for tact when expressing an opinion always wins a smile from me, but do you agree with Bungie’s logic? Is it fine for a game to just look good, or are those absent pixels proof of a gaming benchmark missed? As ever my friends, it’s over to you.
[Tip from The Big GD. Big thanks to TwilightLouis for the pic]
