: Halo 4 had some really stand-out beautiful moments that I believe get
: overlooked.
: The reveal of Requiem's landscape when you exit the tunnel from the crash
: site was the first time since the Halo 3 announcement trailer that the
: series had really impressed me with its visuals.

Halo 4 has some high-quality vignette moments, but they're good in a very structured sense i.e. "this is pretty cool when you walk in here from this angle while this music is playing." The gameplay areas between that initial view and the cathedral at the end just plain didn't inspire me. The game feels like it was made by a vignette team and a gameplay area team, operating independantly of each other. They managed to pull off a consistant art style through Halo 4, but didn't tend to build iconic visual elements and then use them cohesively.

If I hop into The Ark in Halo 3, the opening pelican LZ isn't designed to give quite the same level of immediate punch as Requiem's landscape opening up. But it's a solid moment in a solid art style, and the aesthetic isn't damaged at all as I move on to the gameplay areas. The level doesn't visually lose itself anywhere. One of the Ark's punchiest vignette-ish moments is when toy go through the wall and the inner Ark is sprawled in front of you... and that's actually effectively part of a combat sequence. (For that matter, so is the location in Halo 1 that the Requiem landscape reveal was based on.)