: Those clean lines. Those simplistic designs and textures. Those
: instantly-recognizable yet completely unimposing aesthetics. Surely
: there's some kind of value to that?

Of course! And all this carries over into the campaign as well. It's that kind of smart art direction that drew me into Halo's worlds. It was bold, colorful, identifiable, understandable and uniquely alien. And all those traits helped the gameplay. It molded perfect arenas for Covenant destruction and multiplayer madness. It made memories that distinguished Halo from other games.

One of the reasons I loved Halo 3/ODST so much: they didn't abandon that direction. As they added new, fancy hardware in, they found a balance between informative and clean. That's still what Halo 'looks' like to me, and one of the reasons I found it hard to embrace the direction of Halo 4 (and why I greatly, greatly disliked Anniversary). I feel like it abandoned that balance for the sake of shock and awe. It's impressive at first, sure, but then I'll start getting lost in a straight hallway due to the blob of lines everywhere. And it's lifeless detail as well. It only works from afar. You start looking up close and its all blurry and uniformative to the world you're exploring. I'd sit all the time in the Halo trilogy and stare at weird, abstract Forerunner machines trying to use the environment design and textures as hints for what they may be for. I've only played through Halo 4 two or three times because I could rarely find places for that kind of imaginative detective-work to occur.

But I don't think it's just 343i. It's 'AAA', or whatever you want to call them, games in general. With all this new technology at their grasp, they often keep pushing the detail and the grit to the max. And then it all just dissolves into convoluted mush. This 'showing off' makes for good headlines, trailers, and impressive screenshots for marketing, but it doesn't necessarily make for a good gaming experience. And I find it hardly ever makes for a good multiplayer map where aesthetics especially need to instantly inform the type of action that could occur there.