From this reasoning, I even wonder why they bother pushing extra particles and resolution as features for the PS4/X1. Doesn't this make them far from the "same" experience?
The excuses... unbelievable.
Depends on your semantics.
There are a number of aspects of game design, all sorts of knobs, all sorts of decisions right down to how your in-game projectile effects are shaped, regarding how a game can be made suitable to a given framerate. Why does Halo 1 use fairly slow movement, and why do plasma rifle shots have massive trails? Low temporal resolution is a big aspect of that.
Destiny is a huge project. Would cranking Destiny to 60fps make it feel better? Sure, but the exact compromises and design choices to making Destiny
as good as it can be at 60fps might be different than those made when you've got a target FPS of 30. If you're trying to develop one game and simply have a it be a multi-platform release, that's a problem; designing the game around 30fps on all platforms and simply having fidelity-per-frame juiced up on some can be a far more reasonable and manageable option than trying to bring the best out of every platform with various sorts of gameplay design targets.
In a sense, yes, the experience is different in terms of fidelity, but the point is that the qualitative target is the same. This isn't a "we're doing it for parity" point in the sense of deliberately gimping the shit out of some versions.
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(And really, I feel like reactions like those seen in this thread are a huge reason that game developers are so obnoxiously opaque about everything.)
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Well me personally at the time halo 1st came out was a PC FPS elitist and found 30fps quite laughable.
It certainly looks like it should be 60fps but who knows the scale of the larger battles.
You mean CE should be 60fps?
Halo 1 is pretty heavy on the transparency blending, which the original Xbox isn't that great at largely thanks to its wimpy GPU bandwidth. Environmental surfaces use decent-quality bumpmapping on all lighting responses, which includes diffuse and specularity from both environmental lighting and a decent number of dynamic lights. The game also handles a
lot (firing an assault rifle at the wall can spawn well over 100/second) of environmentally-colliding particles, some of which play impact noises as they bounce off of surfaces.
Shading on dynamic objects, and general dynamic object quality, are both pretty low. The game also doesn't have all that high terrain polygon density. But it's doing a lot of stuff which was absolutely insane for a 2001 game. Running at anything resembling a sustained 60fps would have been beyond mindblowing.