The slipspace engine, which they were previously using, was just an updated version of the reach engine. 343 have never actually used a completely new engine until now, they had just been updating the previous bungie engine

Halo and halo 2 looked incredible for their times

Exactly. I bought it to play w/ friends. Shortly after getting Halo: CE, I played through the campaign with a friend in co-op, and we would frequently have XBox parties where we’d have couch tournaments and whatnot.

The visuals were fantastic for the time, but that’s not why I got it at all, and none of my friends seemed to care what it looked like, we just wanted to play team deathmatch.

I remember when Halo was first shown off and being amazed by the graphics. I thought it looked almost like pre-rendered graphics.

Funny how we’re now in an age where the real time graphics look much better than the pre-rendered ones from back then.

Agreed

They did restructure and fire alot of the old management , so maybe it’s not as bad now