Agree with a lot of the critisism DF have put forward. Halo: Infinite is not a looker. This is made even more obvious when they switched over to footage of Halo: Reach campaign and the difference wasn't obvious. In all honesty, Halo: Reach at 4k native at 60fps would't look a generation behind Infinite.
It is quite concerning. Yes, I'm a Halo fan first and foremost for the gameplay. But man, did Halo 2 look good back in the day and even Halo 3, resolution aside looks really good.
I just don't know with this game. It also concerns me that this is apparently a new engine. I woner how they will scale up the graphics from here. Halo: Infinite seems to be a game with the sharpness filter turned to 11, it's IQ is great! But everything else... animations, enemy models, lighting..
Adittionally, I really dislike Brutes, they're boring opponents. I hope the campaign has enough variety for me to like it. I hope we see prometheans again. They're 'digital nature' gives endless opportunity for enemy variety. Play with that, 343!
Halo Reach would absolutely look generations (plural) behind because Halo Reach's environmental geometry detail and sandbox scale is nowhere near as high as what's inside Halo Infinite. No Halo game comes close. Halo Infinite has a lot of micro-detail and very much overlooked graphical flourishes that previous Halo titles simply haven't had at all ever, only ever had in cutscenes (sometimes not even then), or to anywhere near the same degree.
Starting with Halo 4 they tried to take a more active means of packing in a lot more environmental detail into Halo environments. One of the best examples of this was Halo 4's first level on the Forward Unto Dawn and specific parts of Halo 5, which I admit to enjoying a great deal as it addressed one of my main criticisms of Halo games since they touched HD consoles, I had a lot of trouble believing the purpose served by many locations, especially the outdoors locations. Each game did it in their own way and came with their own compromises as such, particularly in sandbox size and freedom in some cases, but it isn't like Halo games of the past were absent very linear sections, there were many of them. Some of the best Halo levels are very much linear.
No Halo title is touching all the small detail shown in this one screenshot below when you zoom and look around, same for the one below it. None comes as close to having structures of the same size that players can physically approach and observe so much geometry detail. They only share a familiar art style, but that's where it ends. Halo Infinite's scale, geometry complexity, shader work, modeling, lighting, skybox etc., all appear to be taking things to a very different level. One only thinks previous Halo games compete if they ignore the fact that much of what they see in past Halo games is fake window dressing, areas you can't go to or interact with. And even in the bigger spaces you would often never encounter anything visually worth seeing or finding. In many parts of Halo Infinite if you look carefully you can actually see how things work, or a basic blueprint of what the various individual pieces to build something like that are. The designing of things in Halo Infinite is a lot more modular, and because they're a lot more modular they can be reused a whole lot more often and then iterated on to a far higher degree in Halo Infinite than in past titles. The UNSC gear in the screenshot below are all the same quality models for what you would actually play with, only they made artistic modifications and broke them up to fit the narrative of the banished having a facility where they salvage UNSC equipment.
There are parts of Halo Infinite's latest campaign overview where you can see and make out individual latches used to stack storage containers on top of one another for easier moving by the banished. You even see the wheels that are used as part of brute choppers with such great detail. As someone who scrutinizes environments because I like to believe the world I'm in and the spaces, it's clear where Halo Infinite is a generational leap. It simply shares a common legacy art style, which I'm okay with.