No offense but you guys are idiots. Halo 3 is all about quallity, as you can see the Campaign missions are very good looking and beautiful. Nothing is a background image, it's actually polygons. I make maps on FarCry before and it sure is that hard to make a great map. The storyline is groundbreaking and only players who haven't played Halo 2 or Halo 1 would be the only ones disappointed. They make the worst ending from Halo 2 make sense. There are no health packs in this game, they have 'shields' that regenerates which basicly replaces the annoying health pickup first-person shooters. A lot of balance has been added in Halo 3, especially on the Battle Rifle. They have the Forge system, not only it's a map editor that can't edit geometry but you can have 8 players in total to edit and screw around with the maps or have a magic carpet ride and everything. You can also shoot down players who are in the 'Editor' mode.
Nothing in Halo 3 would be cheap, unless some idiots who uses Forge to their advantage points. You can ignore prepubescent little boys by hitting the back button and hit ignore, so you can have a better experience. Matchmaking is balanced out, from ranks and skills so you won't see a single player in the lead of the entire game. In ranked matches, the other opponents are muted so you won't get trashtalked so it's all about competetion. Most battles in the Campaign are epic size, the enemy AI are extremely smart but the allies are a bit stupid. Halo 1 brought gaming with shields, Halo 2 is duel wielding and Halo 3 is the "Equipments" in which reminds me a lot of Real Time Strategy perspectives like throwing a bubble shield, mines, gravity lifts, regenerator and so on. There are a lot of new weapons and vehicles, and the ones I consider the best are the Gravity Hammer and the Chopper which one is like a motorcycle on steroids while the other can anhillate anything and send it to the sky. Nothing is cheap, especially the "Support Weapons" (Which is taken idea from FarCry on Xbox expect third person point of view) in which you can rip out turrets, grab a flamethrower and a missle pod that can lock on to vehicles.
There are saved films, yes it's been done before but it is the first console game to have it. Nobody can lie, it can catch cheaters, you can do slow-mo and so on. The only thing I'm disappointed is that the sounds are not deep if slowed down or light if speeded up. It gives a lot of strategy, and it helps millions of players who doesn't have capture card that records videos, screenshots to their computers. Also in screenshots, at the site you can have them configured as comics. Very interesting.
There are new game modes such as VIP in which you have both teams with an important player to protect and to kill the opposing. And a new one called Infection in which a few starts off with swords and uses it to let 'humans' get infected. Kind of disappointed that it doesn't have a flood character models. But it did replace the custom varient from Halo 2 in which you'd have to change teams to green but you don't have to do that anymore.
You can edit game modes with Forge and their varients, from score, gravity to weapon ammo and respawn rate and so on. You can make a game with one flag, two flag, same goes to the bomb with a role of offense and defense gameplay. Not a lot of games has those.
There's finally online co-op, we know it's not the first game to have online co-op but it can be the first game on consoles to have online co-op without having the developers editing the geometry and removing levels in Doom 3 or how to remove cutscenes like in Serious Sam 2.
Don't forget that there are armor customization, they're unlockable. There's emblem, color custumization and so on. And also, there are new control schemes in Halo 3 so you don't have to smash your X button on everything. X Button is for equipments, RB and LB is to reload, switch grenades and activate objects. It's good because it's just by your trigger, it doesn't bother your melee, switching to secondary weapon, jumping and looking around. That's the big problem from most first-person shooters on consoles, it was Halo 1's fault for that.
Don't compare this to Unreal Tournament III, I'm a Unreal Tournament player and I know a lot of things from Unreal Tournament III. They finally have a story-base, there are Necris vehicles counterparts to the Axon and the weapons are heavily upgraded from balance to how the guns looks. Graphics are amazing, like Halo 3 it's made of polygons. Instead of shields, it's the old-school health. There are new elements of gameplay, like the "Equipments" like the green boxes to slow everything in it. Everything in this game has been redefined and repolished, it's already done and they're still polishing to perfection.
Crysis is beautiful, but the gameplay macinacs is like a standard shooter. You can completely modify your weapons from silencers to ammo clips and scopes. There's a heavily powerful map editor that allows players to edit clouds, geometry, brushes, land and so on. I'll need to edit this page to add more info...
If you think Halo 3 is crap, tell that to 4 million players. And later, 20 million buyers. That's pretty much the highest point where Halo 2 went in sales. I'd like to see you do better.
Having played Crysis, UT3, and Halo 3, I will say that Halo 3 simply CANNOT compete in terms of graphics.
Crysis single player is SICK, and it's not a standard shooter, if anything it's more original than Halo, what with the powers and the weapon mods.
UT3 is UT. 'Nuff said. It rocks.
And BTW, full 3D skyboxes and fully 3D environments is not exactly new.
None.