Halo 3: ODST left many reviewers divided over the game's additions to the franchise, though one area that was readily apparent to everyone was how the game looked. Running at a sub-720p native resolution and having animation and facial detail that was roughly unchanged since Halo 3, the game was not as visually appealing as certain other titles that released in 2009. Bungie community manager Brian Jarrard was aware of the various complaints, and he talked with IndustryGamers during GDC about how Bungie plans to improve Halo in the graphics and animation department.

"We've definitely heard [from them] and taken it on the chin a little bit in the past,” said Jarrard. "For our team, we've built massive, simulated living breathing worlds with open-ended sandbox-like encounters and unscripted elements, but with that, we've made trade offs between things like framerate or even resolution in some cases and, while I feel like every Halo game's been a beautiful artistic endeavor, for Reach we definitely we went back and overhauled all of our tech to make something that could hold up this holiday compared to other titles that we really did feel like would raise the bar on the visual side and certainly, to be more specific, for animation.”

"I think our team would agree that, from each title to the next, animation is the one area where we haven't really continued to improve and iterate,” added Jarrard. "Not that it's bad by any means, but for Reach we've got the whole system from scratch. We've hired a lot of great people now, we're utilizing a mo-cap facility with some hand animation on top of it, we're really doing a lot more technical stuff to sell this goal of a more character driven story with human characters that give believable performances. Our old tech just wouldn't allow us to do that, and it's everything from our lip-synching to our facial tech, all those things that I would say have been one of the weaker sides of the Halo series, and that was from the beginning something that we put a lot of investment into.”