There have been a fair number of complaints about what people saw of Halo at E3, despite the fact that lots of players' comments were pretty positive. Chief among the complaints were low framerates and lack of detail in multiplayer.

Just to reiterate again, some of that was due to the fact that the hardware Halo ran on at E3 was not up to the production specs-- the machines were, in fact, Xbox Development Kits (XDKs). Case posted about the differences between the two pieces of hardware in our forum:

Actually, since we are waiting for final hardware before making any graphical optimizations to the split-screen mode, the frame-rate jump should be substantially more than 2x. Sure, you might not get the rays of buddah through the trees and the Marines will be lower polycounts (which you will never notice because they will be smaller) but we are confident that we can achieve a steady 30fps for split-screen.

Readers have posted in our forum that the Xbox hardware is done and already in production. While we haven't confirmed that yet, we do know that Halo wasn't running on the same machines at E3 that it will run on in your living room sometime later this year (we hope).

Also, it was mentioned that the version of Halo running at E3 wasn't the newest available. The staff of Xboxcampus.com have managed to confirm this, speaking with Community Guy Matt Soell, who told them:

For some reason the build we brought along was the one from last Thursday (I think). Definitely not the most recent build at any rate. There were some bugs that we fixed specifically for the show that we ended up showcasing.

In short: everyone calm down, the fat lady hasn't sung just yet.

Incidentally, Xboxcampus.com will be getting a chance to fire some more questions Matt's way next week. If you'd like to suggest something for them to ask him, post to this thread on their message board.