Halo Infinite [Fall 2021] [XO, XBSX|S, PC, XGP]

[Rangers]

Consolidation seems to be increasing in speed in gaming industry (EG, Microsoft buying everybody). How long before UE5 is the defacto only major engine? Given CDPR announcement too.

Hmmm? Well, you can still continue to finish "world" content after you finish the main campaign.

What do you mean? The only things I really remember not doing were all the broadcast towers and finding all skulls. I'm not interested in finding skulls as I detailed before. That leaves the propaganda towers. I actually set out to find these, but it quickly grew very boring and I am unclear how to go about it. I tried combing every inch of terrain starting one corner of the map with the airship, but I didnt find any and I cant shake the feeling some will only show up if you are on the ground. Pus the map is too big for this tactic really, with lots of annoying heights, the slowass annoying plane, etc.

I wonder, if they add new campaign missions but with full multiplayer matchmaking enabled, like destiny 2 strikes, maybe it can grab the attention of more players?

See I dreamed of a "Destiny lite" with Halo Infinite before release. I am not sure exactly what I mean, but yes that sounds cool right? Maybe not as much time investment as Destiny. Even though D2 vanilla was meant to be "destiny without the time investment" and flopped. We could blame that on the implementation not the concept.

It turned out to be just open world lite which I'm on record loving that direction, I dont want Ubisoft open world for sure. But it wasnt exactly hugely ambitious. I still wonder what the hell 343 did all those years. Halo 5 released in October 2015, that's 6 years plus a month. I was expecting the game to be insane, packed with content, instead it was kind of "nice little game".

 

[SmooTh]

https://www.halowaypoint.com/news/halo-infinite-update-april-2022

• Campaign Online Co-Op: Late August
• Campaign Couch Co-Op: Season 3
• Campaign Mission Replay : Late August
• Narrative Events: May 3-16, Jul 19 - Aug 1
• Fracture Entrenched: Week 1 May 24-30
• Forge Beta - September Target

community livestream scheduled for next Wednesday, April 27, at 1:00 PM PST on Twitch.tv/Halo and YouTube.com/Halo. We’ll also be discussing the roadmap in more detail during this livestream.

 

[BRiT]

Surprised to see Season 2 run for 6 months as well. They really need to make sure Season 3 is at most 4 months long or need to have to have 2x to 3x the number of new maps

 

[Scott_Arm]

Game is now averaging 5000 players on Steam. The timelines for this stuff is wild. I'm sure Season 2 will give them a bump, but when Forge doesn't even hit beta until September, I have a hard time thinking this game is ever really going to take off again.

 

[eastmen]

Can't believe they delayed the game by a year and still ended up in this situation.

I think at this point they should pull a destiny and start putting a sequel in development with a better engine. But unlike destiny they need the sequel to actually be good

 

[zed]

Yeah nah the game is dead, According to iroboto the game has a massive amount of content, so adding more wont fix it

Halo by itself as a game dwarfs most games from a content perspective. Most other studios will fully dedicate their efforts to a single mode and a small play space; Halo is a lot more than that and some.

then again subtlesnake saiz it has less than other halo games?

Well, it has arguably less content than any Halo game did on release, updates have been glacially slow, and there is no progression system apart from Battle Pass. Also there are issues with the netcode/melee registration.

but my take is, doesnt the hugely popular fortnite just have a single map?
i.e. content is overrated, The core gameplay is what really matters

fortnite metacritic 81
halo infinite metacritic 87

 

[Scott_Arm]

Fortnite has one map that they change each game season, but within seasons they change which weapons and items are in play. On top of that there is creative mode so people have made a lot of ways to play. Fortnite is not lacking content.

 

[iroboto]

Yeah nah the game is dead, According to iroboto the game has a massive amount of content, so adding more wont fix it

then again subtlesnake saiz it has less than other halo games?


but my take is, doesnt the hugely popular fortnite just have a single map?
i.e. content is overrated, The core gameplay is what really matters

fortnite metacritic 81
halo infinite metacritic 87

Infinite actually didn’t ship with that much content. Compared to previous halos.

that’s really what confused people here. Adding content will be bringing infinite up to par with the other halos.

they still need to fix cheating and server issues.

 

[Silent_Buddha]

Infinite actually didn’t ship with that much content. Compared to previous halos.

Yeah the lack of Forge mode as well as co-op in any form are serious issues. I understand that MS felt the need to ship it after that year delay and for what they shipped it was surprisingly really good.

Still, it really needs to have Forge mode and co-op.

Issues in multiplayer certainly don't help. Some of those issues either remaining or taking inordinately long to fix kind of soured the initial praise that multiplayer was getting from a large number of players who were either coming back to Halo for the first time since Halo 4 or had never played a Halo game before.

Halo games always had some pillars that made it stand out above other games (before 343i).

• Great single player campaign that also worked great in co-op.
• Couch co-op.
• Multiplayer that was among the very best of any competitive multiplayer shooter.
• Forge mode so users could create their own content.

Halo: Infinite only shipped with, let's say 1.5 of those. A great single player campaign with a lot of content but short main "quest". A good multiplayer that had issues and a lack of map variety that kept it from standing at the top of available multiplayer competitive games.

So, to me it isn't all "that" surprising that after finishing the good single player content that player counts dropped significantly afterwards due to a multiplayer that was quite good in many aspects but failed to match what was available in previous Halo games.

Regards,
SB

 

[Johnny Awesome]

Game still needs work, but I'm confident it will make a comeback.

 

[Jay]

Has there been any indication of when the current gen update is due?

 

[Scott_Arm]

Has there been any indication of when the current gen update is due?

pretty sure the game is already series x/s native.

 

[Jay]

pretty sure the game is already series x/s native.

They had a current gen upgrade planned. Believe RT was mentioned, but not 100% sure if remembering that aspect or just assumed that it had that.

 

[Scott_Arm]

They had a current gen upgrade planned. Believe RT was mentioned, but not 100% sure if remembering that aspect or just assumed that it had that.

Right. Actually kind of remember RT being discussed as an upgrade now. No idea what's happening with that. I'd expect it's way down the list considering how much gameplay related content they're behind on. They probably wouldn't want artists and level designers spending a bunch of time validating all of the existing content with a new lighting pipeline when they're trying to get all of this new stuff out. Just a guess.

 

[Subtlesnake]

Yeah nah the game is dead, According to iroboto the game has a massive amount of content, so adding more wont fix it

then again subtlesnake saiz it has less than other halo games?


but my take is, doesnt the hugely popular fortnite just have a single map?
i.e. content is overrated, The core gameplay is what really matters

fortnite metacritic 81
halo infinite metacritic 87

Yes, though you can't just look at the raw numbers. For example, Infinite shipped with 10 maps compared with 11 for Halo 3 and Halo 2. But two of those maps aren't any good, it doesn't have Forge like Halo 3 did, and ranked only has 5 maps in rotation. (Also no co-op doesn't help either)

But more broadly, the game modes don't have the depth of scale of a Battle Royal or the Warzone modes from Halo 5. These modes can work with fewer maps because they allow for more variation due to the objective based gameplay. There's only so many deathmatch games you can play on a given handful of maps without it becoming stale for many players. Really Infinite needs both more deathmatch/B2B maps, and the Battle Royal mode Certain Affinity is developing, to keep newer FPS fans interested.

 

[SmooTh]

https://www.reddit.com/r/GamingLeaksAndRumours/comments/uarpnq

https://www.reddit.com/r/GamingLeaksAndRumours/comments/uarpnq/comment/i5ztby1

Studios please

 

[BRiT]

If Halo Infinite was indeed made with just 2 years of development time (as the rumor claims), then 343 Studios is God Tier ranking and so far above and beyond any other developers.. I don't think the spreaders of that rumor thought it through.

 

[Silent_Buddha]

If Halo Infinite was indeed made with just 2 years of development time (as the rumor claims), then 343 Studios is God Tier ranking and so far above and beyond any other developers.. I don't think the spreaders of that rumor thought it through.

Well, 343i were only experimenting with a hero-based system. And I don't imagine that adapting that to the more restricted equipment based "hero" like powers (grapple-shot blowing up enemies when hitting the ground is basically a "hero power"). Outside of that I don't think it would have impacted other areas of Halo: Infinite development other than balancing. IE - level and world design would be unchanged.

As Jason Schreier mentioned, that other tweet was really exaggerating what effects that would have had on Halo: Infinite development. So the only thing that "changed" in the past 2 years would have been to stop the prototyping of the hero-based system.

But I think I get the point you're making. If the original tweet was attempting to imply that there was a huge amount of work involved with stopping of the hero-based experimentation, then yeah that was a huge fail in multiple ways.

Regards,
SB

 

[RobertR1]

After a long hiatus I went back and finished up the campaign and I'm not sure what I just played.

It feels like multiple ideas forced together into a campaign. I'm happy that the story side is back on track. It was nice to have Chief only and a more complex bad guy, a bit Thanos like, in Escharum. He came across quite intimidating and well developed as the story progressed. By the time you fight him, he didn't feel like another boss for the sake of progression but something you knew you'd eventually have to deal with.

The HDR is beautiful outside of the bug where it might reset to 1 when you start up the game. Having been lucky enough to get the Alienware QD-OLED, it's HDR presentation was the main reason I started playing again but then got sucked into it enough to beat it. The sound and music was very done also. Not ODST good but certainly up there.

The open world was the first 'forced' piece I felt. Outside of having random things to do, there was no material impact to the overall progression. All those FOB 's taken, weapon boss fights won and squads rescued amounted to nothing at all. You can just go from one campaign mission to another and the game will give you what you need to progress. In fact, it's more efficient to do any collecting along the way as you'll come across the camps as part of the campaign course. Anything you missed, post campaign, you'll be able to fly to those areas and save yourself a lot of travel time!

Yet this is another where there's another conflict of ideas. These open world fights, while immaterial to the campaign, feel way more like playing a Halo than the campaign itself. Too often, the story missions force you into linear corridors just to make the battle more tense. Even the cliché of you can't get past this room without getting powercells (keycards) from these other room to activate the lift. Taking the most tedious aspect of Doom campaigns and injecting into a Halo game wasn't on anyone's request list. At least not anyone I know. This is even more obvious in making story mode boss fights artificially difficult by making you fight in copy/paste rooms with slight variations.

The most enjoyable fights are when you're fighting the weapon bosses in the outdoor areas which have nothing to do with story progression!

It's hard to put my thoughts in order but I guess that's how the campaign felt; scattered ideas glued together. I enjoyed it but I don't remember much of it.

 

[orangpelupa]

Yep. The campaign got way to Many corridors.

Yep. The open world felt really forced. Especially with how far the next campaign mission location is. Unless you kept an aircraft safe somewhere. As early on, it's pretty much impossible to hijack a flying aircraft

The campaign formula was very destiny 1-like. Instead of more freedom / open like older halo.