Halo Infinite

[twonha]

Finished the first mission. Game's dope, I really love how the grappling hook opens up the traditional Halo gameplay. You're still the Chief of old, but with more options to fly around like a Spartan should.

Runs at an almost airtight 60fps, High preset, 2560x1440, vsync, and the game is probably doing some magic of its own to stick to the frame rate.

[metroidfox]

I've got the multiplayer, but waiting for them to roll out ray tracing, and fix the interaction of enemies with environmental lights before I get the single player.

Also, coop next year. Game is incomplete without that.

[KAC]

Yeah that's being brought up allot. Careful with limiting the framerate, unless they patched it, it causes issues if you do it in game.

And what is essentially the video version of the article demo linked.

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This is the updated video and what I was talking about.

[acroig]

I've got the multiplayer, but waiting for them to roll out ray tracing, and fix the interaction of enemies with environmental lights before I get the single player.

Have devs said this is actually coming?

[Mangler]

Yes, they're going to add it post-launch.

And is the way enemies are lit really a bug, I though they intentionally did it this way for visibility reasons?

[acroig]

Yes, they're going to add it post-launch.

Cool, TY.

[metroidfox]

Ray tracing + coop are confirmed from what I've heard from Digital Foundry + Hardware Unboxed.


The environmental lighting is something I hope they fix. It definitely helps enemy visibility, but it just looks so wrong. They could instead do those enemy outlines you see in multiplayer.

[jimjobob]

Ray tracing + coop are confirmed from what I've heard from Digital Foundry + Hardware Unboxed.


The environmental lighting is something I hope they fix. It definitely helps enemy visibility, but it just looks so wrong. They could instead do those enemy outlines you see in multiplayer.

Any idea when? Think I’m going to put it on hold till it’s added.

[metroidfox]

Mid next year for coop. I'm holding off until then too.

[twonha]

Finished the main quest, haven't rounded up all the side missions yet.

Overall, it's a good Halo game. Gameplaywise, I think it's brilliant, with the gunplay at 343i's finest levels. The sort-of-open world gives Halo a Far Cry feeling that really suits the game and its universe. In some ways, this is how Halo was envisioned twenty years ago: sprawling vistas, engagements that allow the player some freedom, and a Ringworld that inspires you to 'get out there'. Basically, all of the campaign feels like The Silent Cartographer was blown up into a fullsized game, rather than a single mission. And turning the Master Chief into Spider-Man sounds silly at first, but works wonders in-game.

Unfortunately, there are also a lot of shortcomings stopping the game from being really great.

First point: 343's storytelling
343's storytelling is a hot mess. The primary storyline makes little sense, wastes time with what only *looks* like exposition, introduces characters just so there's an enemy to chase after and removes characters from the playing field even though their tale would've been much cooler to tell. Rarely does the player character understand his motives on any deeper level than "...otherwise the enemy wins" or "because not-Cortana told me so". Some of the themes Infinite touches are reasonable, like the Chief suffering from the events of Halo 4 and 5, but much of it feels amateurish at best. From the start, I feel 'skipping' the complete aftermath of Halo 5 is a cop-out. I'm not sure what's covered in Halo Wars 2 or the extended universe, but I feel the game shouldn't have waltzed over the +/- seven months that precede Halo Infinite. Lastly, I feel uneasy about the apparent schism between the game's chirpiness (The Weapon, the marines you save) and the game's premise (UNSC lost, Cortana is gone, Chief got his ass kicked by Atriox, the universe is doomed).

Also in the storytelling department: the audio recordings you pick up everywhere are cute, but I think it'd have helped if you'd unlock them in order, instead of unlocking them in whatever order you find specific tapes. You acquire broken bits and pieces until you've got the whole thing. And UI wise, the little yellow indicators on new tapes appear per tape, but not per category for me. Not sure if that's a bug on my end, or an oversight in the UI.

Lastly in the storytelling department: the game world is peppered with small combat encounters that sometimes try to do some environmental story telling, but I found that it rarely goes deeper than "humans hid here, Banished found them, now everyone's dead". So much more could've been done here, but it wasn't - or I haven't found it yet.

Second point: 343's level design
Level design is a mixed bag, for the third game in a row. When it comes to grand vistas, Halo rarely disappoints. But 343i still loves repeating Forerunner architecture for no apparent reason. Some missions are really cool with interesting design, but so much of the indoor areas in particular is an endless stream of similar rooms, you'd think that 343's level designers' second-favorite Halo mission was The Library. The combat doesn't necessarily suffer, so it's still fun to play through, but the mission design does suffer from a frequent "go here, put AI into console, then go there" pathway.

Nowhere is 343's shaky level design more obvious, than in the upper left part of the ringworld itself. The upper left part of the game world is hard to reach for no apparent reason, contains one high value target to attack, but is otherwise practically empty. This section of the game world, I feel, should've been either developed fully, or cut entirely. Some other sections of the map you'll visit several times or spend significant time in, while some other sections of the map are barely visited. It's clear that the game's development spent a lot of time on getting everything to work, and some sections are beautifully done, but the developers have had to cut corners along the way.

Third point: pacing and mission structure
Around the halfway point of the game, there's a gaping hole in the game's pacing and mission structure. The game's storyline ánd level design come together to bring the game's progress to a grinding halt, asking the player to access four beacons. I've criticized 343i before, for using simplistic mission design into Halo 4 and Halo 5: "to activate the controls for this door, you must (attack/turn on/destroy) these (3 to 5) targets". Especially having to do things multiple times, just so the player spends more time doing them, slows down the feeling of progress. Having to activate four beacons, several kilometers away from each other, with all four being essentially the same thing, feels to me like a shout out to the regrouping of the marines in CE's mission 'Halo', but without the variations of the separate encounters.

Fourth point: this Ring is not whole
Halo Infinite's "under construction" ringworld is a painful parallel for the game itself. There's no Firefight multiplayer mode, which was a fan favorite in ODST and Reach, and my go-to mode for the Master Chief Collection. There's no Forge mode, leaving the creative section of the Halo fandom waiting. The lack of co-op, let alone couch co-op, is practically heresy in the Halo franchise. And with plenty of critical feedback on the multiplayer end as well, it's clear 343i aren't anywhere near done with the development of Halo Infinite. 343i and Microsoft obviously rushed the game out the door. There is absolutely no way this was anywhere near ready for release last year, or any time before now, and even now it's not actually ready, it's just taped together and pushed out the door.

Concluding...
The combat loop is beautiful. The open world is a powerful way to reboot the franchise. But Halo Infinite's development was a troubled one, and many of the flaws in the game can be directly linked to some kind of development hell. As it stands, it's a good game. And were it not a Halo title, I might not have been so critical. But this is Microsoft's flagship title from its flagship studio, and as such this game really needed another six month delay to be *really* great. Microsoft chickened out on that, settling on 'good enough' instead.

As 343i takes a Christmas break, I'm sure they'll be all hands on deck again in January, to piece back together this overwhelming title. For whatever comes after that, I honestly hope 343i continues to strengthen its vision as a developer and caretaker of the Halo universe. So far, 343i has been swinging at Halo like a kid at a pinata: sometimes they knock it out of the park, other times it's a swing and a miss.

[ATI FURY-OUS]

i dont understand why this game is popular, the gameplay feels very generic, the boss levels are typical console type annoying and frustrating. i rage quit and gave up now have just bought far cry 6, a lot better

[Silent-Runner]

[SirBaron]

so true

[JZL]

i dont understand why this game is popular, the gameplay feels very generic, the boss levels are typical console type annoying and frustrating. i rage quit and gave up now have just bought far cry 6, a lot better

I've played the campaign a little while and it's making me want to go back and finish Titanfall 2.

[Trunks0]

I've played the campaign a little while and it's making me want to go back and finish Titanfall 2.

I know right? Movement is why I love playing Apex so much. Really wish we would get another SP game out of Respawn.

[Munkus]

I've played the campaign a little while and it's making me want to go back and finish Titanfall 2.

That was a fun game.

[twonha]

I've played the campaign a little while and it's making me want to go back and finish Titanfall 2.

It is absolutely criminal that you haven't, yet.

[KAC]

i dont understand why this game is popular, the gameplay feels very generic, the boss levels are typical console type annoying and frustrating. i rage quit and gave up now have just bought far cry 6, a lot better

Ah yes, another game you can hate on. Nice. Do let us know how much you hate FC6 after 15 mins of play time but in its own thread.

[JZL]

It is absolutely criminal that you haven't, yet.

I lost my progress when a HDD failed, then made a lot of the way back, then got sidetracked.

[SubCog]

The combat loop is beautiful. The open world is a powerful way to reboot the franchise. But Halo Infinite's development was a troubled one, and many of the flaws in the game can be directly linked to some kind of development hell. As it stands, it's a good game. And were it not a Halo title, I might not have been so critical. But this is Microsoft's flagship title from its flagship studio, and as such this game really needed another six month delay to be *really* great. Microsoft chickened out on that, settling on 'good enough' instead.

As 343i takes a Christmas break, I'm sure they'll be all hands on deck again in January, to piece back together this overwhelming title. For whatever comes after that, I honestly hope 343i continues to strengthen its vision as a developer and caretaker of the Halo universe. So far, 343i has been swinging at Halo like a kid at a pinata: sometimes they knock it out of the park, other times it's a swing and a miss.

This. Last year when their lead designers left and they brought back Joseph Staten, it was clear that the project lacked proper vision. Halo really needs a visionary to lead it... it's not really something that works well in a 343-style enterprise environment. Halo really needs a Kevin Feige.

[Nascar24]

Great game! Just finished it, and I have not finished many games this year.

[KAC]

Yes game is dope af. I plan to play it on a harder difficulty setting and at least try to get all the collectibles. Wish there was an NG+ mode so I didn’t have to hunt all logs etc again.

[twonha]

This. Last year when their lead designers left and they brought back Joseph Staten, it was clear that the project lacked proper vision. Halo really needs a visionary to lead it... it's not really something that works well in a 343-style enterprise environment. Halo really needs a Kevin Feige.

Something else that's puzzling me:

Halo Infinite was largely produced in work-from-home covid conditions. Its conceptual work has been years in the making, but at least production will have been something of the past two years. And in the game's credits, I noticed that an enormous amount of people appear to have been outsourced workers (Randstad, Neal Analytics, YCH, whole studios brought in to work on the game). I wonder if a lot of its eventual outcomes in terms of creativity and design can be partially traced back to those conditions: lots of distance between people, lots of figurative walls between different (sub-)studios.

The game's open world has basically just the one look. Had there been people sitting side by side in a game development office, would they really not have come up with "let's add snow to all the higher peaks"? There are gigantic space ships floating around in the distance at every point in the game. Did they really not come up with a Halo Reach-like aerial assault, boarding and assassination level? ("Tell 'em to make it count", still hurts.) Could they really not have made at least some form of trench run work, for instance around one of the giant spires? (It's not like 343 isn't riffing off classic Halo elements everywhere else.) How did some of the bosses and their combat encounters even make it into the game? Was the central story line developed on MS Teams with a sticky notes app, instead of in a room with a bunch of visionary writers riffing off each other's work?

Infinite could've been so much more than it is. It's a decent Halo title, it really is, but I also think it's high time for MS to go look at some "making of" videos for Sony's biggest hits. When it comes to killer apps, that's the bar I think Microsoft should hold themselves, their studios and their franchises to.

[KAC]

I don’t expect much story from 343. Tbh Halo 4 and 5 were massive disappointments. My biggest gripe is that the gameplay in MP hasn’t evolved over the years. To me it has regressed a bit instead.

Main game was amazing to play at and the grapple really steals the show. I have never had this much fun with a grappling mechanic like I had in Halo Infinite.

[acroig]

Main game was amazing to play at and the grapple really steals the show. I have never had this much fun with a grappling mechanic like I had in Halo Infinite.

What the man said.

[SubCog]

Played through the first several missions of the game. So far enjoying it very much. Definitely feels like they learned some lessons from BotW about mission structure, making sure there's always a few choices without overwhelming the player.

[ATI FURY-OUS]

Ah yes, another game you can hate on. Nice. Do let us know how much you hate FC6 after 15 mins of play time but in its own thread.

****

acroig edit: surely you can respond with more eloquence?

[nutcrackr]

why do you have to join a lobby to play the campaign? :/

[Drexion]

Only on the second level of single player and the two-weapon limit is really really annoying. Making me wanna uninstall and play something else. I don't remember being annoyed at a weapon limit in previous Halo titles, I think they must have thrown way more ammo at you so you didn't have to swap weapons so often.

[Nascar24]

Guns are everywhere!

[Nascar24]

I want to play more of Infinite but there just isn't much left to do, not a big go looking for collectable stuff. Finished any missions that were not done and found a few more units to save but that's just about it.

[Drexion]

Guns are everywhere!

Yes they are, but not all archetypes (at least in the beginning levels). For eg. only found one shotgun so far, and disliked having to drop it as it was quite fun to use. You can play entire sections where only 'pistols' archetypes spawn, and its annoying as hell as I find myself wanting to swap to the archetype which best suits the situation.

The devs should have said "hrm now that the player can almost instantly change his distance to the enemy with the grapple, maybe we should raise the limit to 3-4 weapons so he can switch as the situation calls for."

AR a bit from distance, grapple close for some shotgun fun, grapple to a high ledge for a bit of sniping, flank nearby for some smg action - all without the annoyance of having to drop/swap weapons from the ground or 'chests'.

Lastly in every other shooter game when you pick up a dead minibosses 'big bad heavy weapon' to use for a bit, you keep all your other weapons. Run out or ammo with it you just drop it and back to your loadout. In this game you drop your weapon when picking up a miniboss gun. So annoying. Reminds me of eurojank devs who refuse to learn from what other devs are doing and keep making games like its 2005.

[nutcrackr]

You can pick up mounted turrets and you keep your other two weapons. Hell I spend half the time with a turret when attacking a base because it kills things pretty quick.

I'm not having too much of an issue with the ammo because the scan shows you exactly where to get more, and the plasma/kinetic recharge nodes are pretty plentiful.

So far this game is like Halo Cry: Destiny Edition. Combat is fine but I don't really get the huge excitement over the grapple. All it means is that the world has 50 billion explosive canisters and I've died from them enough times for that to be annoying. I guess the grapple helps to navigate the rather rocky terrain and stun the shield dudes.

[KAC]

Yes they are, but not all archetypes (at least in the beginning levels). For eg. only found one shotgun so far, and disliked having to drop it as it was quite fun to use. You can play entire sections where only 'pistols' archetypes spawn, and its annoying as hell as I find myself wanting to swap to the archetype which best suits the situation.

The devs should have said "hrm now that the player can almost instantly change his distance to the enemy with the grapple, maybe we should raise the limit to 3-4 weapons so he can switch as the situation calls for."

AR a bit from distance, grapple close for some shotgun fun, grapple to a high ledge for a bit of sniping, flank nearby for some smg action - all without the annoyance of having to drop/swap weapons from the ground or 'chests'.

Lastly in every other shooter game when you pick up a dead minibosses 'big bad heavy weapon' to use for a bit, you keep all your other weapons. Run out or ammo with it you just drop it and back to your loadout. In this game you drop your weapon when picking up a miniboss gun. So annoying. Reminds me of eurojank devs who refuse to learn from what other devs are doing and keep making games like its 2005.

Halo has always been about making the most use of guns around you. With the grappling mechanic I can't believe that this is even a complaint anymore. Play some more and you will get used to it. Btw all the mini boss weapons get stored in FOBs where you can get them again from.

[Progression]

Thank God for the multiplayer, it game me something to play after quitting Overwatch. Overwatch is such a garbage game, it makes you feel awful and there's no way to quantify your progress, there's no clear metrics and you depend on other 5 guys so whatever you do right or wrong is super hard to tell.

Wish they would make another game like Starcraft 2 where you could measure your own progress. I got to #1 master playing Zerg and it was so satisfying after playing for so long. "Single player" or compact team competitive multiplayer games are my favorite, games like Halo, Starcraft 2, WoW, etc.

The aiming on Halo MP feels PERFECT as well, almost as good as counter strike's mouse feel. At the moment I just wish there were more maps available.

[nutcrackr]

Single player was pretty meh overall. The story is flat and the cortana angle felt undercooked. I didn't enjoy the boss battle focus. Boss battle, repeating room, boss battle, copied room, boss battle, duplicate room, two bosses, then 4 rooms the same in a row. Felt like I was playing destiny in a claustrophobic version of the Library from halo 1. Echo 216 is not that likable. Master chef can barely say more than one word. The open world is pretty meh too; FOBs are literally just a single platform with enemies around it.

The combat obviously carries it. I used the threat sensor a lot indoors. The grapple is quite useful to get to ledges or steal vehicles or grab weapons. I wish it had more range though. The sentinel beam is very good and in the second half I felt like the devs knew this and just kept giving me ammo for it. Did Halo 5 give you ammo for weapons if you walked over them? That's a nice change from the old games where you'd have to pick up the weapon of the same type just to get full ammo.

Outside you're so much more effective in a vehicle when coming across any group in the open world. So I'd just stay in a ghost and just run people over, since it's generally far more deadly than any weapon and has unlimited ammo + speed. Sometimes enemies throw you off it, but often they don't bother to get on so you can just hop back on without any loss of health. I'd even go so far as try to skate up inclines with it just to keep using it.

People waiting for coop probably have the right idea, seems like the outside bits would play better with a buddy riding shotgun or using another vehicle. As a solo experience I give it about 7/10

[KAC]

Most marine weapons give you ammo when you walk over them in all Halo games. Same with needler. Energy weapons are a first that usually required a weapon swap.

[acroig]

That was a fun game.

Finished the main story, best Halo ever?

[twonha]

Finished the main story, best Halo ever?

No.

[acroig]

No.

I did not play 5 so which would you say is better?