From the Vault: A Guy's View on Halo Infinite & the Perils of Covering a Live-Service Game.

Editor's Note: The content of this article reflects the state of Halo Infinite's live service as of this article's original publication date: January 18th, 2022. Several changes have been made to the original article to better address grammatical errors and improve readability while adding annotations to correct and update information regarding the game's state as of October 31st, 2022.

I've been debating whether or not I should post this article since Halo Infinite's multiplayer released on November 15th and its campaign on December 8th, but not for the reasons that you might expect. Mainly because I haven't had the chance to pull myself away from the game long enough to actually elaborate more on my thoughts.

That should speak to the level of quality that 343 Industries has reached with Halo Infinite; that it's the most fun I've had with a Halo game since Halo 3 despite its litany of shortcomings yet I'm struggling to put it down so I can finish writing up my thoughts on the game in its current state. By the time I do get around to doing so, many of the sticking points I've had with the game have been (or are being) addressed while new issues pop up in their place and existing problems only worsen. The last time a game made me feel this way was Destiny, an appropriate comparison considering Infinite's aspirations as a live-service platform for Halo's future, the rollercoaster-rides that were their respective development cycles, and how both games launched almost barren of any content.

This is what makes covering a live-service game such as Halo Infinite so difficult and why I never covered Destiny in an article before: How do you cover a live-service game that, by definition, necessitates constant change and iteration? Does one cover the game that launched or the newest version and the problems that still exist? How relevant will that post stay when more updates are released that address most of my comments and concerns? What if new updates add new issues in monetization or gameplay that makes this post age like a fine milk? Do you cover the development issues surrounding the game or the potential that it has yet to reach? What about both? Do I have to keep updating this post with every new content update that comes out till it resembles a more verbose game of whack-a-mole?

The answer to all of these questions is "I don't know and I don't care anymore."

Leaving aside that Halo Infinite's multiplayer is free-to-play and that the campaign is a part of Xbox Game Pass, recommending this game to anyone is less of a question regarding a dollar value that one ascribes to a product or an entire subscription service and more of a statement on what you personally expect from a finished product and what's worth both your time and money. Besides, I'm not interested in reviewing a game that's already been covered a thousand times over by several press outlets just to satisfy a few people who have probably made their minds up anyway. Especially if you're asking someone who's pre-disposed to say "Hell yes you should play this game" as a fan of the series since Halo 1. (Which to be clear, is exactly what I'm gonna end up saying at the end of all this_._)

Instead, I'll be diving deeper into Halo Infinite as a whole while discussing how the final product was affected by a rocky development cycle fraught with mismanagement, compromises, and crises ranging from a global health crisis to departing studio heads. As such, this is going to be a longer post than I’d have anticipated writing to fully cover every facet of my thoughts on this game but in doing so I'll be content that what I wrote will act as a sufficient indicator as to what my thoughts on Halo Infinite's current state are and what needs to be addressed for it to be the best game that it possibly can be.

With luck, I'll be able to cover all of it with less toxicity than what it would take to lock down the Halo subreddit for the weekend before launch.

Get Ready.

Thirty Seconds of Golden Triangles

(Sandbox) Combat Evolved.

"In Halo 1, there was maybe 30 seconds of fun that happened over and over and over and over again. And so, if you can get 30 seconds of fun, you can pretty much stretch that out to be an entire game."
- Jaime Greisemer, Former Bungie Game Designer

"Thirty seconds of fun" is a pithy way of describing how Halo's core gameplay loop allows for engagements to feel as fresh and dynamic as possible amid changing scenarios, be it against the Covenant, Flood, or human players. At the core of this design philosophy is a 'golden triangle' of weapons, grenades, and melee that are reinforced by a utility-driven sandbox that encouraged unique roles for armaments and vehicles across different factions. It gave greater context to the larger environments and the two-weapon limit by encouraging players to scavenge the environment and find the tools they need to overcome any challenge by any means possible and eventually settling into a gameplay rhythm that would turn thirty seconds of fun to thirty minutes and so on and so forth.

Starting with Reach, the series began moving in the direction of intrinsic modifiers such as ordnance drops, armor abilities, and enhanced mobility to attract a broader audience, affecting weapon balance and the way by which maps were designed around player movement. The sandbox became more focused on lethality rather than utility with greater aim-magnetism to better compensate for the speed of Halo 5's enhanced mobility and despite the greater weapon variety and addition of weapon variants, the sandbox became even blander with nothing standing out as unique or particularly interesting. Infinite marks something of a return to form by returning to extrinsic modifiers that shift the tide of encounters and a more focused sandbox in an effort to return Halo to its old-school arena combat roots while gathering inspiration from other games in the genre.

Some aspects of enhanced mobility return from Halo 5 but with drastic changes to supplement the player’s base movement speed rather than outright replace it. Sprinting can only take you so far but in the right hands, players can perform Titanfall levels of speedy traversal by chaining together the right combination of sprinting, sliding, clambering, and equipment usage to fly from one end of the map to the next. This change alone makes movement far more skill-based than it was in previous titles and puts more emphasis on Halo's gunplay than ever before, even acting as a way to let the player interact with objects outside of weapons and grenades.

Y E E T.

To shake up the gunplay even further, equipment has also seen a major improvement and is much more diverse in Infinite than it was in past games in sheer variety and functionality. Beyond classics like Active Camo, Overshield, and a re-tooled version of Halo 5's thruster pack, the highlight of Infinite's equipment sandbox is easily the Grappleshot. With it, you can hijack vehicles to board them, pick up fusion coils so you can chuck them at enemies like a seven-foot-tall metal-bound Donkey Kong, directly hook onto hostiles for a surprise sucker-punch, and pick up weapons/objectives as effectively as you're able to evade danger and navigate the map with it.

Equipment is designed to be far more multi-purpose than ever before and apart from the Grappleshot, nowhere else is this also better exemplified than in the Repulsor: In the right hands, a player can reflect enemy projectiles back at them and allows for ingenious plays in platforming and defensive maneuvers such as pushing players off the map and providing a boost to get you to certain platforms faster. Even something as simple as the Drop Wall (think, a quarter of a Bubble Shield that you can shoot through) can be a death sentence for a trigger-happy rocket-wielding Spartan rushing you if deployed at exactly the right moment. There's even enough room for support pickups such as the boring but practical Threat Sensor that highlights moving entities behind walls much like the Pulse Blade from Titanfall 2.

Booping has never felt so rewarding.

This is bolstered enormously by Infinite's sandbox and its renewed focus on utility as a core design tenet. Armaments and vehicles are divided into damage types with returning staples like the Battle Rifle, Plasma Pistol, Sentinel Beam, and Sniper Rifle being divided into Kinetic, Plasma, Hardlight, and Power damage respectively. This Destiny-inspired change serves to codify established rules in past Halo games like plasma damage stripping shields and the 4-shot kill threshold of the Battle Rifle while allowing for more space to add new weapons, expand upon iconic mainstays in Halo's armory, and introduce a new damage type in the process.

Shock damage inflicts incremental damage-over-time on players, stuns enemies briefly, and disables vehicles via an EMP effect, which ends up removing it from the Plasma Pistol and does away with "no-fun allowed" weapons like the Spartan Laser in the weapon sandbox. In its place are more interesting weapons like the Skewer, an anti-vehicle sniper rifle that can hobble or destroy vehicles and one-shot kill a Spartan but requires an insane amount of time to reload and to properly lead your shots while accounting for projectile drop-off much like the devastatingly powerful Mangler. The Mangler- much like everything else in the game- is helped by having some of the most visceral and satisfying sound design that I've heard in any game this side of Battlefield with Infinite's Battle Rifle being the best iteration in the series for this reason alone.

Stop asking for Mangler nerfs for the love of God.

The Skewer also acts as a showcase of how the sandbox design and improved movement work together to benefit the gameplay; because of the changes to enhanced mobility, aim magnetism isn't as baked into the game's aiming mechanics to compensate for player speed and it allows for more experimentation in the sandbox. It allows for weapons like the Heatwave- a Forerunner shotgun that riffs off of Halo 5's Scattershot that fires ricochet rounds with a horizontal firing mode for multiple targets and vertical for single targets - to exist without intruding upon the sandbox role that the Bulldog shotgun fulfills without completely erasing the role that the classic pump-action shotgun used to take up despite the latter's absence.

It seems as though 343 Industries wanted to avoid repeating their mistakes with adding an overcrowded weapon sandbox out of an obligation to include and re-tool legacy weapons with little opportunity to add new ones as seen in Halo 4 and 5 without feeling overly redundant. What they ended up going with feels like the best of both worlds despite how trimmed down the weapon variety really is. Yes, the Bulldog is no replacement for the classic shotgun, but it's bound to end up returning at some point with balance tweaks to better integrate them into the sandbox in a future season. One glaring omission from the equipment pool are things like the portable man-cannon that filled neutral roles for both players to evenly benefit from, though one can hope that'll be included as well along with the requisite balancing passes to buff underperforming weapons and other sandbox elements.

Editor's Note: More weapons and equipment are confirmed to be added to Halo Infinite in future seasons.

Fun Fact: The Bulldog is full auto! Hold the trigger and thank me later.

This unfortunately includes vehicles which- despite having undergone several design changes since Halo 5- leave a lot to be desired in just how much of a severe downgrade they are compared to past games next to the sheer number of options that players have in disabling and destroying them. The main issue is that it feels like Infinite does everything it can to discourage you from getting into a vehicle at any time: If the vehicle you're looking for happens to spawn in an apparent miracle (likely exacerbated by the asymmetric design of Big Team Battle affecting their spawn rates), then it won't be too long till you wish it didn't thanks to some of the worst handling I've ever seen in a video game, provided it doesn't get destroyed in mere seconds by stray gunfire.

While Halo's vehicle physics have always been rather floaty, they at least had a semblance of weight to them that made them feel satisfying to control. Not the case with Infinite; if you so much as drive over a pebble, the vehicle can and (probably) will roll over regardless of how straight the road you're driving on is and may God help you if you decide to make a turn at any point because there's no guarantee you'll even be in the vehicle long enough to complete it. Even aircraft and tanks aren't immune from this thanks to an absurd lack of power in their onboard weapons and similarly low health pool that only makes them feel like a puzzling afterthought.

This is likely due to balancing changes so that a small group of players in a Warthog aren't unstoppable forces of destruction, but what good are new vehicle variants like the Razorback and the return of the Brute Chopper if they're this unenjoyable to use? I'd hope it's something that 343 decides to take a look at because it's bizarre that such a staple gameplay mechanic feels so unpolished relative to the rest of the game, especially if more vehicles are on the way in future updates.

Editor's Note: Vehicle spawns and health pools have been addressed in Season 2.

I think it's more like a Puma.

Leaving aside my issues with the vehicles; Halo Infinite plays like a heavily grounded version of Halo 5 with a more focused sandbox, deeper movement, and an extremely satisfying game feel that fully embraces "Thirty seconds of fun over and over again" all over again with a newly reinvigorated focus on Halo's golden triangle and the end result feels like a return to Halo's halcyon days.

Especially when it comes to its campaign.

"Oh I like it."

Good to have you back, Master Chief. Things aren't going so well.

Cards on the table: Halo Infinite has the best campaign that 343 Industries has ever made and is as close to a true thematic continuation of Bungie's Halo games as they've ever pulled off. After the garbage-fire of calamitous writing, atrocious pacing, abhorrent characterization, and inexcusably horrendous level design that was Halo 5's campaign, literally anything beyond the bare minimum of what's to be expected of a Halo campaign would've been seen as a triumphant improvement over its predecessor. As the only PvE content in Halo Infinite as of this writing, there was a lot of pressure for 343 Industries to deliver upon something with enough replayability as other Halo games with the encounter design and enemy variety to match.

Since Infinite is a "soft-reboot" of the series, it uses the basic story structure of Halo 1 as a foundation to build its story upon and establish itself as an accessible starting point to newcomers while extending olive branches to those who are familiar with past games and the overarching lore of the Forerunners. What we're left with is a more focused narrative that acts as a somber reflection on the series up to this point and an appropriately thematic continuation of Halo 4's story of the Master Chief reconciling his humanity as he copes with trauma, failure, and the loss of a friend all while wrapping up plotlines opened up in Halo 5 and rerailing entire character arcs in the process.

*operatic monk chanting intensifies*

Just like Halo 1, Infinite's story begins in medias res with humanity at their lowest point since fleeing Reach as the UNSC fights a two-front war against a fearsome alien aggressor in the Banished from Halo Wars 2 and Cortana's Created from the end of Halo 5. When Cortana's location is tracked down to the newly discovered Installation 07 (or Zeta Halo), the UNSC sends the Master Chief with a fleet led by the UNSC Infinity to capture and bring her in for immediate deletion. Before the mission can be carried out, the Infinity is destroyed in an ambush and the Master Chief is defeated and left for dead by the Atriox, the leader of the Banished.

Six months later, a lone pilot on an adrift Pelican discovers the Master Chief floating in space and resuscitates him. In that time, Zeta Halo has been blown apart with the resulting explosion triggering a Slipspace jump to an unknown region of space that effectively strands the weakened remnants of the UNSC and the Banished- now under the command of Escharum in the wake of his student Atriox’s death- as they fight for control over Halo installation. With no way back to Earth, the Master Chief launches a counterattack with the help of the Pilot and a newly discovered AI known only as “The Weapon” to establish the UNSC's presence on Zeta Halo while uncovering the mystery of what the Banished are looking for on the rings and how Cortana’s involved.

Much of Infinite’s story is spent filling in the missing pieces of what happened before and after the attack on the Infinity with audio logs to explore the depth of the UNSC/Banished conflict while adding context to both factions' respective viewpoints much like the terminals from past games, but never in an over-explanatory way that detracts from the mystery that Infinite spends its run-time building up. It’s a smaller scale narrative than most 343-era Halo games with a renewed focus on the Master Chief and a significantly reduced cast of characters that allows for emotionally weightier scenes with greater depth than anything seen in Halo 5. With the Pilot and the Weapon, the game is able to explore the Master Chief’s humanity through the Pilot’s survivor guilt and his grief in losing Cortana through his burgeoning friendship with the Weapon and contrasting her naïveté with the Chief’s stoic “been there, seen that” attitude by role reversing Chief and Cortana’s dynamic from past games.

They let me pick, did I ever tell you that?

The first few levels of Infinite are largely linear affairs that take place within Banished and Forerunner environments, giving players a preview of two out of the only three environments they’ll be spending much of their time in and what to expect from encounters once you’re able to explore the ‘open-world’. Infinite borrows heavily from ODST in how its open world acts as connective tissue to bridge main missions, side objectives, and collectibles together with the completion of campaign missions being a necessary condition to explore more islands in Zeta Halo.

Some of these collectibles are used to upgrade the equipment that the Chief picks up throughout the main missions, often by adding new functionality to them like the Grapple Punch for the Grappleshot or by blending existing equipment together like the Thrusters triggering a brief Active Camo effect. The game matches the Chief's new abilities and equipment with wide-open battlefields and enemy variety that keeps the player on their toes, leading to some wonderfully frenetic and hectic combat scenarios that feel almost exactly like they came right out of Combat Evolved. Beyond the usual suspects of Hunters, Elites, Grunts, and Jackals (yes, even the God-forsaken snipers), the Brutes return in a variety of archetypes that can shift the dynamic of encounters by forcing you into more defensive maneuvers like the Brute Berserkers that can rush you into close-quarters engagements.

With the right armaments, enemy squads can be a force to be reckoned with and they frequently work together with witty dialogue to accompany how they co-operate in the battlefield such as Brutes flinging suicide grunts at the player's head. Even bosses- an enemy archetype not seen since Halo 2 (we don't talk about Warden Eternal)- have seen a major revamp with phases, unique attacks, and arena design changes that make them stand out in interesting ways. It's Halo's combat at its most experimental and it's incredibly refreshing to see 343 iterate upon widely panned ideas by focusing less on artificial difficulty and emphasizing mechanical novelty with appropriate build-up and thematic suitability to make boss fights feel more narratively fitting. That the Prometheans and quick-time events of Halo 4 and 5 were left out of Infinite only elevate it even further without the need of cheap gimmickry.

You know I had to include this for the meme alone.

It lends itself to an addictive power fantasy with moments as exhilarating as evading a rocket fired by a heavily armored Brute with a well-timed thruster boost, switching to your Grappleshot to pick up a nearby Skewer and sniping the Brute in the face before picking off the retreating stragglers with your sidearm and hurling grenades to take care of a few distant grunts desperately attempting to kill you with their Plasma Pistols while Infinite's breathtakingly amazing soundtrack plays in the background. Best of all, moments like this take place across the entire campaign through every mission available to the player and it effectively incentivizes exploration throughout Zeta Halo. It's so mesmerizing and murderously balletic in its execution that it would make the Doom Slayer shed a tear.

Completing missions gives you Valor, which unlocks increasingly powerful weapons, vehicles, UNSC squad-mates, and variants of both that can be requisitioned from FOBs (Forward Operating Bases) so you can take them with you to other missions throughout the game. As the campaign progresses, more side objectives become available to the player as the open world expands and plenty of possibilities open up along with it, allowing for the kind of ridiculous sandbox hilarity that the Halo games are known for even with only one person at a time. It's a shame that co-op campaign isn't available as of this writing because this would be one hell of a game to break over your knee with a friend and I hope it arrives sooner than later.

(Editor's Note: Halo Infinite will have online co-op and mission replay in its next major content update scheduled to release on November 8th, but split-screen co-op has been canceled despite the existence of a glitch that allows players to play through the campaign in split-screen across all platforms that Halo Infinite is available on including the base Xbox One.)

It took me 25 hours to beat the campaign on Legendary with 100% completion and instead of walking away from it as bitter as I did with Halo 5, I wanted even more. Admittedly a major part of that comes down to a lack of variety; most missions and combat encounters take place within some variation of Banished structures, Forerunner formations, and UNSC bases with only one biome connecting everything together and one common objective. "Go here and kill everything" begins to wear thin after a while and without any compelling quest chains to go after within the open world, it makes Zeta Halo feel utterly barren. This open world design works well for something like the deserted streets of New Mombasa in ODST but it doesn't hold up nearly as well in a Halo installation where a sense of scale is needed to communicate what the Forerunners were capable of and the conflict that takes place on the ring's surface beyond skirmishes and Ubisoft-style map markers.

Those mountains aren't natural formations.

This begins to fall apart near the end of the game where the scale dramatically ramps up out of nowhere and the campaign rushes to cobble together a feasible threat that's really only built up during the only non-playable gameplay snippet in the entire game and through audio logs, which is why they're so important to Infinite's overarching narrative beyond adding context to the six months the Chief spends floating out in space. Once the final cutscene played before the credits rolled, it only made me want to see more biomes than the seemingly infinite (hah!) range of forests, rivers, and canyons that litter the landscape as a send-up to the second and third levels of Halo 1. That said, I didn't feel fatigued playing through the game or exploring the open world and I enjoyed my 25 hours with the campaign enough that I'd reconsider playing through it all over again, ignoring the lack of a mission replay feature that shipped with past Halo games at launch.

With all that said, I'd definitely be singing a completely different tune if I had paid full price for the campaign compared to downloading it off of Game Pass. Because it's $60 for the campaign, it's doing a lot of heavy lifting to justify value for something that was part of a larger package with a baseline number of features but ultimately comes up short for it. It becomes much harder to swallow when you remember that Reach shipped day one with solo and co-op campaign, competitive multiplayer, Forge, Firefight, and a functional theatre mode with more content between each mode than the entirety of Infinite at this point. It's a huge trade-off that feels like it was used to justify a subscription fee to a service that- despite its insane value- offers ephemeral ownership in return and feels more indicative of a cynical gaming and global landscape that promises zero ownership and greater 'happiness' for it like paying a subscription fee for heated seats in a car that you already own.

But that's why the free-to-play multiplayer is there, right? Well about that…

"Your Ass, My Size-24 Hoof."

I've been playing Infinite's multiplayer since its surprise launch on November 15th as a “beta"- whatever that word means when it was out mere weeks before its official release date with microtransactions in tow- and there were a lot of things I was willing to excuse on the assumption that fixes were coming. Despite the hotfixes that have been made to address concerns, expecting more might’ve been too optimistic so I’m going to talk about the multiplayer in its current state. While I’m still enjoying the multiplayer, it’s clear that it’s still effectively a beta and that 343 needs to address a lot of outstanding issues in the months ahead.

A large part of that comes down to just how little content launched with the game in November with only four playlists, a handful of ranked playlists, and a Battle Pass tying it all together with free events interspersed between seasons of content lasting a few months with Season 1 lasting until May 2022. This would be easier to stomach if there was something else to go after in the game beyond the Battle Pass but there's zero auxiliary progression beyond it and Weekly Rewards in stark contrast to SR levels in Halo 5 or the performance-based XP system seen in the Master Chief Collection. Once that Battle Pass is done, you basically have next to no reason to come back to the game unless a free event runs in the game for a shot at limited-time cosmetics.

Spider Chief, Spider Chief! Does whatever a Spider Chief can!

Initially, the Battle Pass could only be leveled up through challenges that offered a stingy amount of XP to reach a single tier before it was changed to offer a continuous 50 XP reward for completing matches and finally changing to a deprecating XP reward that would go from 300 to 50 XP in a matter of a few matches in response to feedback. Over time, the challenges were tuned in difficulty to allow for less stringent completion requirements that were contingent upon specific modes that could only be played in certain playlists. If a certain challenge is still grating to complete, you could swap them out for easier ones that are a matter of a dice roll that could end up taking multiple swaps to find a plausibly bearable one to finish.

The philosophy behind this change was to give players a reason beyond chasing a number that grows larger the more you play, but that feels like a revisionist take by 343 themselves. You're still chasing a number that grows larger the more you play, it's just attached to something you could spend real money on. Besides, it's not like past Halo games didn't have a number or ranking you chased after to begin with; Halo 3 offered a player rank that grew the more XP you earned across playlists, Reach offered a unique leveling system based on credits you earned throughout all activities offered in the game. Even Halo 4 and 5 did the same thing with the SR ranking system. It's a shame because this makes an otherwise phenomenally fun multiplayer game feel like a chore; the exact opposite of what 343 wanted to avoid in the first place in making its multiplayer feel like a second job. That challenge skips have been offered in promotional codes and Game Pass bonuses only reinforce the feeling that 343 knew this system wasn't ideal to begin with.

Don't worry about chasing a large number, go after this large number instead! -343 Industries

What makes it more discouraging is that there's no social experience that ties it all together; Infinite didn't ship with lobbies and with it, no option to view other Spartans apart from the intro cutscene in every match or partying up with other players. This alone is particularly galling because I recently played the original Halo 3 on the Xbox 360 prior to the servers being shut down and with Infinite being hailed as a return to form for the franchise with stories of several players returning to play with their friends circulating social media, it's beyond infuriating that this franchise's latest title doesn't have better tools than a game from 2007 to match and play with other people at a time when gaming has only become more social. It only serves to confirm a shift of focus away from Halo's roots as a social party game towards the competitive e-sports crowd and the franchise itself has suffered for it despite Halo's illustrious history as a competitive multiplayer game during the MLG era.

We never knew how good we had it.

This is without getting into some of the networking hazards that litter the game's multiplayer; desynchronization issues that are caused by Infinite's netcode exacerbate the unreliably wonky melee system that registers lunges whenever it feels like it and the removal of friendly player collision along with it. Infinite's inconsistent anti-cheat system turns social and competitive playlists alike into an uncomfortable minefield of cheaters with an unforgiving ranking system for competitive play that drops you by whole ranks that only make the experience far saltier than it needs to be despite how fun ranked multiplayer actually is to play. Even BTB was broken for days on end with a patch that's scheduled to come this week as of this writing.

(Editor's Note: The patch needed a patch to fix outstanding issues and as of this writing, BTB is thankfully more functional. Anti-cheat fixes are coming to the game in successive updates, including the next major content update in the Winter Update as are networking fixes to address desynchronization.)

Thankfully most of the maps are really well designed with a lot of effort being made to preserve a sense of flow, allowing for dynamic movement and equipment usage to really shine. It feels like the culmination of several lessons that 343 Industries learned in making maps for Halo 4 and 5 by following in the lead of how past games and popular Forge maps handled weapon spawns and chokepoints. Plenty of breadcrumbs have also been added for fans of the series to nibble on with homages to past games with Streets and Bazaar being my personal favorite maps in the game for this reason alone with references to both Halo 2 and ODST being plastered on walls and the inside of buildings. It helps that every map- much like the rest of the game itself- is unbelievably gorgeous with the art design doing much of the heavy lifting to communicate the grandiose scale of Halo's universe from the tiniest of towns to the largest of Forerunner installations instead of merely being a series of tangentially connected BSPs. Even with all these references, the presence of Halo 5-esque weapon pads do detract from the environmental story-telling the classic Bungie era games were able to do with something simple as a sniper rifle spawn in the Blood Gulch cave being tough to find.

At their best the maps feel like a continuation of Halo 3's map design philosophy but at their worst they feel awkwardly out of place for the player-counts they were designed for. Despite the aesthetic appeal of maps like Behemoth taking place in a Forerunner structure out in the desert of Zeta Halo, the open-ended width of the map makes 4v4 combat feel like a stop-and-go affair that gets excruciatingly boring with the chance of a permanent deadlock happening during objective based game modes such as Capture the Flag. One would hope that 343 plans to experiment with higher player counts as 5v5 combat in maps as large as Behemoth or even the Reach-inspired Launch Site could benefit a great deal from more chaotic engagements with more players with more maps being more than welcome when they are released down the line. More variety in environments would also be greatly appreciated with Covenant and Banished environments rather than strictly human or Forerunner inspired maps.

(Editor's Note: The deadlocking issue present in Behemoth CTF has thankfully been addressed.)

Because Infinite is free to play, the multiplayer has been built from the ground up to accommodate new players with bots to practice against and a full-blown tutorial that gets your feet wet with the basic mechanics of Halo as a whole. If you want to practice with specific weapons, there are a set of trials for each gun that help you get accustomed to the weapons and their unique traits to train you in different situations with a scoring and star system to assess your skill. For new and returning players to the series, the onboarding process feels incredibly smooth with plenty of opportunities to practice and it offers a great way to ease into Halo's combat flow from other games. It feels respectful to other players and their time in a way that's refreshing and welcoming to see in today's gaming landscape.

That is, until you want to make your Spartan look halfway decent.

"And you'd told me you'd wear something nice!"

When the squad lookin fresh like

If you go by the number of parts you can change on your Spartan, then Halo Infinite easily has the most in-depth customization seen in the series since Reach. Everything from your Spartan's armor to prosthetic limbs, armor effects, voice, and body type can be customized including the way your weapons and vehicles look with their own set of cosmetic items. Customization options can be unlocked through playing the campaign, levelling the Battle Pass, a Fortnite-style rotating store that you can buy items from using real money, and special events such as the Fracture Tenrai event for the heavily advertised Samurai-inspired Yoroi Armor Core.

On paper, it’s the Master Chief Collection’s customization suite taken to its logical conclusion; it allows for multiple styles of Spartan armor and experimental cosmetics to be added in the future with the existing options being aesthetically appealing on their own thanks in no small part to the game's sublime art direction. In practice, Infinite’s customization is frustratingly limited at best with several customization options having been downgraded from previous games and downright malicious at worst in the ways that customization is intrinsically tied to its monetization system.

While you were out spamming grenades, I studied the way of the blade.

Part of the issue comes down to the way that cosmetics are spread across items combined with the amount of overlap between them. Vehicles, weapons, and armor cores share unique pools of cosmetics that can’t be shared between each other and lead to frustrating outcomes like the way vehicle emblems can’t be used for your player emblem despite sharing the exact same appearance. This gets even more ridiculous when you realize that individual vehicles share individual cosmetic pools much like weapons do, possibly to leave more room for monetizable cosmetics like mud flaps for the Warthog. Y'know, assuming you get into a Warthog that doesn't blow up quickly enough for you to appreciate them for the five nanoseconds you'll be riding in one.

This is where armor cores come in by locking customization down to a pre-defined pool of cosmetics for that specific core. Most of this makes sense from both a lore perspective and a design standpoint; mixing and matching different pieces across cores may not be compatible across different generations of Spartan armor and could lead to clashing aesthetic choices that may cause rampant clipping in the character models. At least that would make sense if the bots couldn’t do cross-core customization and the Waypoint mobile app couldn’t demonstrate it were possible via rendering glitches in the in-app Spartan model with almost zero clipping.

I'm willing to give 343 the benefit of the doubt when they say that it could take months of work to implement for players but that also could be so that they can balance giving players cross-core customization with pending monetization systems similar to how Transmog/Armor Synthesis from Destiny 2 was designed to complement Eververse. As it stands, it’s a cynical way to make you buy overlapping cosmetic options per armor core and it gets even more baffling when you realize you're buying the exact same armor coating as offered in one armor core either through the Battle Pass or for free.

Editor's Note: 343 Industries is slowly adding cross-core customization to the game with no additional monetization. As of Season 2, Visors are now fully cross-core across the five currently available Armor Cores: Mark VII, Mark V[B], Yoroi, Rakshasa, and Eaglestrike.

Is this a sign of what's to come for customization?

The arbitrary limitation of armor cores also affects the way that accessories can be equipped; in addition to being locked to a specific core, only one attachment slot can be used at any one time on any piece of armor. With this change alone, it ruins the silhouette that some armor cores are known for and dampens further customization. It’s the main reason why the Reach armor pieces look off; the knife is a separate attachment that can only be bought from the store and several armor attachments can’t be mixed together on the same piece. A lot of them are just flat out missing such as the UA-HUL attachment for the ODST and Recon helmets. It gets even more outrageous when you realize that certain armor pieces outright block the armor emblems with no way to position the emblems anywhere else on the character model.

Worse yet are pre-selected sets known as “armor kits” that can be equipped so that players can look like the five named members of Noble Team or an e-sports team themed Mark VII set. Using these feels incredibly pointless since changing any piece of it removes the entirety of the armor kit. These problems are exacerbated even further when you realize that certain pieces found in the armor kits are behind a paywall and combined with how arbitrarily restrictive the Destiny-inspired coating system is compared to the Primary/Secondary/Tertiary color customization options from earlier games, they both lead to the exact opposite of “greater customization and player expression" that 343 Industries was aiming for. If anything, Spartans feel less distinctive than they were in past games and the customization system is the very definition of "mile-wide and an inch deep" for how compromised it all feels.

What was that about "Greater customization and player expression" again?

Worse yet, it's reinforced further by Infinite's monetization and the utterly user-hostile UI that supports it.

"A Monument to All Your Sins."

Were you blinded by its majesty? Paralyzed? Dumbstruck?

I wanted to set aside an entire section to discussing monetization in greater detail because there's a lot to cover and simply saying the monetization is “bad bc expensive" doesn’t touch on why it’s so problematic, especially when it’s being propped up by the worst user-experience that I’ve ever seen since the original Xbox One UI in 2013. In theory, a store that rotates on a daily and weekly basis makes sense for a free-to-play Halo game since there’s so many examples to draw from in both Fortnite and Destiny 2 among a few examples. Done properly, it could be a really consumer-friendly addition to the multiplayer that would complement decisions like the non-expiring Battle Passes but it’s let down by some absurd decisions on 343’s part.

A lot of the store's problems come down to the aggressive bundling of items to justify an obscene price tag in the hopes that ten dollars for cat-ears that you can only put on a single armor core can easily be justified with a handful of accessories you might not even care about. Often these come in the form of coatings, charms, and emblems that only serve to show just how inconsistent the value of these items across bundles and how meaningless the actual prices are. Especially when a lot of these bundles contain copies of the exact same emblem for vehicles, weapons, and armor. This discrepancy can be seen in the highest-tier bundle at 2000 credits ($20); an armor set is barely worth that much, nor are voice packs that used to go for nearly a fraction of the price in Halo 5, and neither are the extra stuff they add to those bundles in an attempt to justify the price. It all comes across as insulting when you realize that the same amount of cash for an armor set can get you the entire Master Chief Collection at its sale price.

Sir, finishing this fight UwU

Ignoring the audacity of bundling a bunch of emblems and a charm with the aforementioned cat-ear bundle, are Warthog mud flaps really worth bundling with three other vehicle coatings you're probably gonna see in two playlists for the same price when the vehicles have the structural integrity of single-ply toilet paper? It makes the more fairly priced bundles feel like a rip-off and combined with how cosmetics are bundled and never sold separately, it makes the "Stay Tuned for more Details" messages in each armor piece more egregious because of the FOMO it inspires. Even if you do find something you think is worth spending money on, rest assured that the way Spartan Credits are bundled on Xbox Live Marketplace will get you to think twice about dropping a dime because its Microsoft Points levels of obscene.

You could say that’s endemic to free-to-play games and Infinite’s certainly no exception to the same issues that plagues a game like Destiny 2 but at least buying Silver to purchase items from Eververse was one option you had to buy things. Halo Infinite currently has no way to earn currency or an alternative version of it (like Bright Dust in Destiny 2) for free through in-game activities and offering this would go a long way to reduce most of the issues with the store provided it’s balanced properly so that players can still choose to spend money if they want to. It'd give players a way to speed up the grind while offering an option to engage with the already sublime gameplay loop to earn enough to buy whatever they’re interested in that given time.

Editor's Note: This was amended in Season 2; the battle pass contains Spartan Credits across the premium track.

Thankfully, 343 have announced in an update that they plan to evaluate the store with requested changes like lower prices and better value bundles in response to user feedback but how far is that going to go when people are still buying cosmetics from the store in droves? Are the same pricing tiers going to exist but with more stuff packed into them? What dictates how much a certain cosmetic item costs over another and what about event-related cosmetics? I'd be remiss to say that I'm not excited to see what changes are in the pipeline for the store, but it's merely the first step in addressing an even larger problem that lies in the game's horrible user experience.

_Editor's Note: The cost of items is still a major issue despite the price reduction across the board and worse yet, the store suffers from anemic variety with repeated cosmetic items showing up week after week as of this writing.)_

Wait till you see how long it takes to load this screen alone.

Despite running the game on a Series X, Infinite's UI is a sluggish affair that takes an eternity to connect and synchronize data with the server on a decent internet speed upon startup. Successive updates have only made the wait even longer with several players reporting the same even with better internet than mine. Even if this was rectified, the UI is still a horribly jerky mess that's barely built at scale.

Editor's Note: This was later addressed in successive updates following Season 2's release to speed load times of the UI, especially upon startup. Despite this, some users report similar load times

The playlist selection menu in particular feels like it was never supposed to have more than four playlists at any one time with a horribly awkward scroll bar that crops other choices off. By the time you do get to a match, you'll find that there's no other way to mute players without jumping through a series of infuriatingly hidden menus in the pause menu that past Halo games were able to solve with a single "Mute All" button on the scoreboard. If you do come across a cheater or a toxic player, there's no in-game tools to report players and submit feedback directly.

Were you expecting a Mute All button?

The customization menus are where all these problems culminate into something even worse in how it seems to go above and beyond to sell upon the fantasy of picking between personalized suits of armor, weapons, and vehicles like something out of Iron Man but with none of the functional appeal behind it. As neat as the presentation is, 343 forgot to build a functional UI over it with horizontal menus being rampant across the customization menus to resemble that of the Battle Pass UI.

Equipping any cosmetic requires more clicks than past games with some options being hidden behind tabs. While less options are less difficult to navigate for newer players, it'll become a massive problem when players have been playing for multiple months and accrue a ton of cosmetics over time at which point the filter option feels like an inadequate solution in ways a vertical menu would've mitigated from day one. And don't even get me started on the misleading and completely vestigial nature of the rarity tiers in this game: That the game's own storefront actively refuses to acknowledge it in its pricing of cosmetics in any logical way only makes the rarity tiers for cosmetic items a meaningless differentiator that adds absolutely nothing for the end user.

Great idea, not so great execution.

This isn't me just saying "just make it more like the old games lol", even 343 themselves recognized that in Halo 4's UI from 2012 and Spartan customization fared far better for it! This feels like change for the sake of change that only serves to repeat Halo 5's mistakes by detracting from the user experience and customization along with it. This is without getting into the poorly optimized PC version with the way customization menus seems to cause the framerate to tank, not to mention the rampant crashes and lack of red reticle for "anti-cheat".

Editor's Note: Fixes for crashes and the addition of a red reticle range are scheduled to appear in Halo Infinite's PC version as of the Winter Update scheduled on November 8th.

I'm aware that these aren't simple fixes and would likely take months if not years to implement changes and overhauls, but is that not just like the state of the rest of the game at this stage? If Infinite needed one extra year of development from its projected Holiday 2020 release date and this is what we got out of it all, it only begs the question: Exactly what on Earth did they plan on shipping last year when Infinite was planned to launch on the same date as the Series X and S as a launch title?

Pointing that out now seems like kind of a moot point with the sheer volume of complaints that've been made about the state of the game by the community at large all while pro-players leave Halo's competitive scene at the same rate that Halo Infinite has been losing players throughout its lifespan. Despite that, nothing's stopping me from going on about everything else.

So I will.

"I Think We're Just Getting Started."

Wort the Blargh?!

As of this writing, Halo Infinite has been out for three months with multiple components that are missing with Forge and co-op campaign scheduled for 2022 with a performance-based progression system and multiple seasons of content to go along with it. That’s without getting into the conspicuous absence of Service Records and in-game statistics among several features seen in Halo games at launch.

Editor's Note: Forge is releasing as a beta with the Winter Update on November 8 alongside network co-op and mission replay alongside several Quality-of-Life fixes.)

So far, the theme with Infinite appears to be "Expect it ___ months/years after launch" and while I understand the disappointment that some people -myself included- do feel that these modes and features aren’t being included at launch like Halo 5 before it, the issue doesn't come down to “lazy developers.” I know that's not what keyboard warriors want to hear, but it speaks to a larger issue of crunch in the video game industry and the mountainous technical debt that's accrued throughout the development of nearly every main-line Halo game and iterating upon the -Blam!- engine since Combat Evolved in 2001.

Even to this day, Bungie has struggled with technical issues related to the engine in developing two Destiny games thanks to burdensome tools and have only managed to get into a consistent groove of quality expansions and seasonal content as recently as last year. That's eight years into Destiny's ten-year plan and Infinite is in a far more dire state even with all the broad deadlines being brought up for Forge and co-op campaign.

With all that being said, what no one wants to admit about Forge and co-op campaign being delayed is that had they shown up at launch on December 8th, you’d have heard far more stories of employee burnout with layoffs and hellish stories of crunch abound all while the modes and features in question would’ve ended up in a far worse state for it. If that sounds familiar, try CD Projekt Red and Cyberpunk 2077 or - better yet- Bungie during the development of their Halo games.

Taken June 2004, five months before Halo 2's launch in November of that year.

Halo 1 was developed in nine months to coincide with the launch of the original Xbox after Microsoft purchased the studio following the MacWorld 99 demo while Halo 2 had to be massively stripped down and rebuilt in eighteen months due to development issues after E3 2003 with some employees working fifty-hour weeks. The crunch from Halo 2 was so brutal that several staff members took a less active role throughout Halo 3’s development which experienced similar levels of crunch and overtime as Reach and ODST did years later.

In the six years between Halo 5 and Infinite, 343 had been releasing content drops for Halo 5 while hiring and actively developing the Slipspace Engine atop -Blam!- for Halo Infinite all while working on much-needed overhauls to the Master Chief Collection and porting all six games (Reach, CE, 2, 3, ODST, and 4, seven if you count H2A) to PC and the Xbox Series S/X. Infinite's development cycle has been fraught with high-profile departures, rotating studio leads, a reliance on contractors contributing to its revolving door of staff, and a shift to working from home in the onset of a global pandemic with new hardware launching the same year before being pushed back a year after an underwhelming yet promising eight-minute snippet of the game’s campaign.

It'd be an understatement to say that 343 has been incredibly busy as of late and I doubt that the decision to push these features back was an easy call to make with everything else going on in the background. I’m willing to accept these features being delayed if it means that they’re trying to respect the well-being of their employees by not subjecting them to the same levels of crunch that Halo-era Bungie and even 343 Industries themselves have been guilty of with Halo 4 and 5. It’s why I take umbrage with accusations of laziness or malice that are being directed toward staff members of 343 Industries because it misses the point entirely as to why these issues can happen in game development; chronic mismanagement.

Set a fire in your wallet, Spartan!

Many of this game’s issues and scant amount of content feels like the result of heavy-handed mismanagement on both Microsoft and 343’s part as the project rapidly changed scope and direction throughout development (if accounts by former 343 staff are to be believed) all while implementing several systems and UI decisions with the intent to prioritize maximizing Infinite’s revenue stream over fleshing out the game itself. If the aforementioned issues, high turnover of studio leads and contract staff, and the hiring of Joe Staten to right the ship as Campaign Lead weren’t enough to show just how much disarray Halo Infinite’s development cycle was in, I don’t know what else can hint at the hellish tug-of-war that must’ve taken place between 343 and Microsoft. Hell, you can argue that same conflict took place throughout Halo 4 and 5's development too.

Editor's Note: On September 12th 2022, founder and head of 343 Industries Bonnie Ross has left the company as part of a major management shakeup citing a family medical issue. Bonnie's exit from 343 Industries is the latest of a series of high-profile departures from 343 Industries including Tim Longo (Creative Director), Mary Olson (Executive Producer), Chris Lee (Director), Andrew Witts (Lead Multiplayer Designer), and Jerry Hook (Head of Design).

According to a comment from Microsoft to Windows Central, Bonnie's role as head of 343 Industries has been split into three roles: Pierre Hintze (Partner Head of Production) is now the studio head while Bryan Koski (Head of Halo Marketing) is the Franchise General Manager. Elizabeth Van Wyck will retain her role as Head of Business, Operations and eSports.

The level of mismanagement runs so deep that you can even find hints of it in the game’s achievements as the background art for the achievement granted for completing the Battle Pass shows 120 levels rather than the 100 levels seen in the final game; a hint that several items were most likely removed to be sold in the store for that sweet MTX cash. How else can you explain the Mark VII helmet being placed in Infinite’s Battle Pass despite it being part of the default armor core of the entire game’s multiplayer and being so heavily advertised in Infinite’s marketing campaign or Reach armor like HAZOP and JFO being store bundles instead of being offered in the Battle Pass?

Editor's Note: An update to Infinite is coming with several missing cosmetics returning as part of a Battle Pass such as the CQB helmet for the Mark V[B] Armor Core.

A smoking gun or a signal of things to come in future Battle Passes?

If 343 Industries’ Community Manager Brian “Ske7ch” Jarrad’s response to the Halo subreddit about the state of Halo Infinite is anything to go by, it’s that the team is painfully aware of every single issue in this game and are working to resolve them given the foundation they have to work with and the mountainous expectations placed upon them after six years between mainline Halo games that have already set the standard for 343 Industries to surpass.

The toxicity reached such a fever pitch that the entirety of the Halo subreddit was locked down the weekend before the campaign's official launch. I don't believe that 343 owes an explanation for what happened during Infinite's development, nor do I endorse the stupidity of taking a monolithic corporate entity like Microsoft -and subsidiaries like 343 Industries by extension- at their word. But I vehemently oppose hurling insults and baseless accusations as a substitute to constructive criticism and I explicitly condemn death threats over something as banal as a fucking video game.

Despite all that, I believe 343 has the best chance they've ever had to capitalize on this game's strengths and deliver something even better than what we got even if the base game is about as unfinished as the Jorge armor kit's untextured shoulder pad.

It's the beginning of what could be a Great Journey.

“The Great Journey is at hand.”

Believe.

I mentioned earlier that one of the reasons why this post took a long time to finish beyond playing the game (and let's face it, sheer laziness on my part) is how open 343 has been in how they’re receiving feedback. Any fault I point out regarding Infinite’s progression, the lack of playlists, and desync has been addressed one way or the other with fixes on the way if they haven't already been patched. (Editor's Note: To some extent. Desync issues run rampant to this day along with matchmaking and server outages all while 343 continues to investigate them.)

With Halo Infinite being a live-service game, I expect that the game -like my thoughts on it- will change a lot over the course of time as the game continues to expand with new additions to the sandbox, a new campaign or PvE content as a more substantial release, new events and cosmetics on top of the requisite updates for sandbox balancing and networking stability. I’ve written almost an entire dissertation's worth of my thoughts on this game and despite all my problems with the game, I still want to go back to playing more of it the moment that this article goes live.

Again, that just goes to show how much 343 Industries nailed Halo Infinite’s gameplay and I'm excited I am for what the future holds for the game. Everything that Infinite gets wrong is immensely balanced out by what it gets right that I can’t help but enjoy it as much as I have been, much like Destiny was and still is for me to this day with its sequel and the clanmates I've played with since 2014. Maybe it's the fact that I'm biased as a huge fan of this franchise and the legacy it's built over the past twenty years; Halo 1 was the first shooter I ever played when I was a kid and one of my favorite games ever made. I badly want to entice more people to join in to see why this series appeals to me the way that it does but in Infinite's current state it feels too early to do so while things are still so raw.

Maybe that'll change and I hope it does. After all, the possibilities for the next ten years of this game's planned post-launch support are just that: Infinite.

This ends with me needing a weapon.

-Toasty out.

Thank you, Craig, for blessing me with the will to finish this goddamned article.