The hour of deliverance has come for 343 Industries. After years of hard work, the American studio is launching the long-awaited single-player campaign for Halo Infinite this week. It's time to look in the rearview mirror and look back on the stormy development of this opus.
We owe this new information to Bloomberg and its journalist Jason Schreier.
Cascading worries
Halo Infinite's design story could have been like a missed date. Announced as the big exclusive for the launch of the Xbox Series X | S, the FPS from 343 Industries will finally have taken more than an additional year to reach us. The fault of a first demo extremely badly received by the players, and especially of many internal concerns.
In order to design the ambitious universe of their new Halo, the development teams used a set of tools called Faber. But it quickly proved difficult to tame, and many bugs were unfortunately invited to the party. So much so that 343 Industries would have spent months studying the possibility of switching to Unreal Engine. But this change did not ultimately take place.
Another major problem, the workforce of the studio was anything but stable. Indeed, most of the talents could not be retained by 343 Industries, since their contract expired after 18 months. Hiring was extremely rare due to Microsoft restrictions. New members therefore had to be constantly trained. The different teams also worked in their corner, which gave rise to conflicting decisions between each group. One developer even goes so far as to say that it was almost like “developing four or five games at the same time”.
When Halo Infinite Almost Looked Like Zelda
Now, back to the summer of 2019. At that time, Halo Infinite was off to a pretty bad start. Bloomberg tells us that about two-thirds of the game has been removed, so the designers had nothing to do while waiting for guidelines on the future of the project. Because, at the start, this opus opted for an even more open structure and inspired by Zelda (Breath of the Wild). But 343 Industries was forced to revise its ambitions downwards.
These hectic turns necessarily led to internal postponements. Initially, Halo Infinite's multiplayer was slated to launch in 2019, with its single-player campaign the following year. In addition to the setbacks directly linked to the creation of the game, the July 2020 demo has definitively buried the hopes of a release for the arrival of the new Xboxes.
If the final form of this Halo Infinite no longer has much to do with the initial trailer presented at E3 2018, there is no doubt that these postponements will have been life-saving for the FPS. Indeed, multiplayer has already welcomed millions of players on its servers, and single player has landed an average of 86% on Metacritic. Six years after Halo 5: Guardians, Master Chief is truly back!
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