I’m sure he’s doing great work and making positive internal changes, but at the same time as far as multiplayer goes Halo Infinite in many ways just seems to be following the plan they always had. There was always going to be a period where resources were tied up finishing forge and co-op and all these other features, and once forge was out they were always going to be able to better support the game with forge content while adding more features over time. I’m not sure how much they have actually changed course, more they’ve just gotten the time to get the game where it needed to go.
There’s definitely been changes and improvements to what they originally planned, like how the new battlepass is condensed or how we’re getting more crosscore, but even then they always meant the game to be ever improving and reacting to player demands.
Definitely many of the changes happening this year were already outlined in that presentation in September last year… They weren’t in a position to make more frequent updates last year as the engine was such a mess on the backend that whenever they were introducing an update to fix something, 2 other things stopped working. Even this year the launch of Season 3 brought plenty of bugs that needed to be fixed over thext week or two.
Still, there’s no doubt the old leadership had many questionable practices and I’m sure the new people in charge are aware that they have to do better. Xbox split Bonnie Ross’s responsibilities to 3 different people to ensure everything is taken care of going forward. So far things appear to be working.
I am so impressed by the Forge AI presentation, it’s going to provide great things for years to come. I also hope 343i has scrapped the plans to switch to UE5, I’d rather they build their next game on top of all the amazing features already developed for Infinite, sort of like Halo Reach was this amazing package because it was built on top of Halo 3.
Midship remake:
I ama amazed they were able to do it without Covenant presets in Forge. Stunning.
Yeah I think Stayen deserves a lot of credit for turning the ship around. What we are seeing right now is the result of his efforts. Addressing that technical debt was incredibly important to creating the situation where we have a steady supply of updates.
We’ll see what the new leadership has done when Season 6 rolls around.
Have they shown anything yet at the tourney? I wondering if Season 5 will have the new UI.
I was playing a bit last night to finish off challenges and had a ton of fun and yet again remembered while performing the challenges that the game doesn’t even have challenge progress bars. Such a basic live service feature that we haven’t yet seen. But here’s the thing I’m still having a ton of fun so I didn’t care and I never really did care since season 2, when the challenges were more like a chore.
Challenges since Season 3 have been really good to the point where I’m not having to measure progress every match. I just know what I have to do and have fun and whatever happens, happens.
And reminder to everyone who is into collecting the stream drops to have a device “watching” the stream today for at least 3 hours to unlock all goodies.
I believe they mentioned somewhere that the main menu would now have your challenges shown on the menu screen instead of having to jump into the battle pass section each time
So I believe it’s a new UI but I’m not sure it’s going to be some huge overhaul that I know some people would like, the custom games section is definitely in need of a big UI overhaul
We had 3 independent sources (Halo youtuber Sean W, Ains from Seasoned Gaming and Jason Schreier from Bloomberg) stating 343i is looking into switching to UE5, if they can replicate the Halo feel on that engine.
Obviously I don’t know the state of the tools for the Slipspace Engine, how efficient the pipeline is etc. Outsourcing is obviously easier when you’re on UE5. But starting the multiplayer featureset from the ground up again is going to be such a pain point for the community, I’d prefer if the next Halo built on top of Infinite the way Halo Reach built on top of H3 to deliver such a rich package at launch.
I’d go a step further. Reach built on 3/ODST in the sense of retaining all the modes from launch, but I’d argue that throwing away maps isn’t ideal. If they can work out a way of including all Infinite’s maps in the next release, perhaps with a visual upgrade (easy, I cry!), that’d be cool. There’s so much work that has a short lifespan.
At this point you’re merely getting a new coat of paint over the old game, sort of like CS:GO → CS2. Perhaps if the population recovers for Infinite there will be no need for a multiplayer sequel and simply give it ongoing (content/feature/technical) updates. R6 Siege is 8 years old, GTA Online is 10 years old, Minecraft is 15 years old - all are still going strong. That’s a big IF though. Infinite has been gradually rebuilding trust with its core audience. Sea of Thieves had that Pirates of the Caribbean update 3 years after its launch that brought 5M players, but dunno what Halo could do to catch attention in a similar way. That Tatanka BR mode had better be real and better do something really interesting lol.
I’d be shocked if we do not get a new MP. Hovering around #20-40th most played game on Xbox is respectable but the damage that Infinite did to it’s PC community is unfixable.
Infinite barely doing better than Halo MCC on steam is just not acceptable, especially as a F2P game. You kind of have to release a new MP by necessity to recover that demographic.
