When I gave an update on Halo Infinite back in August, I described a youthful and energising FPS sandbox but a neglected wreck of a live-service game. At the time, I predicted that it would be a while before the shooter's condition improved. What I didn't guess was that it might get worse. One of Infinite's most hotly awaited features was Campaign Co-op. Those who've tagged along for the rocky history of 343 Industries no doubt found the wait familiar. As the developer geared up for the release of Halo 5: Guardians in 2015, head of development, Josh Holmes, appeared to confirm on Twitter that the shooter's single-player would include split-screen co-op play. Microsoft subsequently clarified that Guardians would not support local multiplayer in any form.
Cutting this feature dealt a crippling blow to Halo 5 that colours the perception of it to this day. Earlier Halo games had been groundbreaking in opening up group experiences in the genre. For many, the series had provided their first or formative contact with split-screen action gaming. It's why, at a 2017 appearance at the DICE Summit, 343 boss, Bonnie Ross, described cutting the feature from Halo 5 as an "incredibly painful" decision for the community that "eroded trust" between 343 and its fanbase.
It's this dear attachment of the Halo fandom to the local multiplayer that meant they were always going to be embittered by Halo Infinite launching without split-screen Campaign. It's the reason that it's a big deal that afterchanging the predicted release date for the mode twice, on September 1st 2022, 343 announced that there would be no split-screen Co-op Campaign for Halo Infinite. It's bad enough that 343 dropped this series cornerstone. It's worse that it tacked its audience along for months, assuring them the mode was just on the horizon when in actuality, it would never arrive.
Infinite's history has been replete with delays and shortcomings, and local Campaign Co-op was one of the strongest incentives for players to stick with the game. Yet, the studio retracted it without any official announcement on its website. Its cancellation was announced off-hand in a thirty-minute update video and was accompanied by no apology. Surely, that's the least your audience deserves. It also worries me that the reason Joseph Staten gave for the exclusion of the feature was that the studio wanted to redirect resources to other projects. What on Earth is going on at 343 that the Halo developer doesn't have enough resources to implement every essential mode?
Beyond Campaign Co-op, the major issues with Infinite fall into three columns:
- The absence of Forge, Halo's proprietary map editor.
- A drought of long-term challenges and rewards, mostly because there have only been two full Battle Passes since launch.
- General nicks to the game's polish and functionality, like glitches and lag.
In some sense, these are all the same issue. The game is meant to receive feature and content updates, as well as quality-of-life improvements, at the start of every season. So, what 343 needs to be doing is introducing new seasons regularly. And they haven't been. While play periods were originally slated to last three months each, both Season One and Two were extended to be six months long. November 2022 should have been the start of Season Three. After what felt like a lifetime of waiting, we'd be looking at a new Battle Pass and a new Halo. Except the other bombshell 343 dropped in their September update was that they were extending Season Two another 150 days. Within Infinite's first fifteen months of operation, there is a ten-month gap without any landmark updates.
Maybe talking about Infinite's run up to now as "two seasons" is misleading; it's more like 2.5 seasons. The studio's thinking was that if it couldn't introduce a whole new content run for winter, it could at least release an update with pint-sized versions of all the accessories you'd expect in a season. Instead of a full set of completed features, there's a couple of new Campaign options and betas for two other mechanics. Instead of a paid 100-level battle pass, there's a free 30-level Battle Pass. Instead of two new maps built from the ground up, there are three new levels built in Forge. We had a budget Christmas this year.
Despite local Co-op going MIA, we can now replay in-game missions and enjoy online Campaign Co-op. Most other players and I have found the new campaign components to be reliable. In general, the Winter Update went off a lot smoother than introducing Season Two did. There are also new Campaign achievements like "Splatter 50 enemies while riding in a vehicle with another player" or "In the Nexus, kill the Hunter pair with melee final blows". Even if you've already played the story front to back, there's still reason to galavant about Zeta Halo with a vehicle or power weapons, either solo or with friends.
In the multiplayer, not everything is likely as you remember, either. For 343, no weapon modification is too minor if it equals out the competition. The update log is full of painstakingly accurate notes like "[Commando Rifle] Aim Assist Angle [increased] from 5 to 6.25 degrees" or "[Plasma Pistol] charge shot angular velocity [increased] from 20 to 35 degrees per second". To my eye, the most substantial change is a fractional reduction to the aim assist on the Battle Rifle that makes this headshot generator require finer edging onto its target. But turning heads is the December nerf of the Energy Sword, which prevents you ripping through whole teams. Not to be overlooked are the devs' refittings of the Pulse Carbine, Commando, and Disruptor. Long viewed as inferior pretenders to serviceable weapons like the Pistol and Battle Rifle, a combination of reassessment by the community and buffs from the devs resulted in a newfound respect for these firearms. Given their unique underlying functions, like acting as a mid-range homing rifle or temporarily disabling the enemy's power to recharge their shield, their rehabilitation has further diversified the play.
If nerdy stats are your cup of tea, then you'll also love the metrics 343 has added to your profile on the Waypoint site. This is an addition that was made a little before I uploaded my last article, and passed me by. You can see your medals, match history, and advanced post-game stats on your page, giving you further accolades to bask in after your victories and providing more of the persistent rewards and challenges that Infinite needs. Although, I'm still not sure why the service records for previous Halo games had to be scrapped.
The game also uses a new set of rules to calculate your Competitive Skill Rating: the persistent measure of your talent on the battlefield. If a teammate quits a ranked match and you quit after them, you'll receive a reduced CSR fine. The idea here is that if someone in your party bails on a game, you no longer have to choose between playing through several minutes of a one-sided match or enduring a stinging injury to your CSR. A minimal player base means imbalanced matches, and imbalanced matches mean more motive for players to quit, so this leniency just makes sense.
The less advisable change to the system was reducing the weight personal performance has on your CSR relative to your team's performance. If my team loses a match, but I performed capably, I want my ranking to honour that. Now, I can run circles around opponents and still have my points docked. It's annoying. It smarted especially before 343 had ironed out many of the connectivity issues on the servers. Ping is now lower, and on average, more stable, but even a rock-solid connection is still liable to jitter now and then. Unfair CSR penalties were also worse immediately after the Winter Update when I was encountering an inordinate number of losing matches.
I can't overstate how much of a curse on Infinite its current player matching is. The estimated time to find a match is so inaccurate that it can predict a thirty-second wait, then you can hit the button, and have the program time out looking for a session. If Halo had a healthy player base, the discrepancies on the estimates might only be a few seconds, but we're long past a time when that was true. Average Steam users for December were sub-4,000, and at the time of writing, Infinite is the 25th most-played Xbox game. Following the FPS in its first year has felt like playing another shooter in its twilight days, which creates the uncomfortable impression that maybe this title is too. My biggest fear is that even if the latest Halo does get patched up, the ship might have sailed on its recovery.
The multiplication of playlists throughout the Summer-Autumn period further diluted an already sparse player corps. More playlists let 343 widen the pool of experiences available and bring back fan favourite modes without having to create a lot of new content. But all these fresh hoppers pulled players every which way, only increasing search delays. With the November update, 343 pruned the less popular playlists and refocused on a core set of social and ranked play formats. It speaks volumes that Last Spartan Standing, which was the signature addition for Season Two, is nowhere to be seen on this roster. Attempting to make a Halo battle royale only feels more like a misallocation of effort in retrospect. Now, 343 rotates out the more niche gametypes from week to week, allowing it to keep the multiplayer fresh and faster. Yet, player abilities, both within and between teams, are still lop-sided, and Ranked Matches especially are time-consuming to find. There's no substitute for making a game that people want to play.
The developer is finally making you jump through fewer hoops to complete your weekly Challenges, and that's a step in the right direction. Challenges used to be hyper-specific and often protracted, rewarding you for taking to weapons and gametypes that you hated and pursuing strategies that made you a detriment to your team. With regular players having filled out their Battle Passes months ago, weekly cosmetics were the only trophies regulars had left to win, and you were delivered them when you finished all your weekly Challenges. Yet, earning one of these cosmetics required completing 21 tasks in seven days, and with the indifferent measures for player matching, was largely down to luck. Now, Challenges are more flexible, don't take as long to finish, and you need fewer to unlock your weekly fashion statement. It's out with "Earn 7,500 points in Rumble Pit" and "Get 10 kills with the Stalker Rifle" and in with "Score 5,000 points in PvP" and "Get 5 kills with Banished weapons".
You can also now earn XP bonuses for your placement on the scoreboard, and any wins, again moving the mechanics towards this principle that rewards in empowerment games should be comparative to success. But with Infinite's proneness to technical snafus, even a feature as rudimentary as XP assignment remains glitchy two months after revamping. And reward systems mean nothing if you can't get the prizes you want from them. In that department, Infinite continues to fail players. The new Battle Pass is a welcome meal after a long fast, but not only is it less than a third the size of a typical Battle Pass, it also doesn't have the glitzier cosmetics like Charms and Kill Effects that players put a high price on. If you've not made your start on it yet, I sure hope you like shoulder pads. After you've hit Level 30 on that pass, the new XP goes nowhere, and the company has now run out of weekly cosmetics and is looping back through its line for 2021-2022. There is no material reason left for any semi-frequent player to keep checking in on the game.
The fandom has further been peeved that the new PvP maps (Argyle, Detachment, and Empyrean) were fabricated in Forge instead of professional tools. Sure enough, the rocky outdoors of Detachment has that cheap, grainy look that the story mode's exteriors do, while the artificial surfaces in all these environments have the opposite problem. A flat, untextured appearance has been characteristic of the primitives in Forge in the past, and that continues to be true. Empyrean is also let down by its gaudy yellow and purple. Yet, I can't deny that in the level design of the winter maps, 343 once again show themselves to be top of their class.
The first two environments are eccentric. On Argyle, a wide central channel provides plenty of opportunity for the brave Spartan to hightail it from one base to the other with flag in tow. The side routes off that thoroughfare are snaking and elaborate, and where most maps include one of each power weapon, Argyle spoils you with two Shotguns and two Snipers. The level caused some machines to crash when it was first instated, but this bug has since been squashed. Detachment is nothing like I've ever seen in a shooter. It splits into three areas: On one side, you have a tiered indoor facility like the outskirts of Argyle; down the centre, you have a plateau with a divider preventing people in the bases from taking potshots at each other. On the other edge, you have a floating island from which snipers have free reign over players in the map's core. My one frustration is that with team flags being two staircases off the ground, you can be practically at the same X and Z coordinates at them, but they can still dangle out of your grasp. It's maddening, like when you drop something down the back of your desk, and your arm is just a couple of inches too short to reach it.
Finally, Empyrean is a remake of Halo 3's The Pit. It's a classic map of ups and downs with snug high-wall bases. New to this incarnation is an Overshield perched before a sheer drop into oblivion: an enticing gem for any player who thinks they can grab the power-up without getting repelled off the edge. This Pit 3.0 has been an instant hit. 343 was right to crank out a hefty number of original levels before falling back on Bungie's work. We already have a decade of maps from the original Halo smiths, and fans will inevitably imitate them in Forge. Still, with fourteen original stages already under 343's belt, I'm not going to say no to a little nostalgia.
With these three Forge arenas, 343 shows the startling power of their new map engine. Having played video games since I was a kid, not much shocks me anymore, but I can scarcely believe the options included in Infinite's Forge. You can switch the materials props are made of, sometimes on different parts of the same object. You can change properties of the assets like colour, roughness, or reflection index. You can attach magnets to items so that they snap to others on specific faces. You can name them and group them together to make them easier to manage and replicate, and share groups with other builders. You can set the angle of the sun and the primary and secondary colours it casts on planes, and choose the ambient sound for the map. You can view and edit the navigation data for the AI and see heatmaps and other analytics showing you where the engine is focusing its lighting calculations, allowing you to optimise your system memory usage.
One screen lets you construct node graphs: structures used in professional software development, to script original gametypes and missions. Already, crafters have used these trees to create auto-turrets, the bananas from Mario Kart, and the first loop from P.T. While there are plenty of "Forge has arrived" headlines out there, keep in mind, this is only a beta. For me, that's sometimes meant textures or even whole maps won't load. In its typical sluggishness, 343 forecasts that it won't have the feature finished until at least late June. I'll also warn you that this tool has a steep learning curve, but that's only because it is verging on real dev tools. Unfortunately, Forge is so stand-out because it's the first of Infinite's modes that isn't missing multiple core components. It's, at minimum, five months off completion, and it still feels like the most finished part of the experience.
It's also easier said than done to get those maps out of Forge to a test track. Chances are you can't gather seven friends in one of these community locations because your friends probably aren't playing Halo Infinite. So, we're reliant on the "Custom Games Browser". Scheduled for release in March, 343 busted their ass to get it out the door pre-Christmas. They figured it was better to have an unsound browser in the wild than no browser at all, which is correct, but there's still no mistaking that this was a premature release. Even more frequently than the Forge editor, it locks up during loading screens. Perhaps the worst Halo bug I've experienced is that when trying to enter matchmade games after playing a custom, I've had the program drop my avatar into the session idle, me unable to control them until I'm eventually kicked from inactivity. This has happened multiple times, but for what it's worth, I've been unable to replicate the glitch in the past week.
In both matchmade and custom games, we can, after an eternity, mute players without opening the Xbox overlay. About half of LIVE chatter is living room background noise, and harassment, including abuse targeting minorities, remains prevalent on the network. To leave basic "ignore" tools out of the game for a year was to leave players unsafe. It also takes too many button presses to mute someone, but 343 got it in ahead of schedule, and it is the rare system that works on release.
Shortly after 343 Industries' September update, Bonnie Ross made it known that she would be stepping down as the head of the studio due to a family illness. It's telling that her old job was split into three new jobs. Microsoft evidently believes that the developer has been suffering from a lack of managerial hands on deck. Whether changing that actually fixes Infinite is anyone's guess.
Infinite's Winter Update and the smaller expansions that wreathe it are tangible improvements to a service that had gone for months without any substantial development. But I still think the best compliment you can give to 343's recent patches is that they're "promising". That's a problem because, after all the delays and breakages and the Co-op cancellation, I don't think a promise from 343 is worth anything. In this article, I could have gone into more detail about the studio's roadmaps and schedules, but the reward for investing in those prophecies over the past thirteen months has been getting kicked in the teeth again and again. Even after five articles on the game, I haven't touched on every one of its failings because there's just so much wrong. Unless 343 finishes plugging the base features into Halo Infinite, an apparently insurmountable task, I won't believe they're capable of stewarding this game into the future. Thanks for reading.
Notes
- Credit for the Forge map Eternity goes to I am a Luxury.
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