Last week, Microsoft announced that Halo Infinite would be delayed until 2021, but there have been challenges with building the game that began long before this announcement. From E3 2019 onwards, I have heard rumors about the development process and when Phil Spencer validated my report 343 said inaccurately From July onwards it was time to put together the story of everything I had heard following that revelation.
343 jumped into a time machine after 2015, and began building the successor to Halo 5. Initially referred to as Halo 6, the company went after a remake of almost everything Halo. They built a new game engine called Slip Space and the team laid the foundation to build a launch title for the next-generation Xbox, the X Series.
Building a new game for a console that has not been announced is quite the challenge and is probably why launch titles are sometimes not missed in the Graphics department, as they are not very sure where the final specs will land. Sure, they have a rough idea, but it’s typically easier to scale up graphics than to cut back on quality if the new console is not up to the paper promise. Meaning, would you actually have less graphics at 90FPS than better quality graphics, but at 25FPS?
In addition, 343 built a new game engine, for an unannounced console, for a game that would ship at the same time as the new Xbox. If you’re trying to take the path of most resistance to launching a new game, this is the perfect route to take – and then throw your COVID-19 in for the cherry-on-top.
But the story of difficulties begins long before July of 2020 and as far as I am aware the difficulties began to surface for E3 2019.
One of the challenges of building Halo Infinite is that a significant portion of the game is outsourced to third-party contractors. This is not all that unusual, but the coordination between the many different companies that contributed to Infinite has been rough at best. One person familiar with the company’s plans indicated that they believed the out-sourcing for Infinite was a ratio higher than a typical studio undertakes during development, which caused significant headaches for cross-development collaboration.
If you go back and watch the E3 trailer of Halo Infinite in 2019, that game looks remarkably better than what was shown in July of 2020. How can a game significantly decrease in quality with an extra year of development time? It makes no sense and if you go back to the 2018 announcement of the title and demo of what the Slip Space engine is capable of doing, the event in July looks even worse.
It is my understanding that the 2019 trailer was re-released and at that time the game was not in a state that was playable at that level of fidelity. Even the trailer says “Game Engine Footage” – this is an afterthought, because we do not know if this is an attempt to show what gameplay would look like (currently not plausible based on what we saw) or what cut-scenes would look like what the more plausible explanation is, but this far too much-sold expectation for Infinite’s later demos.
Several people familiar with the development efforts behind 343 have described the collaborative effort behind the development as challenging and key agreements internally have been revealed with Tim Longo, creative director for Halo Infinite, leaving the company in August 2019.
Appointed for the role of Tim after he left was Mary Olsen, who left the company in October of that year. At the moment, 343 said “There is no creative dilemma in the studio”, but there was clear unrest within the walls about the game’s development outcome.
One of the big questions that began to manifest in late 2019 was how 343 could change the way forward for Halo Infinite so that they could meet the exact deadline of holiday 2020. Phil Spencer has confirmed that splitting the campaign and multiplayer was a serious consideration, but this was not a recent discussion, as many had assumed, as this option was considered in early 2020 or possibly late 2019.
The final decision to send the game as a full title as separate parts might have been recent, but the idea of sending two separate pieces has been around for about a year or so.
One insider states that the production of the Halo TV series for ShowTime has been a major distraction for 343 management. Often times who take their priority instead of focusing on making sure that progress of development is on the right track to reach its goal line.
One of the other disconnections I heard about recently is that engineering and marketing have been on two different planets. Engineering asked to hold back delays and material, but marketing has moved forward.
An example of this happened a few weeks ago with the Halo team announce that multiplayer would be free and run at 120FPS. Why would the marketing team express this and generate another wave of pre-release excitement for the game when management knew the game would likely be delayed? Marketing won the argument and those on the technical side sat on the sidelines as marketing pushed more Halo news through the door, with the reality that the game is unlikely to be shipped soon.
If you look at all the problems that 343 have to deal with, including a new engine, major outsourced development, turnover in key positions, trailers regressing in quality and then COIVD-19 jumping above, then that’s not all so surprising that things have not gone as smoothly as many had hoped. The question is how will 343 correct the course so that they can actually send a game that meets the promises made?
But the biggest challenge of all can be internal. Microsoft has invested hundreds of millions of dollars in Halo Infinite, with the end goal being a title that would increase Xbox Series X upon launch, but we all know this will not happen again.
Tagged with Halo, Infinite, Microsoft, Xbox
