Halo 5 Won't Be Enhanced, But Will Perform Better On Xbox Series X

So I assume it will stick to 60fps and now the dynamic resolution is always stays at 4K (essentially not dynamic and just always 4K now). It is a good looking game anyway but I always found Gears 4 and 5 to be far better looking games.

Did I read somewhere Series X enforces 16x anisotropic filtering on back compat similar to how One X did on unpatched games?

That’s cool, let 343 get on with making Halo Infinite using all resources the game it should and needs to be and stop messing around with MCC and other things.

They really treat Halo 5 negatively. Campaign was epic in scale but ultimately didn't really fit well into the franchise imo. Didn't find the gameplay very innovative and it felt clunky throughout.

I’ll be playing this since I missed out not having an Xbox one. As long as it runs smooth and looks decent I’ll be happy.

Heard mixed things about halo 5 so it’ll be interesting giving it a play through.

@FraserG good, that alone should have a great effect even on games that were already 4K like this one

The fact that 343i saw cause to update MCC and not Halo 5 is telling to how poorly Halo 5 was recieved.

@Dezzy70 Extra manpower won't get Infinite out quicker or even of higher quality (more manpower is likely to decrease the quality). They've had 5 years of an 10 year old company, fully funded by the biggest company in gaming, and they still missed the deadline. They needed better managing.

I'll just wait for the inevitable PC port, will be better anyway.

@AJDarkstar Series X will not play it better than PC.

@Richnj Much as I love MCC, I'm convinced MCC is the reason Infinite is incomplete and late. They've spent such ridiculous amount of times adding onto that. Granted, I'm sure they did it largely as R&D for Infinite to figure out "how do we actually make Bungie style gameplay and systems?"

Or they just play Destiny all day every day...

@NEStalgia Well they had said that the MCC team was different from the one working on Halo Infinite. And besides, they weren't working on MCC from 2015-2018. That right there should have been 3 years uninterrupted work.

No, I'm convinced that Halo 5 is the cause, hear me out. We should have had Halo 6, the third game in the previously announced Forerunner trilogy, released a couple years a go at this point. Instead, we have Halo Infinite. A game that is trying to revive the Halo CE/3 eras, bringing back older style locations, artstyle, dropping Locke etc. It's a pretty big shift in tone and focus for a game that was meant to continue Halo 5.

So around 2018 we seemingly get a new direction for the mainline titles, and a commitment to fixing the collection of classic games. I think that in late 2017/early 2018, they looked at Halo 5 and just saw failure. It failed to meet sales expectations and what appeared to be a tiny population for a Halo game, probably too small to justify the 'free' updates. So they reboot development. Scrapping Halo 6, and instead announcing Infinite and eventually, the MCC updates. That would leave Infinite with just 2 years dev time. More than explaining the rough state of the game.

To me, this theory explains everything. The shift in direction, the commitment to MCC, their lack of interest in updating Halo 5 for xbox series, and the extremely rough state of Infinite despite it being 5 years since their last game.

@Richnj
I totally agree and earlier this year I posted that someone maybe Phil needs to micro manage 343 and at the same time observe to see what went wrong at what levels of the studio and Halo development.

@Richnj That does make a lot of sense, actually. I forgot there even was a Halo 6 on the itinerary.

4 & 5 are just....odd. "Halo" is the CE-3 era. Reach was ok doing the prequel thing. But trying to take Halo into an "expanded universe" direction outside the gameplay and aesthetic that made it what it is was always a dodgy idea. I see why they needed to try it, but Halo that's not Halo just isn't Halo..... It has a specific design, and even if a lot of that design was a result of hardware limitations and time/budget limitations (a lot of the direction of the fiction in terms of Flood, etc was actually due to lack of time for the first game. And the sparse, barren planets were largely due to the need to keep the Flood plot twist a surprise. Originally CE had a populated planetoid with dinosaur things everywhere.)

I still don't buy that MCC was a separate team though. If Infinite is set to reboot the series back to the old loop, they really needed hands-on time with the old games to get that design down.

@NEStalgia I love Reach and ODST for what they are. But what they are is spin-offs. That allows them to be more experimental. Those games can exist without doing major damage to the franchise or main line titles. I think as long as you don't start incorporating everything from those games in to the main games then it's fine. 343 only needed to take what worked, but they took Reach and went even further.

I mean, it's not like we saw huge aspects of Halo Wars put in to the main games. That is until they introduced the Banished. And I know there's the obvious genre differences, but the fact that the Banished are now in the main games shows how testing new idea in spin offs, then having it show up in main games can work.

Reach obviously suffered more decline than Halo 3, but I think the evidence for how it didn't hurt the franchise in a large scale way is in the sales and initial population for Halo 4, which did rival that of 3 and Reach. Until people actually played the game and then they just left en masse. And with Halo 5 struggling there after.

I've said before that 343i's first game should have been ODST 2. Things like ADS, sprint, equipment etc, all could fit the ODST aesthetic. And being a spin off, would have allowed these, and flinch, and ordnance drops etc, most things in Halo 4 in fact. All the while letting people know that the gameplay would be different from Halo 3, and not sullying the main line titles.

Would have gave them more time to prototype a proper Halo 4 as well. But saying that, I've heard that Bungie left 343i a working Halo 4 prototype and they ditched in favour of what the Halo 4 we got instead. So it's not surprising Halo 4 and 5 feel so odd when they've been so poorly planned.

@Richnj

I completely agree with what you said.

Halo 5 is, by far (in my opinion), the worst Halo game as far as campaign goes. And everything you said makes a lot of sense if they just want to forget Halo 5 ever happened.

And I think that is the case here, as Halo 5 is getting zero XSX/S love.

@NEStalgia

I loved Halo 4’s campaign. And that ending..... 😢

But Halo 5 can go ?!$& off. Lol.