Halo Infinite Dev Reveals The 'Huge Pressure' Of Delaying The Game In 2020

343 Industries head of creative Joseph Staten has been conducting a few interviews over the past week following the launch of Halo Infinite's multiplayer, and he's spoken a bit more about the decision to delay the game in 2020.

As you may well recall, Halo Infinite was originally intended to release alongside the Xbox Series X and S in November 2020, but ended up being pushed all the way back to December 8th, 2021. In an interview with IGN, Staten explained that there had been "huge pressure" to stick to that original release date:

"[There was] a huge amount of pressure to stay the course. I think a really wonderful example of Xbox leadership doing the right thing for our fans, doing the right thing [...] for players, even though it hurt them, even though there were costs associated with that. It was 100% a player-first decision, and I'm so proud of the studio and Xbox for making that decision."

In a separate interview with Eurogamer last week, Staten advised that the extra time allowed the team to hone in on "elements where more work could be done to make them even more impactful", such as improving the way Marines pathfind in the game ("a ton of work"), spending more time on boss fights and much, much more.

"There are many other examples I could provide, not the least of which being to make sure the game ran great on whatever platform you have. We just committed ourselves to a set of principles, and then a good handful of these epic tasks, and then went after them for campaign and multiplayer."

It seems to have all worked out for the best, and now we're just a few short weeks away from the official release of Halo Infinite's campaign mode, while the multiplayer launched in Beta back on November 15th. When you look at how the likes of Cyberpunk 2077 launched last year, the delay looks like it was a very, very wise decision.

What are your thoughts on the decision to delay Halo Infinite by a year? Let us know down below.

[source ign.com, via eurogamer.net]