Halo 343 Delay

It's no secret that, by launch, Halo Infinite's development became somewhat troubled. The year-long delay from late 2020 to the following year proved as much, along with the slow rollout of post-launch content since. Even with that in mind, it seems like 343 had to perform quite a few nips and tucks to get the game out the door.

Some major concessions were made to the scale of the open world, at least from the initial design docs. 343's Joseph Staten recently appeared on a podcast to discuss Halo Infinite's development, with Staten saying that the game's open world was quite different by the time the game released.

"We didn’t end up cutting that much ultimately from the open world, but I know from the original designs there was a pretty significant scaling back of what the team had hoped at one point that they could deliver on... We knew that we needed to truly deliver a quality experience [and] scope our ambitions to make sure that the stuff that we did ship met expectations."

"Halo’s always been a relatively open game in terms of its geometry, for a shooter, but we weren't layering on a whole bunch of systems. We talked a lot about crafting, for example, and my infamous line to the team was something like 'Master Chief doesn't need to kill animals to make leather shirts for himself. He's a massive armored super soldier. If he wants something, he goes and kills it, grabs its gun, and then keeps on going'."

In the end, Halo Infinite's map was a pretty big step towards being truly 'open world', but its scale, and the systems within, are relatively basic compared to other contemporary open worlds. Whether that is a positive or a negative, ultimately, is up to the player.

What will be tested out soon within Infinite's open world is co-op campaign. The feature has been missing since launch, with 343 hosting multiple flights recently to make sure the mode is good to go for its full release later this year.

What did you make of Infinite's open world? Let us know in the comments below!

[source techradar.com]