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Everybody is missing the main problem in Halo Infinite

hey, Nintendo and Sony old timers

looks like Microsoft fans are also beginning to get cranky over their old classics getting casual for current soy audiences.

let's welcome them

images
 

tryDEATH

Member
We only saw exploration, not a second of an actual campaign mission, which will likely be similar to the OG Halo campaigns. People really need to calm down with the outrage.
 

Zoro7

Banned
What were you hoping for gameplay wise? Faster paced or slower? More crouch, hide, shoot like GoW?
We aren’t game designers. But that felt like a empty shell of a level. Your bog standard point shoot, move a bit, shoot, move a bit more, shoot. They should have shown a mission with some level of interaction other than shooting.
Its like, this is the best they had? Really? The games going to release in 4 months.
 
D

Deleted member 775630

Unconfirmed Member
We aren’t game designers. But that felt like a empty shell of a level. Your bog standard point shoot, move a bit, shoot, move a bit more, shoot. They should have shown a mission with some level of interaction other than shooting.
Its like, this is the best they had? Really? The games going to release in 4 months.
I agree. I mean I know how the game will play, I've played all Halo's, I've got a decent understanding on how this will go, but I get that if you've never seen Halo or don't know how this game actually plays, this was a shitty gameplay showing.
 

The Alien

Banned
Yeah, this is a good observation. Think of the most epic moments in Halo 3 or Reach, and they absolutely shit on what we saw here. How is that even possible?
The Halo Infinite gameplay shown was likely from an early chapter in the new game.

You're comparing it to "epic moments" from 2 of the better games in the series?.

OK.
 

Drewpee

Banned
You saw 5min, probably 0.1% of the whole map. I don't think every mission is just random opponents scattered over the map

I think his point is they didnt do a good enough job of showing what the gameplay will really be like and what they did show was lacking.

As a huge Halo fan I'd have to say I agree. I enjoyed the demo for what it was but they could have done a better job. I am not buying into the manufactured hate all over gaf but I think it is definitely fair to say they could have given us more agree such a long wait and it does make me wonder if there have been issues with development.
 

Andodalf

Banned
I think his point is they didnt do a good enough job of showing what the gameplay will really be like and what they did show was lacking.

As a huge Halo fan I'd have to say I agree. I enjoyed the demo for what it was but they could have done a better job. I am not buying into the manufactured hate all over gaf but I think it is definitely fair to say they could have given us more agree such a long wait and it does make me wonder if there have been issues with development.

I think it’s crazy to have expected more gameplay, we’ve seen more of Halo than every other 1st party next gen game combined. Clearly nobody wants to show off their next gen gameplay yet. In terms of dev, it’s no secret that they changed course a lot after Halo 5 and took some extra time.
 

the_master

Member
I think it is another example of that cross gen thing holding the game back.
Or maybe 343 is just not competent enough to create something good.
The machine’s specs don’t justify what we be seen
Even if held back, they could have done something like Halo 3. As someone said, one of its battles against a scarab, coop with the mongooses. Maybe like Halo 1 when you land on the silent cartographer, maybe like Halo 2 when he arrives at the city... Held back could mean graphics, detail, scale, physics and number of npcs, but never worse than current or older gens did in terms of what is happenign in the level.
 

Freeman

Banned
The problem with this game is pretty evident, MS needs it for the Xbox launch and it just isn't ready (Covid probably didn't help in that regard).

They'll pull a Sea of Thieves/MCC with it, releasing it as is and try to fix it along the way.
 
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the_master

Member
Nobody missed the main problem, that's just your excuse for another thread.

We are bashing that piece of shit left and right.
I got the impression of everyone was focusing on the visuals, that is also the first thing I noticed. But I can ignore the visuals. Been replaying the MCC, all Halo Games in both clasic and remaster modes, and I am fine with the visuals no matter which ones. Just love the games themselves (till 4, that is, that one is boring and frustrating)
 

the_master

Member
The Halo Infinite gameplay shown was likely from an early chapter in the new game.

You're comparing it to "epic moments" from 2 of the better games in the series?.

OK.
Comparing it to the REVEALS of Halo 1 and 2 for example. And comparing it to the best moments of Halo 3, a 2 generations behind game.
 
I love me some Halo and I understand the build they used is probably meant for E3 and several months old, but I’m still underwhelmed. There was nothing shown that screamed (or even whimpered) next gen Halo. The gameplay does look great and I have no doubt they chose that small sliver of the game to show us they want to take the game back to its roots. The bar was set super high with the 2018 E3 demo and this wasn’t even close. Hell, I was more impressed by the BF5 ad I saw when I watched the trailer again this morning.
 

cormack12

Gold Member
Trust me Im so done with halo and I’m so dissapointed by the reveal but the actual gameplay looked great. The grappling hook is the perfect addition for the sandbox style gameplay, giving you the ability to change positions, hook into enemies, grab items to throw and blow up looked so fun.

....but the graphical quality and the addition of sprint still has me extremely cynical and jaded

The more I watch the gameplay the more I like it, it's growing up on me, it's IMO the strongest part of the presentation so far, at least the gunplay part

This was my impression as well. I am enjoying the memes but let's be honest it's not going to look like that in motion or be that freeze frame-esque. The gunplay was smooth af. The needler and plasma rifle too, pretty good. I dunno if people haven't played the original games, but I distinctly remember them as quite open on the planet with little clusters of enemies on platforms and underneath etc. Spaceships and that were different for obvious reasons. for what it's worth we've moved to little clusters of enemies and checkpoints rather than hordes. I think I saw more variety of enemies than we had for 18 months in Destiny 2 as well. the vehicle stuff looked like it controlled well. To me, it looked like the very first part of the game without the tutorial tooltips.

I think people will get a good Halo game, but not necessarily a next gen Halo game.
 

iNvid02

Member
the price of being cross gen. Both console launch lineups look pathetic, but at least the xbox stuff can be had for free with gamepass. Will comfortably wait until 2021-2022 for one of these boxes
 

hemo memo

Gold Member
the price of being cross gen. Both console launch lineups look pathetic, but at least the xbox stuff can be had for free with gamepass. Will comfortably wait until 2021-2022 for one of these boxes

Gamepass is not free. If you want to be technical, you are renting the game.
 
I watched the show with a friend who is a big fan of the Halo Franchise and he went from: "okay, now I am really hyped up" to "really?".
The combat looked static and that is a shame. There was no real interaction on the battlefield, no tactics visible, no real feel to being within an epic war. Basically, enemy A run in front from Catacomb A and started shooting and Masterchief started shooting or grappling, but if you look the overall feel of the battlefield, everyone is just standing there with no movement whatsoever and is shooting and nothing is happening, no explosions are really impacting the environment, I didn't see any volumetric effects, particles? Not really a lot of them.... Everything was happening without a lot of interaction. The effects looked very underwhelming for a 12.1 TF opportunity and to be honest and yeah, the grappling hook? Seen that, done that....No news here to be honest and especially I find it very hard to believe as such that this hundreds of kilogram Veteran, Masterchief, is actually flying around with a grappling hook...I don't know....it just seems ODD.

If that was the true vision of how Halo Infinite should PLAY than it was even more underwhelming than its graphical shortcomings.
It is really a very tough moment to be in the shoes of 343 as I do believe they love their product and they really are happy and confident about their outcome.

I hope that they can work on the game and maybe RT also changes dynamics a little bit.
However, I don't know if that is even possible in the remaining time frame.
But but they will patch RT in the game after release trough a download....thats the new damagecontrole meme😉
 

Drewpee

Banned
I think it’s crazy to have expected more gameplay, we’ve seen more of Halo than every other 1st party next gen game combined. Clearly nobody wants to show off their next gen gameplay yet. In terms of dev, it’s no secret that they changed course a lot after Halo 5 and took some extra time.

Changing course is great and I was excited to see the new direction they are taking the franchise. The problem is we didnt really see those changes, outside of the grappling hook (which I think will be a great addition).

I think you make a great point about both companies not wanting to show off Nextgen gameplay but they need to get over it now so we have an idea of what to expect when we buy our new consoles.

The show yesterday didnt change my hype for XsX in the slightest and only those who are easily swayed by the mob mentality will have their minds changed by what they saw. Halo Infinite looks fantastic, I just wanted to get a better idea of all the changes they made.

Also, not having Raytracing as part of your flagship franchise after touting Raytracing as a game changer makes absolutely no sense and gives weight to the idea that the Xbox One will hold new games back.
 

iorek21

Member
343 keeps dropping the ball at every opportunity they get, but some people really thought that they’d magically make a GOAT game after all this time.

Fool me once...
 

ruvikx

Banned
Trust me Im so done with halo and I’m so dissapointed by the reveal but the actual gameplay looked great. The grappling hook is the perfect addition for the sandbox style gameplay, giving you the ability to change positions, hook into enemies, grab items to throw and blow up looked so fun.

The clip where chief grabbed a fusion cell, threw it, hijackdd the turret, turned it around and started shooting just looked so halo. The open world now that I’ve seen it also looks like a natural upgrade to the sandbox. I need to see more but so far the gun play and world looked amazing.

I disagree. Halo always had a serious tactical element which made it better than most shooters out there at the time. Choosing weapons, where to go on the map, where to shoot from & which enemies to engage first was the meat & bones of the gameplay (certainly on heroic or legendary). The enemies also behaved tactically as well. The grappling hook meanwhile is like an overpowered jet pack, i.e. the new verticality & speed will simply create totally chaotic combat encounters. I've seen this again again & again with shooters over the years (whether first or third person), i.e. new gadgets which are supposed to make a game look cool in youtube clips are an actual detriment to the game when I'm sitting with the controller in my own hand.

So I don't trust it to be implemented well here at all. Just imagine Halo Reach with a grappling hook... yeah, game broken.
 
The problem with this game is pretty evident, MS needs it for the Xbox launch and it just isn't ready (Covid probably didn't help in that regard).

They'll pull a Sea of Thieves/MCC with it, releasing it as is and try to fix it along the way.
O come on..the Covid excuse..why did PS5 developers did not have that problem?? Excuses excuses just like Phil did and is doing after the first and this showchase.
 
I can't wait for the Digital Foundry deep dive on Infinite, then the layman like myself will actually see if it is next gen acceptable. Because if it isn't why would you buy a next gen xbox console on a their biggest most famous exclusive??
 

Freeman

Banned
O come on..the Covid excuse..why did PS5 developers did not have that problem?? Excuses excuses just like Phil did and is doing after the first and this showchase.
I just said it didn't help. I think Sony was much more prepared and I also have no faith in 343i and the game was apparently in development hell. You need a perfect storm for a game to have such a bad showing.
 
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Andodalf

Banned
I can't wait for the Digital Foundry deep dive on Infinite, then the layman like myself will actually see if it is next gen acceptable. Because if it isn't why would you buy a next gen xbox console on a their biggest most famous exclusive??

The current gen version will be at lower res, lower detail models, lower texture res, drop LOD and frequency of detail in terms of small items/ clutter, have very low resolution shadow maps, probably have many things fade out at very close range ala halo 5, probably bring back half rate animations again like halo 5. Miss new features such as tessellation. Probably a different lighting system. And have much worse loading times/ pop in.

In many ways Halo 5 had to be cut back to run well on XO. Infinite on SX removes those cuts, adds some new tech and super high quality models/ textures on top. The current gen version will just dial all this things back again. And, IMO, I think it’ll move Campaign back to 30, which would really suck.
 

dorkimoe

Gold Member
It was "open world" i am actually more excited for it than I was before the showcase. It has that gears 5 type of open environment which I really enjoyed.
 

MarkMe2525

Member
Looked like the first mission on the halo ring to me. It was supposed to feel like halo 1 when you first got on the ring. Big battles come later.
 

Andodalf

Banned
Looked like the first mission on the halo ring to me. It was supposed to feel like halo 1 when you first got on the ring. Big battles come later.

Yep, if this is their “Halo”, Im very excited to see their “Silent Cartographer”.

And I wouldn’t mind some “Tip of the Spear” either...
 
You saw 5min, probably 0.1% of the whole map. I don't think every mission is just random opponents scattered over the map
It's open world, most encpunters in these games are randomized to some degree (this is why I have not played open world games for years)... They even showed the map with quest markers of all things, this is so very boring, almost as if they hired Ubisoft to make their game.
 

LordOfChaos

Member
The gameplay.
Completely unepic, small scale combat.

The Mc is walking arround killing randomly scattered groups of enemies, gets onto a warthog for a short ride to kill some more randomly scattered enemies. Goes up an elevatror ro kill another brute...
The main problem is the discount Thanos....


Well I'm hoping/guessing the Banished are just a smaller scale enemy in the way before we conclude the Created plotline from Infinite...It has to be, right? Because three games in a row that hop to new main enemies after fan reactions would be just as bad as the Star Wars sequel trilogy in lack of a cohesive vision, it was bad enough jumping from the Forerunner arc to this weird Created sidequest, but now we should wrap that up.
 
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Rickyiez

Member
The good: it's still Halo.
The bad: it's too much Halo.

It's like playing again and again the same game, despite the open world, despite the hook.

No, the problem is its not enough Halo. Only peak Bungie can reproduce peak Halo. I don't know why you guys are expecting so much from 343i
 

wolffy71

Banned
Idk halo is such an old franchise. How do you even make it look "new" and still halo? The graphics were unimpressive for sure but it looked like halo. Maybe thats the problem.
 

LordOfChaos

Member
Idk halo is such an old franchise. How do you even make it look "new" and still halo? The graphics were unimpressive for sure but it looked like halo. Maybe thats the problem.

There have been enough comparisons to Reach and 4 to not retread on that, but the issue is definitely not trying to look like legacy Halo, it's that things seem almost untextured and flat, plus the world is still and lifeless, even in comparison to 7th and 8th gen games. It has better filtering quality than anything on those for sure, but nothing about it really says 12Tflops of eating monsters for breakfast and all their Velocity engine stuff, especially with the pop in.

The last part may have been due to running on a PC and not actually using the velocity engine, but that begs the question...Why, this late, would a demo not be running on SeX?
 

sn0man

Member
Split screen is back so atleast that's an improvement over 5

that’s the thing they should show off next time. Open world 4K60 split screen. For folks that love console halo the local experience was part of the fun.
 

Life

Member
It's a non-competitive action FPS. This genre has been the same for 20+ years and has stagnated severely in terms of innovation and quality.

I thought the battle clip we saw was satisfying and upbeat- and it's as good as it gets with an FPS. Simple as that.

It's not a survival game, or a horror game - it's just Halo and it's difficult to make it appealing to audiences that have played the same thing for 20+ years.
 

Moochi

Member
The biggest problem was not that it was open world halo--that seems like it could be pretty cool--the biggest problem is that the first object was exact same thing in different locations. Immediately, it went from the sense of wonder and unknown of exploring this alien ring which Halo 1 captured so well, and gave the player a clear and rote objective. When you show the gameplay loop so obviously people aren't going to keep that sense of wonder. They're not going to care about exploration, they're going to go from objective to objective as fast as possibly because it sends the message that there's nothing interesting in the world between objectives. This is something that Breath of the Wild did really well--obfuscating the gameplay loop a little bit by not showing the player explicitly where the shrines were and filling the world with location specific quests that weren't telegraphed. Halo Infinite looks like it's gone the Ubisoft route, and that sucks because a sense of wonder is what made Halo 1 so special to me.
 

Varteras

Gold Member
While I personally feel like what we saw deserves criticism, it's really tiring seeing 13 threads basically designed to shit on the same thing we've been talking about at length elsewhere.
 

EverydayBeast

thinks Halo Infinite is a new graphical benchmark
Halo Infinite gameplay trailers gives Microsoft fans something to be excited for, gamers know nobody is beating Call of Duty in terms of sales but Halo remains the FPS king, I see a lot of safe decisions in the trailer, the hookshot didn't change the whole dynamic of gaming and that's a good thing and after the misleading Halo MCC collection it's nice to be on track with Halo Infinite, official next generation Halo. The world thought Master Chief was dead when Bungie abandoned him and 343 is making Halo more important than ever and it'll be a must have game in everyone's catalog.
 
Halo Infinite gameplay trailers gives Microsoft fans something to be excited for, gamers know nobody is beating Call of Duty in terms of sales but Halo remains the FPS king, I see a lot of safe decisions in the trailer, the hookshot didn't change the whole dynamic of gaming and that's a good thing and after the misleading Halo MCC collection it's nice to be on track with Halo Infinite, official next generation Halo. The world thought Master Chief was dead when Bungie abandoned him and 343 is making Halo more important than ever and it'll be a must have game in everyone's catalog.

fetchimage
 

iconmaster

Banned
The good: it's still Halo.
The bad: it's too much Halo.

It's like playing again and again the same game, despite the open world, despite the hook.

It feels like the design brief was "remake an original Bungie Halo in 4K." And if you look at it that way, they seem to be nailing it.

I'm not sure many people actually want that in 2020 though.
 

IDKFA

I am Become Bilbo Baggins
I wasn't expecting this to be a true showcase of the raw power of XSX. The game needs to be able to run on seven year old hardware. There has to be a compromise.
 
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