I’m gonna be honest, I am extremely disappointed with today’s new Halo Infinite trailer. For the past 5 whole -REDACTED- years, we’ve been waiting for some sort of grand reawakening of the Halo franchise. Just about everyone here will agree with me when I say that H5G’s campaign was about as interesting as a bar of soap. All the way back in 2018, when we saw the first glimpse of Infinite, I was overjoyed at the prospect of setting foot on a Halo Ring for the first time in over a decade. 2 years later, with next to nothing in the way of marketing, I think it was fair of me to have high expectations for this trailer. After all, despite the current global pandemic, the game had been in development for multiple years. What little tidbits of news that we all so rabidly consumed were quite promising, too. So, here’s my dissection of the Halo Infinite Gameplay Trailer:
[SPOILER WARNING! Please watch the trailer first before reading!]
As the trailer opens, following that (really cool) armory scene, we are introduced once again to our best buddy Brohammer and the Chief. The whole AA scene and landing were pretty decent, and I brushed off my initial graphical concerns as being mere nitpicks. After all, what’s one oddly textured explosion against a franchise that’s older than half of our player base? Wasn’t a big fan of the way that Brohammer was talking to the literal savior of humanity following the crash either, but I’ll let that one slide.
Once the gameplay began, I was ecstatic! Well, for about three seconds until I saw that Minecraftian abomination of a cliff-side. There is just something about the
darkness of the ring above and the look of the unfinished (I know, demo’s outdated, but this is literally the reveal of a flagship title we’re talking about here!) landscape that already had me on high alert. The scene with the grunts was meh, and I was trying to stay positive. That was, until we saw Chief doing his little truffle-shuffle to the warthog. What the heck is up with that? “Yeah, let’s piss off all of the people who hate sprint by keeping it in the game while simultaneously cutting its usefulness in half.” Couple this with the fact that everything in the game looks like a MegaConstrux kit, and I had gone from neutral optimistic to unhappy.
Skipping forward through a relatively unremarkable battle with cartoonish enemies, some moderately interesting new guns, and the grapple ability, we end up with that lovely little chat. When I saw that brute go from hologram to real, I nearly laughed out loud. Does 343 really think that this Gothmog lookin’ turkey necked -Yoink–ape is in league to be a “legend” up there with the Master Chief? No, I’m sorry. This is not acceptable, and I think that we as a community have a direct responsibility to come together against this type of behavior. By backpedaling on twitter and explaining that “it’s an old demo,” we get to see that 343 ain’t exactly been batting 1000 behind the scenes. Seriously, the cutscenes from Halo 2 Anniversary look infinitely better! Yes, pun intended.
So what can 343 do to fix this? For one, we need a multiplayer beta yesterday. Campaign aside, Halo 5 had some decent multiplayer mechanics and I’m actually somewhat interested to see how the grappling hook will work in MP. I would also appreciate it if the upcoming trailers over the next few months would operate using the best and most up-to-date rendition of the game. As long as 343 maintains solid communication with our community, I think the game will be fine.
Does anyone have any other ideas? Thoughts? Opinions? I’m very interested in hearing other peoples’ perspectives on this trailer.