And so concludes another bountiful weekend of Halo Infinite flight testing. Im writing this as more of an “open letter” of sorts to the dev team. Rather than bore you with a wall of text that I did when I typed my report last time, I’d rather compile it into a shorter, categorized list of some things I noticed playing this flight. As always, thank you to the Dev team for working hard to get this flight out, selecting me to participate, and taking this feedback to heart. The game overall plays amazing and is really fun, but not everything is perfect, especially in a test. I would like to address my few chief concerns with the game;
Performance Notes;
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The game looks and plays great on Xbox Series X. - However, again, the same cannot be said for PC. The game ran smoother than last flight, but again, more work is required on PC optimization. Not to toot my own horn, but my PC is more on the beefy end (Ryzen 7 5800X, 32GB RAM, RX 5700XT) and I was still only able to consistently stay above 60FPS on Medium settings. Possibly look into the minimum/maximum framerate setting as I found these to have odd and unexpected results on performance. - The Game was maxing out my GPU, causing Streamlabs to lag frames on my stream. - Some lighting/shader effects were broken; such as the ‘Lightish Red’ AI color appearing as orange. - The game’s master volume resets on every restart. - Aiming with Controller feels “clunky”, inconsistent, and overall strange. Several people on various platforms have discussed this, and I’m sure the team is looking into it. I found that setting my stick dead zone settings to zero helped a lot. - Aim Assist/Bullet Magnetism is not acting as it should. This ties into the previous statement. Controller needs some work on aim assist implementation as well as bullet magnetism. The game overall feels very difficult to play on a controller for this reason. I would hope the goal is for Aim Assist/Bullet Magnetism to function in line with previous Halo games. - “Infinite” Wet Floor Signs. Balancing Notes;
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Melee Trades are happening too frequently. This one is self-explanatory. - Reload Cancel/BXB. I’m sure the team is aware of this one. (EDIT: Maybe keep an option for this in custom games? A mode where it’s just this + Black Eye Skull would be actually really fun.) - Skill-Based Matchmaking. Pitchforks down, I know it wasn’t in the flight, but Infinite is gonna need it. Again, not to toot my own horn, but I like to think I’m pretty good at shooters from a casual standpoint. In the flight test, I was getting my -Yoink- absolutely rocked. Super sweaty lobbies. Especially in a game that’s going F2P, SBMM is going to be required at launch. - Starting Weapons are a little too good. This one has also been being thrown around quite a bit. Part of the necessity in players “scavenging” for new weapons is because their starting weapons aren’t great. In Infinite, I found myself able to go toe-to-toe with BRs/Commandos/Ravagers/etc and vice versa. I want to say that both the MA40 and MK50 Sidekick need to have range scaled way back and base damage slightly decreased. Other options would be to lower magazine size/ROF.Overall, the game is in a very playable state. but it needs just a bit more polishing up. I’m sure the final product is going to be amazing and worthy of justifying my purchase of a Series X. I would like to thank the dev team again for listening to this feedback, and for having me in the flight.
Heres to BTB next week!