HALO INFINITE 2: NEXT-GEN CAMPAIGN NOW IN PLANNING

Games Halo Infinite
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Across many posts on this forum, some players have wanted a next-gen-only campaign for Halo Infinite rather than cross-gen, whilst others have wondered about what follows after Infinite launches, and whether at some point future content will become next-gen-only. We may now have something of an answer.

First, note 343i’s past language in job posts: prior to Halo Infinite being announced, they referred to it in new job-posts as “the next Halo shooter” or “next Halo campaign”, but after the game was publicly announced, they usually stated any new job was “to work on Halo Infinite”. Now, as Halo Infinite is in the final “polishing” phases for launch in Fall 2021, a new 343i job post seeking a “Gameplay Designer II - Halo” has revealed a bunch of interesting details and phrases. Extracted details from job post:

“343 is looking for a passionate Gameplay Designer that can contribute and implement exciting gameplay moments into a next-gen Halo Shooter. // You will work directly with the Campaign and Design Leads to ensure both gameplay and level design goals are met. // This is an amazing opportunity to work closely with a passionate team of game developers and help create the next exciting Halo campaign.”

CONCLUSIONS.

  • despite the “10 year plan” for the overarching storyline and Slipspace Engine, it doesn’t mention “to work on Halo Infinite”, which is “cross-gen” and not “next-gen”, and the design of which is presumably finished as they’ve moved onto the “polishing” phases prior to launch later this year.

  • so this must be a whole new Campaign which sounds like it will be a true next-gen only title for Series S/X, and it’s already in the planning stages as “Halo Infinite Campaign 2”.

  • after Phil Spencer said “From MCC, 343i have learned the value of having a collection”, this job post also suggests “Halo Infinite as a platform” does indeed mean “Halo: Master Chief Collection TWO”; so if the 2021 launch campaign is Infinite’s “Halo:CE”, this new next-gen Campaign must be it’s “Halo 2”.

  • XBox policy says “no player left behind”, so as a first-party XBox Game Studios developer, 343i can’t release a next-gen only game until after 2022 (which is why Infinite had to be cross-gen). So assuming this game has the more usual 3 year Dev cycle from planning stages (now), maybe we should call it “Halo Infinite Campaign 2 (2023/4)” for discussion purposes.

SUMMARY.

So there we have it: as part of the “10 year plan” for the over-arching storyline across a series of Campaign stories told on Slipspace Engine, it seems “Halo Infinite as a platform” is most like “Halo: MCC 2”, and sometime in 2023 or after we’ll get a whole new “Halo Infinite Campaign 2”, which is also when the “Halo Infinite Platform” will jump to next-gen-only.

If this is all correct, what do you think about this - and does it make some stuff clearer about where 343i might be heading with Halo Infinite, at least until they confirm these ideas? Does it also suggest a new next-gen-only Halo infinite Multiplayer will also launch with that campaign? Does it also end the idea that “Halo Infinite will be ‘held back’ by XBox One tech until 2030” if the next installment is next-gen-only?

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343 has said over and over that halo infinite is a platform not a simple game. I dont think its ever been a secret that it is MCC 2.

The benefit this time is that its all unified under one slipspace engine rather than being UE4 trying to duct tape together a bunch of different BLAM engines.

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> 2533274831074612;2:
> 343 has said over and over that halo infinite is a platform not a simple game. I dont think its ever been a secret that it is MCC 2.

Yes, like me, you and others obviously guessed that, but a lot of people on this forum seemed to wrongly think Halo Infinite’s “10 year plan” meant rolling DLC for one campaign and rolling multiplayer for 10 years, and always including the original XBox One in it’s design - that’s why they’ve also claimed “XBox One will hold back the game design, as it will be 17 years old by 2030!” That’s why I thought it was important to show those ideas are actually wrong, and that’s not 343i’s plans.

> 2533274831074612;2:
> The benefit this time is that its all unified under one slipspace engine rather than being UE4 trying to duct tape together a bunch of different BLAM engines.

Similar goes for Slipspace Engine as you note. Alas, some people listened to fake “insiders” on GlassDoor as reported on certain YouTube channels, and got information wildly wrong. People didn’t notice that being posted three days after we saw the July 2020 Halo Infinite Gameplay Trailer, false claims about “spaghetti coding”, “duct tape”, using UE4 and multiple versions of the BLAM! Engine led some to wrongly assume they had something to do with Halo Infinite, and then falsely attributing the Gameplay Demo’s graphics to those problems. Of course, they failed to note the person originally claiming those things also claimed “343i have no toilets on the premises, so you have to go next door to go to the toilet!” Ha! It’s a fact that 343i’s studio has had toilets on premises throughout the making of Halo Infinite - in fact, three toilets on each floor - men’s, women’s and non-gendered for transgender and non-binary people! Meanwhile, “multiple versions of BLAM! Engine and UE4” were only used to make Master Chief Collection for XBox and PC, and yes those BLAM! Engines were “spaghetti coding”, and to fit the short deadline, yes they were “duct taped together” to make MCC - but that has nothing to do with Halo 5 or Halo Infinite.

History: after converting Halo 4 Engine to XBox format for MCC, that was the one they tore down to make Halo 5 Engine as the first “true” XBox One Halo Engine. But whilst they stripped out most of the problematic BLAM! Engine code, they didn’t go far enough with modernising the Engine, or the back-end in the studio, or the UI issues that were still slowing things down. So Slipspace is their first true “Modern Game Engine”, and their second “true” XBox One Halo Engine, designed to “unlock the as-yet-still-untapped power of XBox One”* for Halo Infinite (Chris Lee).

In fact, some problems for the Gameplay Demo were some artwork wasn’t finished in time (Craig’s head, trees etc), but ironically, what we were actually watching was also an early build of next-gen “Slipspace Engine 2.0” to tap into the next-gen tech in Series S/X hardware properly - alas, there’s bugs in some systems still (e.g. VRS, SFS), so the graphics quality problems were due to deliberately switching settings down to low quality to hold 4K/60fps and prevent glitches in the demo. That means some stuff, such as the grass, probably looks better on Slipspace 1.0 running on original XBox One than it looked in the Gameplay Demo, as if 343i were saying “You get the idea. But yeah, we’ll get the hang of this new-fangled next-gen tech in time for launch, promise!”. :smiley:

* e.g. replacing most of the CPU-driven rendering with GPU-driven rendering to free up CPU cores for improved AI and Physics (not least for “destructible fruit”!).

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> 2535466834539387;3:
> > 2533274831074612;2:
> > 343 has said over and over that halo infinite is a platform not a simple game. I dont think its ever been a secret that it is MCC 2.
>
> Yes, like me, you and others obviously guessed that, but a lot of people on this forum seemed to wrongly think Halo Infinite’s “10 year plan” meant rolling DLC for one campaign and rolling multiplayer for 10 years, and always including the original XBox One in it’s design - that’s why they’ve also claimed “XBox One will hold back the game design, as it will be 17 years old by 2030!” That’s why I thought it was important to show those ideas are actually wrong, and that’s not 343i’s plans

Halo Infinite doesn’t have a 10 year plan, that is a common misconception.
The actual quote is that Halo Infinite is the “start of the next 10 years of Halo”. Any amount of research into that statement will clarify that.
It is near impossible to support a FPS arena shooter for 10 years on any single piece of hardware.

As you already said the Xbox One would be 17 years old by the end of 10 years. The Series X/S would be 11 years old. Getting any sort of power out of those old machines would be hard.

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Or it could still be for Halo: Infinite.

In the same way that GTA 5 spanned last-gen and next gen consoles, with the last-gen version slowly being abandoned while the next-gen versions received new content, Halo: Infinite could see new content released, but only for the next-gen consoles [X/S].

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> 2533274865778947;4:
> > 2535466834539387;3:
> > > 2533274831074612;2:
> > >
>
> [1] Halo Infinite doesn’t have a 10 year plan, that is a common misconception. The actual quote is that Halo Infinite is the “start of the next 10 years of Halo”. Any amount of research into that statement will clarify that.
>
> [2] It is near impossible to support a FPS arena shooter for 10 years on any single piece of hardware.
>
> [3] As you already said the Xbox One would be 17 years old by the end of 10 years. The Series X/S would be 11 years old. Getting any sort of power out of those old machines would be hard.

I’ve numbered your points to make them easier to reply to.

[1] Yes, we agree on that point, many people are getting their wires crossed via missing information, misremembering or misinterpreting quotes, or even then turning to fake “insiders” for information. Your point comes from quoting Chris Lee speaking generally about “Halo Infinite as a platform” in this IGN article, “We want Infinite to grow over time, versus going to those numbered titles and having all that segmentation that we had before. It’s really about creating Halo Infinite as the start of the next ten years for Halo”.

However, I’m also talking about the remaining 10 years of the original 20 year plan for the rest of the Halo story, as per my post here about the story-arc (12/20/20). There I quote this GamesRadar article from September 2015 just before Halo 5 launched, where "343’s studio head Bonnie Ross talks about the long term plan, highlighting Frank and his team’s role back in the ODST and Halo Reach days, “to really lay the fictional foundation for the next twenty years. // You can look at the ending of Halo 4 – and where Master Chief is, and obviously we had to know where we were going to take Halo 5 and Halo 6 [now Halo Infinite] with that. You have an epic sci-fi universe and we have multiple ways that we can go with this story, but all the pieces are laying there. The canvas is there for us to paint”. Frank O’Connor then adds “We do kind of know what’s going to happen in the next game [Halo Infinite] pretty well at this point. We’re doing serious real planning and even some writing on the next game already [in 2015, even before Halo 5 launched], and that’s a luxury – we’ve never been in that position before. So we both know at a very high level what’s going to happen in, say, ten years from now. But at that very granular level knowing what’s going to happen in the next game and that’s just been a great feeling for me”.

So we’re both right, there is indeed a “10 year plan” for the story-arc (my point) as the “start of the next 10 years” on “Halo Infinite as a platform” (your point), and all using steadily upgrading versions of Slipspace Engine.

[2] As part of migrating everyone over to MCC on XB1 family and next-gen Series X/S, 343i are only now "sunsetting" the XBox 360 Halo versions at the end of 2021; that includes turning off Halo 3 servers after 14 years, and Halo: Reach servers after 11 years. We can only wait and see what their plans are for Halo Infinite’s servers, given that length of support for “old versions of Halo games”, so “10 years” server support if not upgrades and new content for the game isn’t so far fetched!

[3] Meanwhile, a bit of context. This new thread post is an answer to a “don’t know yet” point I made in my post about Halo Infinite running on XBox One (8/25/2020), all containing fact based quotes with links to show the evidence for each point. Under “WHAT WE DON’T KNOW YET”, I stated there “When Slipspace gets upgraded for full next-gen Series-X features, will this mean new next-gen Campaign content launches by 2022 won’t support XBox One, One S and One X? Possibly, but that’s not confirmed yet. Even if it were confirmed, it may still be possible to stream that new content via XCloud.” Maybe with this job post we now have an answer, as per my original post on this thread!

> 2533274809541057;5:
> Or it could still be for Halo: Infinite. In the same way that GTA 5 spanned last-gen and next gen consoles, with the last-gen version slowly being abandoned while the next-gen versions received new content, Halo: Infinite could see new content released, but only for the next-gen consoles [X/S].

Yes, exactly! The next whole campaign (2023?) looks like it’ll be next-gen only, but as per point [2] above, we don’t know how long they’ll support the servers or add new content for the first version of the Halo Infinite Multiplayer yet, so “Infinite Multiplayer 1” could get support on XBox One until 2030 even if “Infinite Multiplayer 2” is next-gen-only.

Hope this clarifies things. After all, like time 0.18 in this clip, “You know me. I did my research”, because like in-game characters who don’t “do their research” properly, some mistakes are obvious and don’t match prior knowledge - such as when characters “state multiple wrong reasons, and make statements when maybe they should be asking questions instead” as regards what’s coming next in the Halo Infinite campaign story! :wink: :smiley: