Good afternoon!
So we’ve finally seen it! The gameplay for Infinite! It’s felt so long since the E3 trailer but we’ve made it! And it was so good to finally see! Or at least that’s what I had hoped to see from other fans. It appears there’s a lot of contention towards a few months old build. I don’t share the negative opinions, and the CE references aren’t just there for nostalgia’s sake. It appears 343 weren’t kidding when they said they were taking Halo to it’s literal roots, and not by being CE, 2, or 3. But the original concept.
Picture this in your minds.
> A human transport starship crash-lands on a mysterious ringworld. Covenant aliens appear in great numbers to loot what they can, and war erupts between them and the humans. Unable to match the technologically advanced alien race, the humans resort to guerilla warfare. An open world game with terrain that reacted and deformed from explosions, persistent environment details such as spent shell casings, and variable weather.
Sounds amazing right? That’s because it was the original design of Halo before it became the first-person shooter juggernaut we know it as today. Here’s a few quote about it;
> Probably the most unique aspect to the game is the single, continuous world, with seamless indoor and outdoor environments. There won’t be any occasions when the gameplay stops and a dialog box pops up to say “you have now finished X level, now you must go do Y mission.” Instead, the player will have a great deal of discretion as to where they go in this world and how they choose to wage war against the aliens.
> - Jason Jones, Inside Mac Games, 1999
> I think an player will find it immensely enjoyable to destroy an enemy command-and-control center in one part of the world, and have it affect the enemy’s communication in a part of the world that the player won’t even reach until a later stage in the game. And when I destroy a base or even an enemy, I want it to stay destroyed, unless there’s a damn good reason that it was rebuilt. This is just one aspect of the open, dynamic world that we want to introduce in Halo. This is the future.
> - Nathan Bitner, Next Generation Magazine, 1999
> It’s set in a future in which the human race is on the run from a ruthless alien race called the Covenant. As billions perish on humanity’s colonized planets, a human military unit decides to make a last stand on an ancient ring-shaped structure thousands of miles in diameter. The surface of this bizarre stellar body is a lush natural environment. It’s on this “halo” that mankind will stage its greatest battle.
> - PC Gamer Halo Scoop, 1999
I’m fully invested in the idea that these concepts and dreams from 1999 are what 343 are trying to make reality with Halo: Infinite. It’s already out that Infinite is going to be the investment for the next ten years of Halo, and will be the primary instalment of the series for these next ten years. While it may not be as fully open world as say, Skyrim for example, there appears to be a mix of open word elements with linear progression in some parts which hasn’t been revealed. Take a look at some of the most recent details;
> It’s somewhere in between. We have a lot of stuff that we haven’t shown today. We’re trying to build our open and expansive world where the player gets to explore, as we’ve said before.
> - Paul Crocker, PCGamesn
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> 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 10 years for Halo and then building that as we go with our fans and community
> - Chris Lee, IGN
There is still a lot we definitely haven’t seen. You can’t shove everything into a five-minute long gameplay demo preview. However I’m more than convinced that the direction 343 is taking is very much in line with the original dreams and ideas of 21 years ago.
5 minutes is all we’ve seen, discounting cutscenes. I’d wager my bets on seeing what else the game has to offer before decrying it as the…lets see, 4th game to apparently ruin Halo?