Phil Spencer’s recent comments on Halo Infinite’s delay suggests a fall 2021 release for Halo Infinite. The game was announced on June 10th, 2018 at E3. There’s roughly 3,5 years between the announcement and the expected release date. To put things into perspective, the wait for Halo Infinite is longer than an entire development cycle of a mainline Halo game (three years). If we consider the gameplay reveal as an E3 showing, Halo Infinite will have had four E3’s before it even released. Halo Infinite should’ve never been announced so early if there was a possibility of a year long delay. Even without the delay, the game should’ve been announced a year later. This trend of premature announcements of AAA games needs to end. 343 has to steal the show at E3 2021 for Halo Infinite to even have a chance at redeeming this ridiculous content drought.
To steal the show, 343i would need to have made some incredibly smart decisions with Infinite. I’m really hoping the replacement of classic weapons, coupled with armor coating, coupled with microtransactions are not signs that they have not. I want Halo to succeed, and I remain hopeful. However, 343i has a lot to deliver on, and their tight-lipped, hide-everything from the fans policy is not helping.
This suck I pre order it but I understand they have some polishing up that needs to be done for it Do you get your money back or you have to wait. I don’t really like waiting for 5 years going on to 6 years now with a another delay 
There can be an assumption made that they had every intention of releasing it this year and regardless of what you think of the matter concerning COVID they did have to cut Manning in the office and have people stay at home for quite awhile. This could be a contributing factor as to why it was delayed. Was if the sole reason? I suspect that no it wasn’t but with no proof to back it up this is the reason I tend to lean towards. Does it suck? Absolutely but hopefully we get the info we have been asking for this month.
Thing is, a lot of companies nowadays are releasing their games in an unfinished state with barebone features and content. Like with Sea of Thieves and Crackdown 3 under Microsoft which brought a lot of lackluster and not giving enough reason to buy an Xbox.
The Halo Infinite announcement was perfectly fine in my personal opinion. Since then we knew little to nothing about it or even the upcoming new Xbox, the fact of the matter is this. The development of Halo Infinite from what I’ve read and heard has been a development hell, a lot of bad things went on behind the scenes. I’d like to think they were making Halo Infinite during 2017, but they probably went back and forth with ideas, scrapping and rebooting the title. Reminds me a lot of Anthem and Destiny.
Microsoft of course knew what was going on and had to insist 343 to give them something for 2020 showcase, since Halo is a console seller and wanted it ready for the Holidays. Of course when they showed it off, it looked like they been developing the game for about a year or two and it shows with the plastic graphics and facial expressions.
Like we done and gamers should keep doing is not ignore the obvious flaws and point it out. Microsoft and 343 actually listened and committed to improve the game before release (which would be impossible with covid and without overworking 343) but in the end Microsoft did the right thing to delay the game which really surprised me but again, glad.
Halo 5 was…okay, not great and Halo has been struggling since Halo 4. Infinite needs to be the one to revive Halo and show us why Halo was so important.
While writing this, I still think it was okay to announce the game at that time. But it became a problem with development issues and Microsoft didn’t step in and then try to resolve the release date. But as Vilhelmus II said, to steal the show.
Well it was suppose to come out said date, but that was when COVID-19 wasn’t affecting everyone
Too early?
Halo has been a mess since Halo 2.
Halo 2 was a disssssssaster in terms of its brutal development.
Halo 3 was a freebie.
3 and ODST? Who cares?
4 should’ve been an Xbox One launch title.
5 is that nonsense.
Infinite is that Industry nonsense/
I think people are giving covid too much credit here. This is a massive tech company. With the exception of sound studios, 343 should be able to get just as much work done from their homes as in the office. My relatively low tech engineering firm went from 100% in office to 90% at home pretty smoothly and we were expected to get just as much work done.
I am ignorant of the game development process though. I just think that with only 9 or 10 months left on the planned development that there would be very little, if any, motion capture, voice recording, soundtrack and sound effects left to do. Everything should be almost entirely on computers at that point for compiling, testing, and polishing. How long before release does a game typically “go gold”?
Honestly, given that Infinite isn’t the only game in the last couple years to get a sudden or even planned rescheduled launch (Cyberpunk 2077 has been pushed a couple times I believe), it seems that the whole industry needs to reset their (and our) expectations when it comes to releasing AAA games. Unless we as a community start making concessions on time intensive things like realistic graphics, then we need to be okay with longer development periods.
This constant push for bigger and better games that top the ones that came out the year before is an unsustainable business model, and I think we are starting to see the limits of that model with games like Infinite and Cyberpunk.
In 343i’s defense, the game was supposed to launch awhile ago. It kept hitting roadblocks every now and then which pushed development to a crawl. I mean, Halo 5 was supposed to be the start of their new Engine but that got pushed to Infinite’s tie in. Then I think they had some lead swaps from people leaving (not sure if that slowed anything down). Not to mention Covid helped nothing and then people had a fit over the demo we got to see so they opt to push back release even further to try and fix some stuff.
But this isn’t the first game to have a long delay between its previous title and it. Nor is it the longest wait.
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> In 343i’s defense, the game was supposed to launch awhile ago. It kept hitting roadblocks every now and then which pushed development to a crawl. I mean, Halo 5 was supposed to be the start of their new Engine but that got pushed to Infinite’s tie in. Then I think they had some lead swaps from people leaving (not sure if that slowed anything down). Not to mention Covid helped nothing and then people had a fit over the demo we got to see so they opt to push back release even further to try and fix some stuff.
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> But this isn’t the first game to have a long delay between its previous title and it. Nor is it the longest wait.
It’s the longest wait for any Halo game and has had the most rocky development by a studio that has yet to put out a game that works properly and isn’t considered a joke by some section of the community
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> Cyberpunk 2077 has been pushed a couple times I believe
It’s hard to believe, but cyberpunk was announced all the way back in 2012. I had to do a double take when I saw the upload date for the first trailer.
I have mixed feeling on the trend of long waits to release after announcing games. On one hand it’s nice to know the games are in development (ES6), but on the other hand it gets exhausting waiting for the games to the point where hype levels are all but gone for some people (Infinite).
I feel like people are too addicted to hype trains when ‘announcing too early’ is a thing. Not to say I don’t like trailers and information, and I definitely appreciate such close to launch.
Honestly, Imagine if 343 hadn’t announce infinite till this year, 5 years after halo 5. People would probably be worried halo was dead.
Here is what I noticed from the past game development of Halo. When Halo 5 there was a ton of missing features. Forge, weapon tiers, and such items. A lot of these features took 2 years to fully come to development. With 343 working on these features that should have ben done upon release it seams to effect Halo Infinite’s release. I could see that half of the team was working on finishing Halo 5 while the other half was working on Infinite. A lot of developers do this with their games. Please do not do this with Halo, it should not be a games as a services game. Give us a full game upon launch and then work on and expansion or the next fully improved game. I honestly would be ok with a new great Halo game every new console release every 4 years and one or two story expansions between these fully new games with new next gen engines.
So war I am liking the Halo Infinite gameplay, it has the classic Halo feel and brings back a lot of things I wanted back. Equipment, brutes, and special grenades. Please keep some of the awesome social playlists and high level weapons Halo 5 has now. However the game does feel last generation (Xbox One) and I miss the starting maps from when Halo 5 first started out.
All in all if a delay will give us a better full game then delay it.
Thank you for Halo!
Don’t discount the impacts of COVID on the development efficiency of 343. I do honestly think the game would have made the Series X launch if the workforce didn’t have to reinvent their workflow pipeline when the finish line was in sight.
And based off the rumor that Joseph Staten liked the game when he play tested it after coming on to 343 earlier this year, I think they were on track to deliver a great game on the console launch day before a wrench got thrown in the wheel.
All that being said, announcing in June 2018 wouldn’t have been that big an issue if they’d hit their original release target.
I agree that infinite was announced too early. Mainline Halo games typically launch three years apart, and between 2009 and 2015 we got 6 different halo releases. The community was kind of used to frequent releases and content, so the wait for infinite seems extreme because its riding right after the period of the heaviest Halo releases. But like people said above, it’s not the longest wait after an announcement ever seen, cyberpunk was announced 8 years ago. However, I don’t think that means that this wait doesn’t suck. It means its not the worst wait a game has ever seen, but it still certainly sucks. I don’t think they should’ve shown it off as early as they did, because by the following E3 they still had very little to show off. I was personally really disappointed with the E3 2019 Infinite showcase because I felt like we didn’t really get anything new from it, unless you really felt like dissecting every little detail in the trailer.
I’m also going to put some fault on the community for making this worse for ourselves. We hyped the game up way too much after seeing that one 2018 tech demo for it. Everyone forgot all the botched launches 343 has had, and all the poor decisions they’ve made around the franchise, and harped on the fact that we had a classic looking art style again, so the game must be great. I remember everyone blowing Infinite up after that talking about how it was going to be the game that revived Halo, that it was going to be as good as Halo 3, that it was going to be perfect… All after seeing a 2 minute tech demo. We collectively got our hopes up too early, and that made the wait, and the delay all the more painful because we’re realizing that it isn’t everything we hyped it up to be. We should’ve been more skeptical of it at first. I’m not saying we shouldn’t have had any hype at all, but that we should have waited to hear/see more about the game before calling it the savior of the Halo franchise.
Personally, that tech demo didn’t do anything for me. I went “cool, another Halo is coming,” but it wasn’t gameplay and had pretty much zero information in it. Since then the only other official information we’ve got is the campaign demo. The problem isn’t the time of the announcement, it is the lack of communicating with the fans. How many promises have we received over the years for more transparency/communication/involvement? I don’t even believe them anymore when I hear it.
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> Don’t discount the impacts of COVID on the development efficiency of 343. I do honestly think the game would have made the Series X launch if the workforce didn’t have to reinvent their workflow pipeline when the finish line was in sight.
Software development is one of the few sectors where Covid has little to no impact at all, because it is not tied to the employee being at a specific spot. You can program from everywhere, office, home, train, doesn’t matter. Especially for a software giant like Microsoft who at least should have all the necessary infrastructure in the first place.
I should know, I work in SD myself and our group was back on track with work within two weeks, despite not having a centralized computing server set up beforehand.
EDIT: Oh, I just realized, it’s you again. Mister “The government is at fault for Infinite’s delay”.^^
Yeah, you were already as wrong back then as you are now. At most, Covid impacted the final few months of a five year development cycle prior to the gameplay demo. In no way does it explain the lack of quality shown there, and I have serious doubts all of them would have been fixed until the SeXbox launch, even if the pandemic didn’t happen. The issues were just too numerous.
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> And based off the rumor that Joseph Staten liked the game when he play tested it after coming on to 343 earlier this year, I think they were on track to deliver a great game on the console launch day before a wrench got thrown in the wheel.
Where is that rumor from? Because I heard the exact opposite. I just never gave it much thought, because that’s all that it is: A rumor.
Facts are facts…they had every intention of releasing the game in November of this year. If i recall, COVID hit hard in the US January-ish and was accepted/really caught stride around March…Not July when the Campaign was shown.
The delay was announced two weeks after the Campaign demo…which was not received well by most in and outside of the Halo community. Once again JULY…not March, April, May, June. The delay was in fact because of the backlash. There may have been other mitigating factors involved however I don’t think if there was as much backlash and laughter about Infinite that it would have been delayed. In fact, I think we would have received a game missing features at launch but I still believe it would have launched. So I think the announcement was on time with the expected launch.
You don’t figure out two weeks (coincidentally) after the Campaign Demo that the game isn’t going to be ready. Often times the simplest answer is the correct one. Finally look at their perspective as of late: “We will show you stuff when we think its ready”. Do you really think if they knew they were going to get that much backlash that they would have had the campaign reveal and been behind it as much? I think not…
Just my opinion…
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> > 2614366390849210;15:
> > Don’t discount the impacts of COVID on the development efficiency of 343. I do honestly think the game would have made the Series X launch if the workforce didn’t have to reinvent their workflow pipeline when the finish line was in sight.
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> Software development is one of the few sectors where Covid has little to no impact at all, because it is not tied to the employee being at a specific spot. You can program from everywhere, office, home, train, doesn’t matter. Especially for a software giant like Microsoft who at least should have all the necessary infrastructure in the first place.
> I should know, I work in SD myself and our group was back on track with work within two weeks, despite not having a centralized computing server set up beforehand.
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> EDIT: Oh, I just realized, it’s you again. Mister “The government is at fault for Infinite’s delay”.^^
> Yeah, you were already as wrong back then as you are now. At most, Covid impacted the final few months of a five year development cycle prior to the gameplay demo. In no way does it explain the lack of quality shown there, and I have serious doubts all of them would have been fixed until the SeXbox launch, even if the pandemic didn’t happen. The issues were just too numerous.
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> > 2614366390849210;15:
> > And based off the rumor that Joseph Staten liked the game when he play tested it after coming on to 343 earlier this year, I think they were on track to deliver a great game on the console launch day before a wrench got thrown in the wheel.
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> Where is that rumor from? Because I heard the exact opposite. I just never gave it much thought, because that’s all that it is: A rumor.
Software development in general wasn’t highly impacted by Covid, but it is now extremely well documented on various gaming journal sites how hard the remote work situation has been on Game development specifically. Most of us software developers aren’t working on files that are hundreds of GB’s like a modern AAA title is. It’s been known that a lot of Xbox devs specifically were able to utilize X-Cloud to stream new builds, which is great! But that doesn’t help for big multiplayer playtest sessions like they’d be doing for Infinite. That means downloading hundreds of gigs multiple times a week to refresh your build for multiplayer playtests. They also had to get everyone consoles to play the games on, instead of having a centralized bunch that people schedule play sessions on.
If you do some searching on IGN, PC Gamer, Digital Foundry, etc., you’ll find plenty of interviews with game developers, from titles with scopes ranging from small indy games up to the big guys like Bethesda, about the difficulty’s of the mostly remote work force.
I feel that having the opinion that companies in the United States weren’t impacted by Covid more than companies who’s governments responded effectively is an opinion scoped at the individual level, and doesn’t scale well to the process and system level that Covid impacts. I also think that opinion lacks empathy towards fellow citizens and their safety. What measurable quality metric do you have that shows game developers weren’t impacted significantly Covid induced WFH? Show me the data.
The rumor Joseph Staten liked the game when he played it made the rounds on various Halo content creators channels. I think it first surfaced on one of Sean W’s coffee chats. Rumors are what they are, but in the time I’ve been watching his video, most of the one’s he surfaces have checked out so far. Take that for what you will, because I don’t watch 100% of any of the Halo content creators videos. I just catch them occasionally. It’s still just a rumor too, but it was presented as credibly as many of the other rumors that have turned out to be true.
I perform change management on an Oracle SQL database that supports the GUI for one of my employers proprietary web apps. Our team was mostly unaffected by forced remote work because most of the actual files we write out are just SQL scripts, and our server can process and store the large tables we manage lightning fast because it’s all cloud computing. In our day-to-day we’re normally just exchanging nothing more complex than emails with images and Office files between employees. But that’s not even remotely similar to how game developers tools and apps work, at least not when you’re trying to enable multiplayer build tests and even some campaign build tests. And 343, like every other company, had to very quickly put in to place a lot of new tools and processes to enable the full remote work. You know what another side effect of that is? A ton of projects across the enterprise being paused, sidelined, and outright cancelled. Saying that didn’t also impact productivity doesn’t make any sense to me either.