Honestly surprised how many people are mixed on Infinite's open world

Games Halo Infinite
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63

Honestly I liked it when I first started it up. Than I went and play Ghost recon Breakpoint and I was like wait a minute… The graphics on this game look better than on Halo.

Than I was lielke wait, we get snow fog, dust and we’ll weather… Dynamic maps where the environment impacts your characters look such as mud rain and what not.

Than hopped over to infinite and it felt like a cheap crayola art compared to it. Just the way the trees and bushes move in Breakpoint compared to Infinite. The trees in Breakpoint have better texture.

It was at that point I was like man… this is a cheap game

2 Likes
64

I think the problem is the game is ok on 1st playthrough but after carefully looking at the campaign it’s actually not that great and a lot of stuff in the trailers were kind of misleading since it implied things like exploring sea area’s…and yet I don’t recall ever seeing water except maybe a few random puddles.

Plus quite a lot of the levels were just rehashed over and over. I can’t think of any level that stood out in a way that seemed unique because most of the levels seemed samey. Which is weird since Halo 1 did some things like that but it did in a way that didn’t actually feel like that while Infinite just feels repetitive after a while. Plus the puzzles kind of feel lazy since it was just simple grab the random item and use it on door lock then done.

Plus the lack of marines interaction felt underwhelming. It’s like they didn’t seem at all engaging like there was no cool moment where had to fight with them like beachs in Halo 1 or Halo 3 exploring the jungle together.

Not sure more biomes would think fix these problems. It’s more down to lack of interesting idea’s.

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65

I knew from the moment they announced this game was going to be open world that it would suffer for it. I knew it would be empty as its halo and not gta nor fallout with deep story quests, npcs, random events, alternate endings, etc. I knew forge had to be cut for it. I knew online co op had to be cut for it. I knew sacrifices would be made but what I expected least of all was for the campaign itself to suffer for it. Every single linear mission (bar the first one) was a drag beyond comprehension. Aside from the pretty aesthetic, there was nothing of note for almost all of the map.

You say that you find infinites world to be better than that of farcry but just look at what you’ve listed… Farcry had propaganda towers, outposts, marine rescues, boss battles, fortresses, and sooooooo many other things like wildlife, different environments, factions, and so on.

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66

I liked as it offered a lot to explore, and having the grapple hook made it 10x better. But i still think that the lack of biomes really hurt the feeling of the open world aspect of the game. Hopefully in the dlc we do end up getting a new biome, which seems kinda likely since the ending looks like it takes place in a desert biome.

67

Uninstalled mine about a month ago. I’ve abandoned the hope that 343 is for the fans now and that they just take their orders. Shouldn’t have bought campaign especially as DRM renders it useless offline now but I learned a lesson and now know not to trust 343 or MS ever again. Glad to see 343 is distrusted at this point

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68

I enjoyed the House of Reckoning mission as I felt it was actually clever and would have good replay ability… it would also make a good firefight mode but who knows if 343 would even go there… the boss mission were okay but they were just simple boss duels…

69

I really think the AI upgrades in Infinite would make for a great Firefight experience. I really hope we get Firefight some day.

70

For me the open world aspect is pretty pointless. Nothing in it really adds to the story bar the audio logs, which could’ve been placed and were placed in linear levels.

I would’ve much prefered wide open, but still controlled levels, much like HCE, but on the roids. I just feel like a lot of time was wasted, crafting such a lack luster and pointless open world, time which could’ve been used to give us a more crafted, immersive, story rich experience.

I think it’s because of this that we didn’t really find out a whole lot during the campaign. The only big things we learned are that Cortana blew up Doisac, she killed herself to blow up the ring, and there is a new faction called the Endless, which we learn next to nothing about.

The huge gaps in the story are just left to speculation. The audio logs tried to fill some of it in, but they didn’t really provide a whole lot to go off of. I think we could’ve gotten a much more fleshed out story than what we got had they not gone “open world” with Infinite.

I think for an open world game to succeed, the environment needs to be used in some way other than just copy paste objectives. The outposts tried to do this, but they were all basically the same, blow this up, hack this, free marines, and kill the mini boss.

They could’ve given us side missions that explain some of the gaps in the story, using parts of the open environment instead of putting in a linear structure, kind of like the part with the three AA canons, but less repetitive.

Hopefully with the story DLC coming out they can start to fix the issues with the open world and we can get a solid story experience.

2 Likes
71

I don’t see what’s surprising, it was a dreary slog. Once you’ve done each overworld mission type you’ve done them all. There are no memorable setpieces, the House of Reckoning comes the closest but the moment is ruined by doing it twice in a row and it really only highlights how badly this game needed co-op and firefight.

Getting around in vehicles is a giant pain when they get hung up on absolutely everything. And vehicles are still made out of paper and that issue is only magnified by the fact the AI can dunk rounds from miles away because they didn’t want the player to be able to cheese the AI from a distance. The dance just fundamentally doesn’t feel as good due to the changes made to the AI when they overload the player with sprint, slide, grapple, drop shield, and thrust.

All Infinite served to demonstrate is that Halo is not built to support a large open world where the player stuffed full of movement and defensive abilities. Everything you need to do to support having the open world and abilities makes the core gameplay less satisfying.

I honestly can’t think of anything Infinite’s campaign measurably improves from prior 343 beyond the aesthetics being slightly better(though IMO the art, especially the environmental art feels pretty lifeless).

There are still plenty of spongy enemies with feedback issues, ammo capacity still feels weirdly low despite ammo boxes being strewn all over the map, enemy tracking is still too strong. Vehicles are the worst they’ve ever been.

Calling Halo Infinite Far Cry edition is insulting to Far Cry its at best bargain basement Far Cry.

1 Like
72

I’m not against open worlds per se but Infinite didn’t miss a single trope in the Big Book of Open World Clichés from the copy/paste tasks to the vast areas that exist only for the sake of having vast areas to the collectibles which reminded me of hunting flags in the 2007 Assassin’s Creed. The only thing they left out was crafting.
I completed the campaign three times to get all the achievements and now it joins Halo 4 as a solo game I have no interest in ever replaying.

73

I think the concept is great and it was fairly fun, but it’s got a lot of limitations and got boring after getting all the unlockables and fobs etc.

I suspect after some expansions where they include more biomes and complex interactions with the world at large it will reinvigorate interest in the campaign.

74

I enjoyed the campaign and the open world elements. But the environments all felt very similar. There wasn’t enough variety to make me want to pick it up again or explore, because frankly most areas looked the same.

That being said, I enjoyed it, so props to 343 on that

75

For whatever reason, a lot of people don’t understand that almost all of the campaign’s issues come from the inclusion of the open world.

2 Likes
76

I had a pretty fun time with the campaign, and I think there are few things off the beaten path to look around for than some people give the map credit for (the various caves have some fun fights in them and there are several weapon variants that spawn well before you unlock them through valor), but it absolutely could’ve used a greater amount of variety in basically every way.

The FOBs could’ve used more visual variety instead of every one of them being the same platform, and a few more could’ve been moved into more interestingly locations such as caves (I do like some of their current spots, like the one on the lake is a pretty location). Additionally, the Banished bases also could’ve used more spice, say perhaps one has a big focus on vehicle combat with multiple wraiths and ghosts actively present. As is the only ones that really stand out to me are Riven Gate, due to its sprawled layout over multiple elevations, and Ransom Keep, because, well, it’s the first one.

I think a better way to have handled things would be for the islands you visit after Pelican Down (and then the same thing for the island you visit for the end of the game) to be much farther away from the first three you have access to so that they can have a different climate from the previous islands without having the “Minecraft effect” of having several wildly different biomes right next to each other.

77

Well, those islands are pieces of the blown-up part of the ring, so I guess they were quite close together before getting blown out of the ring, hence similar climate.
I’m thinking they plan to use other climates in some kind of DLC when we get to explore other parts of the ring (or other rings? it’s supposed to be ‘infinite’, so who knows). IF they don’t, I think they should :wink:

78

Infinite is the most boring campaign in the franchise, a lot of it is because of the open world. A friend of mine didn’t even complete the last level because he stopped at the 2nd last and never got back to the last because he cared so little for what was going on.

I actually enjoyed the first 2 levels, they seemed well designed and made good use of the grapple hook. This is the only halo campaign I haven’t played more than once, as I don’t wish to slog through its boring soup again.

Infinite’s open world has a number of issues:

Same Environments
The only 1 biome issue gets tossed around a lot and its big. Delaying other biomes for other expansions is just a poor idea. The ring is damaged, just say the environmental controls went haywire and now has different zones. There is also no weather and night time is pathetic.

Even the interior levels feel extremely samey in either being Banished or Forerunner with little to differentiate one level from the other. Halo CE had a lot of forerunner interiors, but every level’s forerunner interiors were different in shape, color, and atmosphere, outside of the levels they repeated (in which case they made sure to change everything else).

Same Colors
The forerunners are grey (with some very rare gold), the banished are grey (with red accents), the rocks are even a similar shade of grey.

The banished likewise all use the shame shades of grey and red, while the covenant used a wide variety of purples, blues, greens, and even oranges on occassion. You can’t say its ‘being faithful to halo wars 2’ because the models all look drastically different than HW2’s approach to the banished. Similarly all banished energy weapons fire the same shade red, even their fuel rods are red somehow.

This lack of color variety makes images of infinite rather drab and boring, and makes the already limited environmental variety feel even more the same.

Same Enemies
With the exception of ODST and Reach, every halo title has had at least 2 factions, who are usually at odds with eachother. This created a variety in enemies that helped mix things up, and helps keep CE"s re-used levels fresh.

The banished meanwhile have nothing terribly exciting. You fight the same enemies most the time with Hunters tossed in on occassion. Bosses are just bullet spunge versions of existing enemies.

The Sentinels are back which is nice and they do provide a little variety but they aren’t the most interesting enemies to fight.

The skimmers are pretty much non-entities who carry shock rifles for you.

Given the entire sandbox is very commonly at your disposal, this further makes enemy encounters feel the same.

Lack of special moments
Because the game is structured into open world or cramped interior levels, you no longer have any big battles. Gone are the space battles, sense of stakes, or even nice shots of where you will be going. Most the game boils down to clicking things and killing bosses. We don’t encounter any real characters after brohammer and not-cortana.

Escharum and the Harbinger have little charisma and the Harbinger is killed off without giving us much of a reason to even care about her. They don’t do anything. Spark teleports you to safety in CE, and the various personalities of the covenant, UNSC, and even the flood shift who is friend or foe through the classic games.

In previous games we’d actually be there for big story beats and the big battles. There was special enemies like Scarabs and people we’d encounter who felt more unique and integral to the plot. Now we just hear about cool things that happened in the past as we slog through an empty open world.

Sandbox is always there
Thanks to FOB’s and 343’s abundant weapon racks and weapon boxes, the game has ample supply of every weapon and vehicles at your disposal. I guess this is nice from a ‘mess around’ standpoint but it kills pacing. You can’t have the fun "tank beats everything’ moments when you can just spawn a tank.

Furthermore, the equipment always being available means the grapple hook just breaks the campaign in half. Its a fun equipment when it has limited uses but it just breaks the vehicle sandbox.

Lack of Life
This is an open world game with no weather. Where enemies just sit around in camps waiting for you to kill them. Captured marines are kept out in the wilderness for ‘reasons’. FOB’s despite having like 3 marines to protect them don’t get attacked or reclaimed.

Unimmersive
This is the gamiest halo game that ever existed. Characters feel like plot devices. Marines are just minions that follow you around rather than having a command giving them orders. Infinite vehicles and weapons just spawn at FOB’s. There’s magic boxes that provide ammo for most guns (except what’s arbitrarily defined as a power weapon). Its boss battles are tacky and bullet spongey. Its villains are passive and dull, sitting in their lairs waiting for you to show up the entire game. The ring doesn’t feel damaged, it feels like a bunch of islands just passively floating in space.

Conclusion
I suppose if you like collecting things and messing around the open world’s decent, but if you play campaign for fun experiences and an epic space story, this isn’t it.

Co-Op might make campaign more fun due to being able to mess around with friends in the open world. Level select is going to be laughable though.

“Do you want forerunner interior, banished interior, or open world”

79

For me the biggest disappointment about the open world was that it wasn’t dynamic in the slightest.

No-one on the ring, bar the Chief, seems to actually be doing anything, they are just present. Both allies and enemies feel like they are just sitting there waiting for you to turn up with nothing happening if you aren’t there to observe it. FOBs will be within visual range of enemy positions yet the two sides won’t attack one another, there are no patrols or shifting frontlines.

I don’t hate it but given all of the years of development and the huge budget it’s disappointing that the Halo Infinite open world feels less alive than games made over a decade ago with smaller budgets and less time in development.

80

I view it more as a filler than a feature. I finished the main campaign on Legendary in a little over 3 hours. The open world is fun and all the first time exploring it, but it really doesn’t contribute much for replay value. None of the collectibles really further the story’s narrative greatly, clearing out bases doesn’t alter gameplay or unlock alternate endings, etc. So to me, it’s all just puffery.

81

You’re right, Death Stranding isn’t a good comparison

MGSV The Phantom Pain however is a good comparison due to sharing similar beats and similar cinematic styles as well as a early similar premise.