Demaning any particular minimum quantity of levels seems nonsensical. You’re essentially ignoring all the nuances of level design, and fixating on something that ultimately won’t matter if the levels aren’t good. In campaign, for example, the structure of the story dictates the number of levels. To begin with, the division of campaign into levels is largely a technical matter: if you’re not changing locations (or doing something equally drastic that changes all the geometry) and there’s time to load everything, there’s no real need to begin a new level. For example, in Halo 2 you see a lot of this, where some of the levels are direct continuation of the previous with a cutscene in between, but were probably split for technical reasons. It would be the same game whether or not it had 14 or 10 playable levels. On the flipside, Halo 3 could start a level after every cut scene, but it doesn’t because there’s no point. The number of levels tells absolutely nothing about the quality of the game.
A slightly less nonsensical thing to consider is the length of the campaign. But there, too, longer isn’t necessarily better. The story calls for a certain succession of events, and that succession of events is interspersed with a set of errands the player needs to run, and these errands and events are tied together to form a coherent campaign. However, making the errands meaningful for the player to keep the experience engaging becomes difficult the more of them you add. If it doesn’t feel meaningful, you run into the issue Halo 4 did where at some point you realize that you’re just traveling from one button to another, and finding and pushing all the buttons on Requiem doesn’t feel like a very meaningful task.
Apart from the number of errands the player needs to run, the other thing that determines the length of a level is the amount of time it takes from one place of interest to another. However, here, too, you can’t just make the time arbitrarily long. Pacing of the level is every important. If the player spends too long without seeing enemies, they will get bored. If the player faces too many waves of enemies, the waves will start to feel too similar, and they will get bored. There is only so much time you can make the player spend on the level before it becomes a borefest. The longer the campaign, the more difficult it is to make it longer without making it worse. I don’t know about you, but personally I’d rather experience six hours of an awesome campaign than twelve hours of a mediocre one.
When it comes to multiplayer, I’m going to say right away: twelve arena maps and five Warzone maps, not going to happen, because 343i knows better. If it did happen, those maps would not be very good. Coming up with, designing, and polishing good multiplayer maps takes time, and the time only grows with map size. There’s definitely a mode of design where you can churn out map ideas, but even ignoring the time it takes to execute them, the maps will probably all feel kind of uninspired and samey. There’s a reason why Bungie had to combine Invasion and BTB maps in Reach, and why Halo 5 has no BTB maps that aren’t made in Forge.
We will see around 12 maps total at launch. How those maps will be divided is unkown, but I sure hope Halo Infinite would ditch Warzone, though I’m confident it won’t. Being fully aware that it probably won’t happen, I would like it to be 5 small, 3 medium, and 4 BTB maps. I would also appreciate them to be not mediocre, but that’s too much hoping for one day.
