It even re-uses assets over and over just like Halo 1 
CE re-uses maps in ways that makes sense for the story. The addition of flood and sentinels, much less different paths, makes them rather different.
CE also feels significantly different level to level, but infinite is just slogging through the banished in 3 environs over and over.
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Everyone knows that the reason CE re-uses assets was lack of development time.
It’s the same thing here. Joe Staten came on board to fix this game at the 11th hour and there wasn’t time to develop sufficient unique assets.
Making story justifications doesn’t change any of that
The open world could have more biomes and diversity but once you get into the campaign missions the cutscenes do not disappoint.
I agree that it is a bit underwhelming, although to be fair, 343 certainly didn’t hide the ball on it not being a “true” open world experience. My issues with it have less to do with the scope and more to do with the sense of polish, variety and frequency of meaningful world events, translation issues with Halo’s core sandbox formula removed from curated encounter environments, and general topographical traversal frustrations with the map.
Many of these were points of concern for me from day one of Infinite being announced to feature any kind of open world, though, and thankfully none of them are total dealbreakers. I found the open world pretty annoying during my first playthrough on Heroic where I was trying to stick to the “Golden Path”- despite 343i’s assurance to the contrary, there were certainly times when it wasn’t super simple to just breeze between main mission objectives over large swaths of the open world map.
That said, upon completing the story and digging in on the open world more deliberately, it is growing on me despite its flaws. It has a bit of an “Assassin’s Creed III” vibe to me; namely, an open world that is beautiful to occupy and has many fun elements to engage with, but which lacks a high level of polish and has too much “empty” space between the real meat of the experience. But, like AC3 to me personally, it has an atmospheric “it” factor that allows me to often feel like the open world is better than it really is.
All this is to say that as an open world experience, I do think it’s got pronounced weaknesses. I think my expectations around the open world really helped me not be disappointed in it, but I can easily see why someone with higher hopes would feel very let down by the experience. I’m just curious at this point to see what the broad reception solidifies as and how 343i reacts going forward.
The open world element needs considerable improvement if they decide to keep building on it, absolutely, but there are moments when the potential of it shines through. I personally wouldn’t be upset if they decided to tone it down going forward in favor of the proven formula of more curated and intentional environments, though.
the open world is boring and uninspired and just filled with filler content. not as bad as i anticipated, but thats because its not much filler content. but still it has little to no quality and at it’s worst breaks the flow of the game.
on a side node: remember when they promised us, we could unlock armor in campaign and said the rumors that it wouldn’t be so are lies? the truth just makes the open world more redundant
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The concept of an open world Halo game is an amazing one since these are ring worlds, after all. But what made Halo, at least to me, were the fantastical set pieces and the way we would go from one environment to another for large, cinematic, battles. We’d go from forests to forerunner structures to snow to covenant warships to outer space to New Mombasa and back. 343 even understood this in Halo 5 – for all of its issues, it at least took us to a multitude of different places.
Infinite, on the other hand, feels like it’s trying to straddle between two worlds: It begins with linear narrative, dumps us out into a singular open world that consists, essentially, of little more than banished encampments and forests, then spends the last third act of the game as a linear narrative again. The open world is boring because there’s no diversity and it really highlights that it’s just there to pad the experience. It doesn’t have any meaningful effect on the game itself. For example, if a player eliminates all the HVTs before finishing the game, that should have an impact on the dialog between Escharum and Chief. But it doesn’t. So what’s the point of the HVTs?
It was fun and I enjoyed playing through it once but I don’t really feel compelled to play it again because I really don’t feel like the open world changes anything. I would have rather had a meaningful, tightly crafted narrative than an open sandbox that doesn’t amount to much. Is the open world as tedious as Ubisoft ones? No, but it’s still pretty shallow.
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I think the open world was where we got a chunk of that gameplay cut out due to Development Hell.
I do enjoy the activities, my favorite being the Marine rescues where I’ll rescue the squad, load them up with my Razorback (with or without them all carrying some sort of power weapon), and then head off to a Banished Outpost or even a main mission. It felt like a lot of what I wanted to do all the way back in CE with my Marine buddies I was able to do here.
That said though, generally the open world is pretty much reduced to “Here’s marks on the map, go to these marks to do stuff, okay now here’s more marks for you to do more of the same thing”. It would’ve been much nicer if the open world was more in line to like Gears 5 or Metro Exodus where doing side stuff could open up into a whole event of its own but still remains very organic and contributing to the main narrative. Like how diving into a cave opens up a tunnel network that shows signs of ancient human civilization or more about the checkered past of Zeta Halo, including whatever is involved with the Endless. Or actually find a Spartan IV alive and becomes a boon to your later conquests. Or your build-up of UNSC forces leads to some sort of epic, large-scale, vehicle and infantry confrontation against the Banished.
It would’ve been really nice if it had some kind of narrative connection to the main story but it…didn’t, which ends up with the feeling that the Chief is just goofing around randomly with these objectives on his way to take down Escharum rather than actually rallying the UNSC for any kind of real comeback against the Banished. Doing the last series of main missions, and then getting thrown back into the open world really hits you with how lacking the open world is.
The Halo combat formula and being able to create silly/epic antics of your own with the Marines is nice and all, but I was really hoping for a lot more out of the open world, especially when we don’t know the fates of so many others (such as Lasky) that were the opportunites to make it much more than it is and hopefully will be later on in the future.
not forgetting that the game cannot be played offline digitally without first loggin in online. It allows it then but when you turn off it as to be done again every time meaning the idea of playing this campaign offline isn’t possible. A real problem for those that care for the concept of playing their single player games down the line. A real issue and one 343 chose deliberately not to tell us about
And the issue isn’t about being online but rather the systems might not be in place to allow for playing the game if you’re online or not. The here and now might not consider this a problem but many that concern with playing their collections will because there isn’t any way of knowing if we will be able to
I’m really struggling with why they wanted to an open world in the first place if they aren’t going to really utilize it correctly or have things that are staples of an open world.
The campaign story is still pretty streamlined and doesn’t involve a lot of the outer world as it mostly takes place indoors just like almost every other halo game so I don’t know why they spent resources trying to make an open world if they had no immediate plans to actually capitalize on it or leverage it to keep people wanting to explore or experience the world.
There are no daily or weekly challenges to do in the open world for XP to help you rank up. Why? What is the incentive of going back to the open world after finishing the campaign? What is the point of doing anything in the open world WHILE doing the campaign? You don’t need to unlock a lot of upgrades to easily finish the campaign.
If 343 wants this game to be a live service they really aren’t making it like one. It’s like they are actively making decisions on ways not to keep people engaged with the game.
i’m enjoying it but the stuttering sucks, feels like i’m playing cyberpunk 2077 again at launch, but not as laggy.
Microsoft and part of 343 were trying to copy the open world fad of the past 5 years in a shallow attempt to make money at the expense of Halo. You have to remember a lot of them don’t really design, understand, or even play the games. They’re there because they come up with ways to squeeze money out of people.
Halo needs levels that offer a degree of openness, like Silent Cartagrapher, mixed in with some linear levels. Not an open world.
The game should have been restructured so that each island was treated like a seperate campaign mission, each with a different biome. Travelling between them in real time is totally unnecesary and takes focus away from the game. On top of moving away from tight level design that takes away from the core arena gameplay, Infinite is very poorly structured.
I wish I could help make Halo games.
also sucks you can’t replay missions…
Yeah it’s boring and tedious and brings nothing to the table except flipping your Warthog over every 5 seconds.
The focused story missions were great however. I hope that story dlc will introduce more biomes and climates and add new and interesting gameplay elements instead of being a carbon copy of Far Cry/Assassin’s Creed.
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