In my opinion, by far the best decision that 343 made in terms of their general philosophy with Halo Infinite is that they allowed the gameplay and characters to carry both the multiplayer and campaign without a lot of extravagance or bloat. They kept it simple, humble and down to earth, and allowed its strengths to speak for themselves and stand out.
Gameplay is almost certainly the strength of Infinite, and they really nailed the Halo formula down while bringing in just the right balance of new and modern features to keep it relevant. They got rid of every weapon that had exactly the same function as another. They brought in abilities that are pickups in multiplayer and aren’t totally game changing in a match, but are still (mostly) useful. Perhaps except for the shield wall, that thing doesn’t work so good. In campaign these elements add whole new facets to the sandbox. Apart from that, the order of the day is plain old Halo combat, in one of its most refined iterations. All of the embellishment went into things like enemy AI, bringing back all of the classic enemy types, and giving them funny things to say.
The development of the game is by now widely known to have been very troubled. They reportedly had to cut 2/3rds of the open world map, and thankfully so. There are just enough things on the map to do to find some extra fun or pad out content for completionists, but it’s not a chore to clear dozens or hundreds of identical encounters, and it’s not necessary to deal with at all. May be an unintentional occurrence, but I still appreciate it.
Some people probably don’t like that the story doesn’t really address any major advancements in the lore of the general universe, and leaves a lot of threads from previous material completely untouched. However, I think that the decision to keep the story as something of a simple “marooned at sea” story between the three main characters was very refreshing and allowed for the characters to do most of the work. Master Chief has a character arc in this game and that’s saying something for what should be such a one-dimensional character. They pared it way down from the lore-heavy insanity of Halo 5 and made it more of a character study, and I think that was a bold choice that pays off. It mostly ignores the content of Halo 5, and when it does deal with it, it does so in an abstract way that’s more about broad strokes and emotional outcomes than nitty-gritty sci fi lore. It allows some more human themes to come to the fore that would otherwise be lost in this type of game, and the one-long-take cinematic style forces it all to rest on the strength of the animation, character design and voice acting rather than massive setpieces or Michael Bay style action. It’s nothing brilliant, and it’s no Halo 2, but it is what it needs to be, and obviously its main purpose is to be a launching point.
I personally have a lot of problems with the business practices surrounding parts of Halo Infinite and it’s clear that it had a very messy development. It’s not perfect in any way, and you have to wonder how many people will still care about it enough to take notice when features like co-op and forge are released up to 9 months from now. But I think in terms of what is there, one of the obvious themes was simplicity, and that is something that does it great service as a base foundation to build off of.