Personally, a lot of what I saw throughout the campaign made sense to me, considering these past few years. If 343 got any message, it was that Halo 5 did not have a good campaign, not many people were really following along with the direction the series was heading, yet so much work is done in tandem project to project. Ideas that were in Halo 5 influenced the events written in by Halo Wars 2, so on the novels in between. Halo 5 dropped a huge bomb on the galaxy with it, that being the Created threat. Unfortunately, you can see many of those vestiges that were going to be on Zeta Halo cut out.
In the sense of making the best out of a bad situation, I actually like how Halo Infinite unfolds. I like that we kind of don’t know the whole picture of what happened between the 6 months. It feels as a player you’re trying to uncover it piece by piece in your time on Zeta Halo, and there seems to be a lot of hints we’ll be seeing and hearing more about it in the coming expansions. Honestly, they could have not included any audio logs of what happened with the Infinity and left it blank for us, the purpose of this campaign was to find a thoroughline in Chief’s relationship to Cortana and Weapon, establish the themes of Infinity (Consequences of the past, hope in the face adversity, trust, emotional growth). To me, all the explanation and allusions are not something I was hoping to get, my worst fear is that they’d totally sweep it under the rug as much as possible, but to me the audio logs and other mentions are like a promise that even though this stuff didn’t make the cut, they are not done with those threads and characters. Even though Halo 5’s campaign didn’t go over well, they still recognize that a lot of us still care for what did happen and expect.
Overall though, I care a little less about that. Halo needed a new frame to carry it forward, and if we have another kind of awkward, too fast transition, so be it. The way they have it where it feels like you’re picking up the pieces to a disaster you don’t know much about makes it enticing enough post soft-reboot. I am interested in what threads we have, and I had a lot of fun in my playthrough learning more. On the gameplay side, sure, there some consequences of this direction with the open world, you can kind of see how the sausage is made by how modular a lot of assets were designed (Banished building prefabs, one biome, limited forerunner tile set) I would say I wasn’t too bothered by it. I didn’t feel like my time on Zeta Halo was more of the same. There are a lot of handcrafted scenes you pass by, evidence of battle, and the open world side content just didn’t feel that harsh. I didn’t feel like I was in MMO quest hell like Dragon Age Inquisition or some of the contemporary Far Cry games. The world has 15 world boss encounters, collectables, bases, and 8 Banished Strongholds. I don’t feel like I’m drowned by that, and honestly you can just pretend it’s not even in the game outside of FOBs to fast travel with. You can just B-line the campaign and have like a 10 hour experience. I would consider that experience still pretty meaningful and fun to go through.
