Why Infinite's campaign is the worst in the series

Games Halo Infinite
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Halo Infinite is aptly named. Not because it took everything about the Halo Franchise and gave us a game with infinite possibilities, it was because it is a seemingly infinite version of level 2 of Combat Evolved, Halo.

The map had no variety in terms of environment. It was badly rendered trees, gray and beige rocks, hexagonal columns, forerunner structures that all felt the same and a few banished bases and UNSC shipwrecks and small bases.

Halo campaigns were always great in that most missions offered a variety of different environments.

Both Halo 1 and 4 took place in almost completely forerunner environments and still managed to portray alpine environments, desert environments, snowy environments, jungle environments, alien environments and even tropical beach environments.

Halo Reach and ODST gave us human environments that were different enough to be fun to explore and replay.

Halo 2, 3 and 5 gave us campaigns that spanned human and forerunner worlds and gave us even more set pieces to appreciate and mess around in.

Even Halo Wars, Wars 2, Spartan Assault and Strike gave us different looking places to play the game in and this all matters.

Nobody wants to play a campaign where everything looks the same, even if it is open world. Halo could have pulled off an open world game if it actually had the environment it billed itself as having in the E3 2017 trailer for infinite. Imagine if there was the initial Halo level feel, and then you could go through environments that slowly transitioned into other biomes, like desert, tundra, tropical, etc.

I could have paid better attention to the plot and felt more compelled to play it more often if the open world actually felt different and like a Halo game. Maybe 343 should stop being a subpar game company and add some yoinking single player content.

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I enjoyed the campaign but your are indeed correct.

Before the games release i thought it would be snowy winter weather in mountain areas.

Also hoped for the possibility of rain aswell.

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Okay, bitter Halo 5 fans opinion here. :smile:

There are some very good things. It is enjoyable to play and adventure around the map. Combat is fun. I liked what was there on the map. Music and ambience is amazing.

But look at what people can do with games now. I literally just went on Arma Reforged and they can get a remastered 54km2 Everon map to work on console. With a games master map editor. Never mind your assassins creed games.

There’s then other issues such as the fact it is consciously telling a much smaller and lower stakes story. The fate of the galaxy is not at stake. Nothing really epic actually happens. It does lack cinematic flair and whilst it soundly nails the personal story elements with one glaring blue misstep at the end you’re just left a little underwhelmed.

The world building is, frustrating. You shouldn’t try to pass off your retcon as a mystery and leave so much vague that you really are only left with a surface level stuff.

I don’t like the Banished. They are the First Order. Come out of nowhere. 343 can only build them up by having them just wreck everything and tear other factions down. It’s kind of cringe.

Also, rather than make this Chief wanting revenge on the Banished they have him be all sympathetic towards the Banished. That doesn’t work for me. If you’re going to fridge Cortana at least let him find new purpose and vengeance.

I think not introducing the Endless properly was a mistake. You can’t tell me this is the most dangerous faction ever and then make a no show. If what we saw was gold, fine, but all I saw was floating squid people; not sure what the fuss is about. They have a lot of work to get that story back on track.

Only having a single faction is boring. If you’re going to cut the Prometheans, which takes no work, then I’d expect a new faction to be brought in.

The game is presented like it’s Destiny 2 and the next DLC will rapidly update the story. Clearly not the case and so all of these issues are compounded.

Also I don’t like that they’re replacing Cortana with the Weapon. It’s only being done because the haters wanted Cortana dead after Halo 5. 343 is trying to have their cake and eat it by writing themselves out of the issue. That they can keep the love story and drama without doing a full Cortana redemption arc. But you have no reason to be invested in that character. All the drama of her asking Chief to forgive her for stuff Cortana did is really weak and I don’t buy it. The idea of them being perfectly perfect is weird and is only going to get weirder.

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For me the campaign lacked that sense of urgency, that race to the finish, the pursuit of the end. Part of it was the “open-world” element. Having side missions and HVT’s dilutes the overall story progression. These side missions distract from the main campaign, serving no real positive or negative addition to the story. Just map clutter for players to “explore”.
The open world element also removes good set-pieces for the campaign. Ideally, that is now left to the player to create impressive moments, but other then just swinging around a-la spiderman, the encounters are bland and dont offer a sense of “wow that was badass!!” The only moment thay felt cool and made me feel like a badass was in the opening mission where you have to escape the banished ship…that was really it.
I was absolutely excited for the next installment of Halo, and was elated when they claimed it was a continuation of Halo 5, but it glossed over important events and sidelined key characters. 343i claimed they werent adding new characters, but then we have all new banished characters, the pilot, the weapon, the endless…
To me 343i has some very ambitious ideas, and goals, but taking it across the finish line is where they stumble. Thats not to say Bungie was great or is great, Halo 2 was a development disaster.

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I don’t think you played Halo 5: horrendous

I view Halo Infinite as Good but Not the Best

Halo 4 was also a pretty bad game outside of the emotion and empathy felt for Cortanna. But then it was completely thrown out the window for H5

Halo 2’s campaign was also bad; it just had a cool setting.

Halo 1, Halo 3, Halo ODST, Halo Reach were masterfully done. I think Halo Infinite sits below these but above H4/H5/H2

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Agreed. The experience is dry and forgetable. All it did was do what halo 5 did to halo 4. more or less tie up the plot points off screen and press the reset button. All 3 of 343’s halo games could be the start of their own trilogies and have no cohesive connecting tissue aside from tons of off scren retcons and happenstance. From a narrative perspective and a gameplay one infinite falls incredibly flat for me. No diverse locations, very very bland and limited weapon sandbox, and enemy variety. yes CE was a great game but going back to having such a narrow scope of sandbox elements isnt fun after all halo 4 and 5 introduced.

im not saying the game should be overly bloated but at least meet what previous halo games gave us in terms of location & gameplay variety. Even the enemies in infinite’s story are boring. Escharum’s generals are all just nobodies that we care nothing about. Even Jega my most anticipated character did nothing but die. He wasnt sneaking around, being a pain in the -Yoink!- or anything through the story. Just like all the other bosses he just appeared, talked crap, and died. Such a mssively missed opportunity for such an amazing sangheli assasin.

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Well that’s the thing it’s not overly bloated. It is quite normal for an open world game to have a lot of content.

It’s boring because it’s never raises the stakes. There is no threat or escalation in this game. You’re just killing Xenos that the game tells you are a problem. I think it’s very apparent that they could only get so much done, so they consciously decided to make an intro story. For example if they hadn’t done any work on the Endless faction or planned for the Swords of Sanghelios to show up. That would have taken a lot more effort and there was probably an element of let’s have a proper go at this rather than sour people to the Endless by making it half baked.

Halo 4 wasn’t really retconned to anywhere near the same extent. Halo 4 is a self contained story in which it was (and still is) left open that the Didact could return. The Galaxy didn’t fundamentally change and it’s still the same post Covenant War setting. Nothing really changed apart from losing Cortana.

That’s not the same for Halo 5. Cortana literally conquers the Galaxy and establishes something like the Culture with a huge AI rebellion. It’s a colossal change to the setting and there really isn’t any way of gracefully avoiding this. They spent six years writing novels and even a spin off title avoiding addressing this just so they could say “forget it” in Halo Infinite and retcon the whole thing. Even Rubicon Protocal barely acknowledges it and the character act like they’ve got collective amnesia. They could easily have just palmed it off to the hacks and had one or two novels that address these things.

For example, there is not a single POV from Cortana or a Created character in any novel. We have never seen a Created occupied human world, much less Earth whose fate is left needlessly ambiguous. Most of the novels and Halo Wars 2 mention the Created and then rapidly move onto to whatever random unrelated threat or story is occupying their time.

They have not even done the absolute bare minimum required to dig themselves out of it. Which would be:

  • Explain what happened and the consequences. Then stick to those consequences.
  • Have some kind of rapprochement between AI and humanity.

Instead what they’re doing is writing the lore and story as if this didn’t happen at all.

Also, the Banished are not good enough to be the main villain. Chief has killed thousands of Brutes. Why is one random warlord suddenly this incredible nemesis who could easily beat him? I don’t buy that and it’s obnoxious. The same can be said of the Banished generally. The UNSC and Swords of Sanghelios should easily be able to destroy the Banished; especially after the destruction of Doisac.

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The biggest disappointment for me playing the campaign that I only ran it 1 time back when infinite launched and haven’t touched it since. This was a huge miss of opportunity and anyone can easily tell it wasn’t play tested, and that it was pushed right out the door as is.

Starting it off I thought to my self that the campaign was going to be interesting looking at some of the artwork that was used from Halo Reach. Well, that thought was vary short lived seeing how the open would felt like copy and paste work wherever I went that my interest even wanting to finish the campaign diminished, but I did. I bet if they actually worked with Staten and some of the other original Bungie employees, and other companies that know how to create an open world instead of just winging it. The campaign could have been a hell of a lot better with that verity when it comes to the environment.

Whether some know this or not, the visual experience is a vary important part of any story.

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Be glad you didn’t. It’s still the same hacky melodrama we got in Halo 4 & 5, just with a new coat of paint. Master Chief as a character is incredibly boring and disinteresting. I find Infinite’s single player offering to be the worst in the mainline series.

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343 is based in Washington and admitted they based Halo Infinite on the mountainous landscape of the pacific northwest. Basically 343 is extremely unimaginative and just used Google Maps to remake Washington and Canada but with hexagon assets and call it a Halo Ring

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Couldn’t believe Chief actually said “he was a soldier just like me”

I just found it hilarious. Considering all the poor life forms chief absolutely demolishes to even get to that point with Eshcharum or whatever is name was.

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