Will 343 Finish this campaign or move on?

Games Halo Infinite
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I’m curious to know everyone’s thoughts on 343s execution of the campaign, and what they will do moving forwards. Personally I really liked the emotional core of the campaign and the music, but was very disappointed by the lack of its scope.

Infinite is a spiritual reboot, harkening back to Halo: CE, but lacks the bio-diversity and plot twist that were so essential to the original. Halo: CE took you all over the ring, an epic tale, and most importantly it surprised the hell out of you just after halfway and really shook up the world… sure you passed through some of the same places again, but seeing how they were transformed by the battle against the flood was fascinating and fun. Infinite has no such twist, and despite showing off a decent looking open world, the world is entirely static and stagnant.

I would love to see the following as basic additions to the campaign before we move on to another location.

1: The return of many of the important chracters from the last 20 years: Hood, Halsey, Blue Team, Lasky, the new Spartans, there is a whole slew of characters that just didn’t appear.

2: A dynamic world. What if part way through the campaign, human frigates are engaged in a battle over the Halo? What if part way through the flood arrive and transform the whole world?

3: More unique encounters. Far Cry does a great job at constantly filling the world with interesting encounters that you run into in a fluid and natural way. The repetitive missions in Infinite aren’t terrible but need more variety, each FOB can’t be the same, each HVT needs a unique location, and the story missions can’t just all be ominous sounding banished bases.

Other than this, I hope that in the next campaign we get a chance to run into the forces from the Spirit of Fire. Would be a great way to integrate some older weapons too, like the M90 shotgun.

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Same bio is wack.

No blue team is wack.

Open world is wack. Would rather linear

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I think that in a more controlled setting the open world could have worked better. There is just nothing dynamic to it, the enemy forces don’t control your movement, nothing random happens, there is no incentive for exploring and liberating forces… the environmental storytelling (which I thought would be the key selling point of the open world,) is practically non-existent.

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They’re done, the game was finished in dec, now they just need to make this game last as long as they can and squeeze as much money as they can out of it.

If there’s any dlc it will be super low quality, won’t be a free, and will be like the Spartan ops “live service” experience lol high quality content right there laugh

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They really just needed to have the ability to interact with other online players, and also connect it to the Multiplayer somehow.

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Agreed. They have no financial incentive to fix the botched campaign, and I don’t think expansions will be part of some excellent 10 year plan to move the narrative forwards, they will be throwaways that are thought up based on what they think will be popular in the moment.

I think they have this idea that they can relegate all of the canon characters and key things like the flood to small DLC stories.

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Hmm, I didn’t care much for the story, but I thought the gameplay was good. I don’t mind the open world - it was definitely fun the first time through, and I had some thoughts of trying to find the skulls without looking them up (only found 2 during my playthrough). Honestly seems pretty impossible though.

I would like it a lot if they added to the current map with another full campaign (think Diablo 2: Lord of Destruction where it improves the game as a whole as well as adding content). I have been staunchly anti-DLC since it became a practice, and I don’t think I’ve ever seen DLC that I actually thought was good and worth paying for. But expansions back in the day I certainly did. Little episodic DLC reminds me too much of that Halo 4 crap that I can’t even think of the name for… looked it up: Spartan Ops. That was the least fun Halo stuff I’ve experienced - they must do better this time.

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1) You’re assuming there’s anyone left alive. I knew this was going to be an issue in the campaign trailer when the hologram of the battle displayed KIA markers everywhere. I didn’t find the game enjoyable enough to put in the effort for audio logs so who knows.

2) What we got was the result of 6 years of “work”, I wouldn’t hold your breath. They’ve reportedly pulled a Destiny and cut away 2/3 of the game to sell back to you later, so you’re looking at maybe small chucks of marginally improved content.

I don’t think this is a “live service” PVE game that will grow and evolve , I think that only applies to pvp. You’re thinking of games like Warframe or to an extent, Destiny, but Infinite doesn’t even have coop let alone any sort of repeatable PVE content. I would be very surprised to see anything other than the other 2/3 of the campaign added back in.

3) Agian, these are the types of system highly unlikely to be added at this point considering how the engine is barely coping now. There’s no patrol systems, no bounty systems, theres no warring factions, no systems designed to have AI doing tasks out in the world, nothing dynamic about Infinite other than its core gameplay sandbox.

I would be very surprised to see 343 implement any of this now. More likely you’ll get more of what you’ve already have gotten, a Destiny-lite or Far Cry-lite experience. It sounds like you’re hoping for “emergent” gameplay akin to Ghost Recon Wildlands/Breakpoint, RDR2 or GTA V maybe but I don’t think Infinite even has the capability in a technical sense.

Typically in a game like this, how it launches in indicative of what you can expect overall. Time will tell.

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I agree with you on most points. It was disappointing that Master Chief, Escharum, and Atriox were the only recurring characters and Atriox was only there for like 5 seconds. Wish it had more pay-off for people who had played all of the games and read all of the books. With the game being open-world it felt like there was a lot less environmental diversity than previous halo games too, most places looked, felt, and played the same. It also felt like the encounters weren’t as unique or interesting either, with a few exceptions. The level-based design of previous Halos allowed for things like really good sniper encounters, warthog runs, aerial levels, heavy weapon levels, etc. while Infinite’s encounters all felt relatively the same without anything special.

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What bothered me the most was that not only was there a lack of biome diversity, the biome we got wasn’t all that filled out either. Particularly I felt like there was just very little environmental storytelling… I was so excited to find places where marines had a last stand, discover a hidden spartan squad, or to explore the haunting inside of a crashed human ship full of skeletons… nope! none of that.

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“I think we’re just getting started” (Master Chief, end of Halo:CE).

I don’t know about releasing “cut content”, if any. But I posted some time ago that 343i must have finished the planning stages for “Infinite Campaign 2” as they were already hiring new staff for the Engine upgrades (including DX12 Ray Tracing), as well as extra “next-gen gameplay designers” for “a next gen Halo Shooter” which is “the next exciting Halo Campaign”. So “Halo 7” as a next-gen only Halo Campaign seems to be in the works, and the “front end” of the Game Design Team have likely already started on it this January.

Meanwhile, we know they said there’d be a new Multiplayer Story DLC idea using the player’s own Multiplayer Spartan as the main character, and there’s a job open now for a Writing Director to oversee the project. Their role involves:

  • Collaborate with Halo Infinite’s Head of Creative (i.e. currently Joseph Staten) as well as other leads to create highly innovative and engaging, serial narrative content for Halo Infinite’s free-to-play.

  • Write everything from cinematic scripts to character sheets for casting to reactive A.I. dialog—and more. Provide precise and thoughtful feedback and editorial for other writers.

  • Work closely with the Halo franchise team to ensure Seasonal story content both leverages existing Halo lore and adds exciting new chapters to the larger Halo story.

[https://careers.microsoft.com/us/en/job/1235938/Writing-Director-Halo-Infinite]

So, yes, before “Halo 7”, there’s plenty of new campaign stuff to look forward to, once they get it up and running - they could maybe even weave any “cut content” from the main Infinite campaign into this new multiplayer story…

Hope this helps. :slight_smile:

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Blue Team are a classic example of when you introduce EU characters into the Main Stiry and pretend like they were always around.

“Oh they follow Chief because they’re like family… that’s why they were never mentioned before…they were off doing, uh, EU stuff, that’s why…”

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I don’t think they’d have to go totally linear. Personally I prefer the way that Stalker or Crisis handled levels. Open enough to give players a sense of exploration, but small enough that you could pack the levels with enough content that they don’t feel empty. I feel this way, because I like the exploration Infinite introduced. I really do, but the world can feel barren at times. I think if they wanted the exploration they could have done it without going full open world.

I do respect your opinion though. Linear is fine too. Just sharing my thoughts.

Would give you a like, but I’m all out. Kind of confuses me to be out of likes :woman_shrugging:

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I think the “Endless” potentially being able to manipulate time opens up a lot of doors for us to not only finish this campaign, but what if it allowed us to travel back and “relive” post campaign events from 4, 5, and so forth.