343 Industries has addressed some of the complaints with regards to Halo Infinite and its infamous gameplay reveal. Disappointment in what many Xbox fans were hoping to become a next-gen showcase has culminated in the birth of a meme with ‘Craig the Brute’ even.
Pretty much immediately after the worldwide first gameplay footage for the highly-anticipated Xbox Series X launch title Halo Infinite was shown last week, droves of disillusioned viewers started venting their utter disappointment across social networks.
It was inevitable really. Microsoft always planned and was open that first-party titles in the early years of next-gen were being created as cross-gen games. As such, these games must run on both the Xbox One family of consoles alongside the Series X. There’s only so much the developers can do in this scenario.
We’ve read your comments, we’ve seen the homemade examples of retouched content, and yes we’ve heard the Digital Foundry assessments. In many ways we are in agreement here – we do have work to do to address some of these areas and raise the level of fidelity and overall presentation for the final game. The build used to run the campaign demo was work-in-progress from several weeks ago with a variety of graphical elements and game systems still being finished and polished.
This doesn’t mean that Halo Infinite looks bad, however. At a full 4K and a blistering 60fps in the campaign, it’s rather impressive even. In a year when current-gen exclusives from Microsoft’s direct competitor Sony still look jaw-dropping, that just doesn’t cut it though.
343 Industries has now tried to explain why the game looked the way it looked and promised that the final game will be better. One aspect is the art direction that ditches Halo 4 & 5’s style and returns to the roots of the franchise. That inadvertently leads to Infinite looking more vibrant and less gritty.
The other more important part here is that the build of the demo was several weeks old. More work is going to go into the game until it launches this holiday and while the art style won’t be seeing a change, fans should look forward to a more polished experience then.
