When Microsoft—a company that made “$198 billion in revenue and $83 billion in operating income” in 2022—made the decision to axe 10,000 workers last week, a number of those came from their video game operations, particularly 343 Industries, the overseers of the Halo series.
343, hit now by a combination of layoffs and key departures, does not appear to be in good shape. As we reported last week:
“The layoffs at 343 shouldn’t have happened and Halo Infinite should be in a better state,” former Halo Infinite multiplayer designer, Patrick Wren, tweeted Wednesday night. “The reason for both of those things is incompetent leadership up top during Halo Infinite development causing massive stress on those working hard to make Halo the best it can be.”
Even prior to yesterday’s layoffs, 343 Industries has been facing wave after wave of high level departures as Halo Infinite struggled to ship new seasonal updates and features on time. The most notable was studio head Bonnie Ross’ departure last September. More recently, multiplayer director and longtime Halo veteran Tom French revealed he was leaving in December. And yesterday, amid the chaos, Bloomberg reported that director and longtime Halo writer, Joseph Staten, was headed to the Xbox publishing side of the business as the studio made the “difficult decision to restructure.”
Those hits led to reports last week that development on future Halo games was going to be handed off to outside studios, with 343 being relegated to a supervisory role. Reports that have seemingly led 343 to tweet the following statement on the official Halo account, denying them (to an extent) and saying 343 “will continue to develop Halo now and in the future”.
Halo and Master Chief are here to stay.
343 Industries will continue to develop Halo now and in the future, including epic stories, multiplayer, and more of what makes Halo great.
Pierre Hintze
Studio head
That’s a short statement that does nothing to address the report that other studios could now also be making Halo games (which isn’t that new anyway, given Creative Assembly’s work on Halo Wars), nor does it address the scale of the layoffs it was just hit with, but it does at least affirm that 343 themselves will still be directly involved in some way in the series’ future.
In Halo, “the sandbox” often refers to the weapons and vehicles on a map at any given time: all the toys you have to play with. But for a whole other set of Halo fans, that sandbox is the game itself. Be it through Forge or ambitious modding projects like SPV3, playing with the very core of the game itself is part of the legacy of the franchise. Now, Microsoft has made that even easier after publishing a thorough collection of modding resources for Halo: The Master Chief Collection. And as a surprise, some of these resources contain some never-before-seen images from Halo 2’s development way back in the early 2000s.
Today, Microsoft released official documentation for Halo: The Master Chief Collection’s mod tools, specifically Halo 2 and Halo 3 (other entries in the series are expected to receive documentation at a later date). As spotted by Halo modder Kiera on Twitter, some of the documentation for Halo 2 contains material directly from Bungie circa the early 2000s. With it are a few development images that few have seen until now.
Screenshot: Microsoft / Kotaku
What’s cool about these images is that they show off the inner workings of Halo 2’s engine. One of these images illustrates the “screenshot_cubemap” command. I’m not going to entirely pretend to know what this does, but based on the documentation, it’s for use in generating reflective surfaces, like we see in the old documentation photo provided.
Image: Microsoft / Kotaku
Another neat pair of images shows off debugging information, listing data for when a model is using specific weapons or playing out various animations.
Screenshot: Microsoft / Kotaku
Screenshot: Microsoft / Kotaku
Like many behind-the-scenes shots, these are hardly glamorous. But they are cool nonetheless. The development of Halo 2 is a tale of high ambition at the cost of abusive crunch, much of which has been talked about openly. Various materials from the game’s development have been seen before, while others remain out of reach, like the legendary 2003 E3 demo (which 343 has recently pondered finally making playable). Today, a little more has seen the light of day.
It’s a law of nature that eventually, every long-running game franchise will have a particular entry that gets dinged for straying too far from what made it so fun in the first place. Your Super Mario Sunshine, your Dragon Age II, Assassin’s Creed III, and so on. Whether or not that opinion changes more favorably over time, the initial specter of negativity will forever hover it. Microsoft’s Halo is no exception, except that negative specter hasn’t hovered over one particular game, but one whole studio.
Halo 4 released for the Xbox 360 on November 6, 2012, and was the first full entry from developer 343 Industries. The studio became the official stewards of the franchise after Bungie bowed out with Halo Reach in 2010, and prior to Halo 4, made Reach map packs and lead development on the 2011 remake to Halo: Combat Evolved. For what was the start of what would come to be known as the “Reclaimer Saga,” 343 wanted to put a bigger focus on narrative than Bungie’s games, which they achieved by bringing to the forefront the series’ deeper Forerunner lore that was present in the earlier games, but not the large focal point.
For a franchise whose earlier entries could best be summed up as “guy in helmet kills aliens,” and as the game industry was beginning to put a greater focus on characters in its single player offerings, you can see why 343 would follow suit. With that in mind, it makes sense why Halo 4 elects to weave in Master Chief and Cortana’s efforts to get back to Earth amidst the latter’s deteriorating mental state and subsequent death with the arrival of the Forerunner Didact, who wants to convert humans into robotic Promethean warriors under his rule to conquer the galaxy. If there’s anything that Halo could be suited for, it would be a deeper exploration of character, and whether one chooses to look at Chief and Cortana’s dynamic as platonic or romantic, there is something there that’s made their adventures worth following over years. But while the campaign tries its best, the end result is ultimately kind of a Mess.
Image: 343 Industries/Microsoft
No doubt, there’s some highlights: the opening wherein Chief and Cortana try to escape the ship they’ve spent years in cryo sleep on while being invaded by the Covenant is chaotic and dizzying, and the moment where the pair crash land on the world of Requiem and Chief looks up at the hovering skyscrapers brings a similar sense of bigness and awe akin to when the they stepped onto the Halo ring in the original game. Similarly, the penultimate mission, which is basically a Death Star run, can’t help but feel awesome thanks largely in part to a strong musical backing from co-composer Kazuma Jinnouchi.
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But the biggest problem of Halo 4’s campaign, and the Reclaimer Saga overall, is that it too easily overindulges in the series’ already established mythology, or just stacks on new lore without doing a decent enough job of establishing why it’s different than what’s come before. Amidst the Chief-Cortana story, which features some of the series’ best writing for the characters, the Forerunner of it all begins to feel like it’s mired in too much terminology to be approachable to anyone not already waist-deep in expanded media. And it’s a shame to say this, because Halo 4 contains one of the series’ most interesting additions that’s come to define 343’s future games, and even the Halo TV series.
Halo 4 features standard co-op similar to that of its predecessors, while also introducing a new mode called Spartan Ops. Set after the events of the game’s campaign, up to four players with their own customizable Spartans in would participate in missions with their own narrative hook and weekly release schedule. That mode didn’t last longer than the first season, and narrative events previously meant for future seasons were converted into monthly comics that served to bridge the campaigns of Halo 4 and Halo 5. But its spirit lived on on in 343’s sequels: Halo 5’s co-op puts players in the boots of three named Spartans on the respective teams of Master Chief and Jameson Locke. Halo Infinite, though it’s following in the footsteps of other live service games by featuring narrative events in its seasonal model, couldn’t have gotten there without Spartan Ops laying the foundation for the franchise to explo.
Image: 343 Industries/Microsoft
Amongst the pantheon of Halo developers, 343’s tenure hasn’t been without its issues and controversies, both overall and specific to certain entries. As stated at the jump, it’s the curse of any long-running franchise: the idea of what it is becomes held so tightly by fans that anything that deviates from it is seen as a gross betrayal. In this case, the franchise’s peak would be Halo 3, a juggernaut that was so big that it brought in players who never gave the series so much as a glance back then. At best, anything else that’s come after can only hope to reach second place or maybe be seen as a close enough equal, depending on one’s estimation of a particular game.
For 343, its Halo games feel like they come so close to perfection. Halo 4, 5, and Infinite have their respective strengths and weakness, and each one feels like they get a certain part of what makes the franchise so beloved and why it deserves to stick around. But each time the developers attempt to correct what didn’t work in a previous entry, the cracks in the franchise’s identity begin to show, and it’s getting to the point where they either need to get wholly new armor or move on to a new journey.
Want more io9 news? Check out when to expect the latest Marvel and Star Wars releases, what’s next for the DC Universe on film and TV, and everything you need to know about House of the Dragon and Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power.
The coolest part of Halo 2 never made it into Halo 2. If you’re at all a fan of the series, you know exactly what I’m talking about: the “Earthcity” demo, shown off during Microsoft’s E3 presentation in 2003. That level never made it into the full release of Halo 2, but nearly two decades later, a playable build is in the works, 343 Industries announced today in a blog post.
Just to give you a sense of how earth-shatteringly cool this is, here’s my real-time reaction upon learning the news, copied directly from Kotaku’s Slack channel:
wait
no fucking way
no
fucking
way
gemr2cmt4p4t3p2m8mp2340u9[m[0m19t
sry sry
my face fell onto my keyboard
In the cold light of today’s fidelity arms race, you might not get this impression looking at the clip’s lo-fi visuals, but it’s hard to overstate just how spine-tingling Halo 2’s E3 2003 demo was. Two years prior, Halo: Combat Evolved—and this almost goes without saying—redefined the first-person shooter. But that game was set entirely off-planet, on a ringworld called Halo. The “Earthcity” demo showed a look at a broader Halo canon—the primordial ooze for a sci-fi universe that’s spanned decades of games, spinoffs, comics, novels, a canceled film, and a recently renewed TV series.
The general scenario of “Earthcity”—a human metropolis is getting attacked, you’ve gotta protect it—is more or less replicated during the second and third levels of Halo 2. And certain gameplay elements the demo shows off, like the ability to wield two weapons at once, were also included in the full game. But the plot details diverged. Near the demo’s end, Master Chief boards a ghost, a typical ground vehicle of the covenant, Halo’s primary antagonistic force. He tears it full speed down a highway. He crashes, and then the demo pivots from real-time gameplay (eye-poppingly impressive for the time) to a pre-rendered cinematic. A number of covenant drop pods fall from orbit, elites wielding energy swords emerge and surround Chief. He pulls out a plasma grenade.
“Betcha can’t stick it,” Cortana, Chief’s AI companion, says.
“You’re on,” he says.
In Halo: Combat Evolved, elites with energy swords were arguably the toughest enemy unit. Facing one or two was usually tough enough. But seven? In close quarters? The demo couldn’t have ended on a more precipitous cliffhanger. As a player, you knew how much danger Chief was in—and you needed to know how he, how you, would fight your way out of it.
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Screenshot: 343 Industries
Though there’s no release date, 343 Industries is planning on making the stage playable in PC versions of “modern retail Halo 2.” (Halo 2 was released as a remastered version in 2014, which is also included as part of Halo: The Master Chief Collection.) The chance of it being playable on console is totally up in the air, in part due to the high technical hurdles for this endeavor.
“We originally didn’t have a lot of assets lying around for the map from previous analysis of leaked builds and the like,” General_101, a modder working with 343 on this project, wrote. “Just the source JMS files for the BSP and a few scenery objects. However, once the source map files turned up it was only a matter of time before we had all the data we needed.”
Beyond Halo 2’s E3 2003 demo, 343 is working with modders to add a ton of cut content to Halo: Master Chief Collection. For longtime Halo fans, there’s a ton of other fascinating stuff in the pipe, including the original elite models and a number of other renderings that never made the final cut. You can read it all here.
For a while now, the prevailing narrative around Halo Infinite is that interest in the game, once confidently perched at the summit of Mt. First-Person Shooter, has fallen off a precipice. But that stands poised to change when season two, “Lone Wolves,” rolls around on May 3. Folks, it sounds (and looks) dope AF.
Halo Infinite, first released last November for Xbox and PC, is the first game in the series to feature a free-to-play model. Like many games with a similar model, it’s built around a seasonal framework. Players have roundly praised Infinite’s fundamentals—the guns, the movement, the heavy dose of nostalgia—but criticized everything from pricey cosmetics to a general lack of new, updated content. (The game’s splashy special event, Fracture: Tenrai, repeated five times throughout Halo Infinite’s first season, with another occurrence planned for later this month.) For its part, developer 343 Industries instituted changes, like lower prices for cosmetics, throughout the first season.
Developer 343 Industries teased Infinite’s second season, “Lone Wolves,” in an exciting if vanishingly brief trailer, with a sizzle reel of new maps, cosmetics, and heavy-handed lines of dialogue (“We always have room for another wolf.”). That trailer is in addition to a series ofblog posts from the past few weeks outlining the granular changes.
There’s a lot to like. Also, you can earn $10.
Okay, not technically, but you could, in theory, buy one premium battle pass and never have to buy another. In January, 343 announced that players could earn credits—in-game currency spent on Halo’s microtransactions that roughly maps out to $1 for 100—through the mere act of playing but didn’t get into the weeds. Now, we know how it works.
Those who buy the premium battle pass for season two (battle passes cost 1,000 credits) can earn 1,000 credits over the course of the pass. You could conceivably then bank those 1,000 credits, spend them on the premium battle pass for season three, earn 1,000 credits from that pass, bank them for season four, and so on. Of course, that assumption is entirely contingent on three factors. Premium battle passes of future seasons would need to cost 1,000 credits. You’d need to be able to earn 1,000 credits from those premium passes. (Representatives for 343 Industries did not respond to a request for comment in time for publication.) And you’d need to have the time, patience, and energy to stick through the entirety of said battle passes.
But “free money” isn’t the only thing worth writing home about, as Infinite is getting a slew of new additions next month, including two new maps.
A huge sticking point for players was how Halo Infinite launched with ten maps—a fine enough number on paper, unless you scrutinize the circumstances. One of the initial maps, Behemoth, was so loathed by the community that 343 Industries eventually removed it from ranked playlists. Another one, Launch Site, is what experts describe as “just the fuckin’ worst.” And three of those maps were relegated to the large-scale Big Team Battle playlist, which spent months languishing with minimal functionality. Effectively, this meant Halo Infinite players were relegated to five maps that were actually reliably fun.
The long-neglected ravager will see an increase to its damage in season two.Screenshot: 343 Industries
Arena playlists will get Catalyst, a small-scale map that looks to be set on a Forerunner structure of sorts. Meanwhile, Big Team Battle—which is functional now!—is getting a new map called Breaker. The season two trailer shows some lava. In any case, if 343 continues to add two additional maps every season, that rate will put Halo Infinite on track to have the same total number of maps as prior Halo games. There’s a deep well to draw on, too; this is the first Halo under 343’s purview that hasn’t yet featured remade versions of popular maps from previous games. (My fingers are crossed for Halo 4’s Haven.)
Halo Infinite will see a bunch of new playlists, too. King of the Hill, the longtime mode in which players battle over control of a small space—and the one I personally haven’t shut up about wanting for the past six months—will be available from the start of the season in “multiple playlists.” As will Attrition, the tense, team-based deathmatch that was playable for a few weeks in January. (Called it.) When it comes back, you’ll no longer be frozen in place for a few seconds after you’re revived by a teammate.
More curious is the Last Spartan Standing mode, which is less of a known quantity than King of the Hill (been around for ages) or Attrition (has literally been playable in Infinite already). The official line is that it’s a “free-for-all elimination mode,” though details, like its release date or even a rundown of how it works, aren’t available. Data-miners believe it’ll be a twist on the 24-player Big Team Battle, something akin to a miniature battle royale.
Capstone rewards are also getting a much-needed overhaul. Every week, Halo Infinite provides players with a unique list of 20 challenges: rote tasks like “complete two Slayer matches” or “kill 50 players in PvP.” If you knock all of them out, you unlock that week’s capstone challenge. Finishing that gives you the week’s capstone reward.
Why yes, I will grind all of the challenges in the world for this sumptuously named “Alabaster Cognac” vehicle coating.Image: 343 Industries
Right now, capstone rewards are all over the place. On one hand, when they’re not worth the time sink—say, an emblem that’s both ugly and has also popped up as a reward for two out of the prior five weeks—so players feel disincentivized to complete the grind. But when the rewards are awesome, you get players saying they feel too much pressure to play, or even feel some FOMO for not being able to make the time commitment. The rewards outlined so far for “Lone Wolves” seem to strike a solid balance: of the five detailed, it’s a mixture of stances, weapon skins, and vehicle coatings. John Junyszek, Halo’s senior community manager, said boring prizes like emblems and backdrops won’t be issued as capstone rewards. It’s a key sign that 343 is listening to its player base, internalizing the feedback, and actually making crucial changes.
These are all in addition to various balance tweaks for weapons (the mangler, the ravager) and equipment (the drop wall, the overshield). Exciting times, if you’re a Halo fan.
But “Lone Wolves” isn’t entirely the silver bullet Halo Infinite needs, as it is going to launch absent some promised features. Support for the cooperative campaign, which can reportedly support two players in splitscreen and four players online, was slated to launch with the release of the season. That’s since been delayed, and is now slated for an unspecified date later in the season. (“Lone Wolves” is scheduled to run for about three months.) And save for one notable leak, the Forge creation tool is nowhere to be seen. Though it was always slated for Infinite’s third season, 343 hasn’t officially unveiled details.
The big question for Halo players is if “Lone Wolves” can reinvigorate players who’ve bounced off the game, or if it’s too little too late. In my mind, there’s precedent here. Just look at 343’s own Halo: The Master Chief Collection, arguably among the most disastrous launches for a big-budget online game…maybe ever? But 343 stuck with it, shored up the servers, added a bunch of new content, folded in enticing targets and seasonal models, and turned the ship around. Halo: The Master Chief Collection was, for a while there, one of the best multiplayer shooters.
Can 343 pull off that same hat trick twice? Only time will tell, of course. But for the first time in a while, I’m feeling optimistic about Infinite’s future.
Master Chief carries the new Halo show.Image: Paramount+
Imagine being a fan of Halo, waiting what feels like decades to see the game brought to live-action, only for it to happen, it be released, and you can’t watch it. That surely happened to some of the faithful this week when Halo debuted on Paramount+, if they weren’t subscribers to the service. But the streamer is hoping everyone will subscribe—and to suck audiences in, it’s dropped the entire first episode on YouTube for free.
Starring the excellent Pablo Schreiber as Master Chief, Halo follows a team of super-soldiers called Spartans who were created to battle aliens known as the Covenant. There’s obviously much more to the store than that—and there’s no better way to dive in than to watch the show’s first episode, which you can do here.
So, should you continue on with the show? In io9’s review, Justin says that “Having seen the first two episodes in advance, it’s clear that showrunners Steven Kane and Kyle Killen are very much interested in exploring the Halo universe through a wider lens than the main games have provided. There’s enough faithfulness on display in Halo to prove that this is a show for the fans. But there’s also enough willingness here to shake things up, get a little looser and weirder so it can take the Chief on a great journey of its own that could offer up some fun surprises.”
Plus, if you do invest in Halo, you know the action won’t end with this first season, since Paramount has picked up the show for season two—a strong indicator of the streamer’s confidence in it, as well as a commitment to making Halo a signature genre show on the platform. Think Stranger Things on Netflix, The Handmaid’s Tale on Hulu, or The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power on Prime Video.
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It’s the end of an era. On Thursday, Microsoft and 343 Industries turned off all the matchmaking servers for classic games Halo 3, Halo 3: ODST, Halo Reach, and Halo 4. And while you can still play versions of these games online via the fantastic Master Chief Collection, many players took time in the final days before January 13 to log on and mourn the end of the original games’ online multiplayer. Some helped other players get last-minute achievements, while others orchestrated cease-fires, and some just played one last match before it all ended.
The shutdown of Xbox 360-era Halo servers, while sad for many, wasn’t a surprise. 343 and Microsoft first announced the news all the way back in December 2020, but the date ended up shifting to January 13, 2022. Now that the date is here, over the last week or so, many players have dusted off their Xbox 360s and hopped back onto Halo 3 and Halo Reach, to join others in saying goodbye to some of the best multiplayer games ever made.
A popular activity in the final days involved players helping others unlock multiplayer-only achievements. A lot of players helped others earn the “Two For One” achievement in Halo 3, considered one of the hardest in the game. To get it you have to kill two players in one shot using the Spartan Laser. Other players helped folks unlock the “Maybe Next Time, Buddy” award which is unlocked after you steal a vehicle back from someone in less than 10 seconds, which can be tricky to get normally. But in the final days of Halo 3, people were open to helping each other grab these last-minute awards and communicated their plans via the game’s voice chat.
Another common occurrence in the final hours for the old-school Halo games was players stopping matches to hang out and chat. Some fired their guns into the air, simulating 21-gun salutes. Others just sat around and chatted about Halo 3, their favorite memories, and what made the game so special to them. It reminded me of the Christmas Day Truce that happened in the early days of WW1, where soldiers from both sides left their trenches to stop fighting in the name of the holidays.
I also saw another player who, during a CTF match, took a moment to eulogize Halo 3 right before capping the flag for the last time.
“Everyone, it has been some of the greatest moments of my life,” said Halo 3 player Xxminiman15xX. “I’m very, very sad to see this end. But, it’s not an end, because we will always have our memories. We’ll always have our moments. And… we can still play on the Master Chief Collection.”
After that they capped the flag, the match ended and shortly after that, the servers began shutting down. Players across Reddit and YouTube shared videos of the moments right as the servers gave up the ghost. Other players took screenshots of the matchmaking screen from Halo 3. Normally the globe seen in the bottom left-hand corner of the map would be lit up representing the various players around the world. But with the servers officially dead, for the first time since Halo 3 was released in 2007, all the lights were gone. The world was covered in darkness. It was over.
Watching players come together to celebrate the end of Halo 3’s servers has been oddly touching. It might have just been a multiplayer shooter, but it was also a game that brought people together. Folks shared stories of meeting friends and even husbands and wives through Halo 3 and Reach.
For me, Halo 3 was probably the last Halo game that I truly, completely loved. I spent so much time in Halo Reach and older games, but none of them (not even the recent and very good Infinite) ever captured the same feeling of Halo 3. Part of that was because I was younger, of course, but also because it was one of the first online video games I really sank weeks of my life into.
Booting up Halo 3 was special, as if I was connecting to a wild and beautiful community. Servers were full of community-created modes and maps—like the wild and crazy “Speed Halo” in Reach or custom parkour and race map in Halo 3. Partaking in that creativity made the games feel like a thing that was actually alive and evolving. I celebrated birthdays in this game. Escaped to its online action when high school got too shitty. It was a place of refuge and a place where I met cool people. (And some racist and assholes.) It also helped that Halo 3 was a damn fine shooter, too.
And while it is true that you can still play Halo 3 online via the excellentMaster Chief Collection, it isn’t the same. That era is now gone. The fight is finished. And like a good Spartan, Halo 3 didn’t go quietly.
Early on, you’ll find the playground for this tentpole shooter isn’t just big—it’s enormous, veering on the edge of what you’d find in a true open-world game, à la, say, anything in Ubisoft’s portfolio. The format is a marked departure from previous Halo games, which have always played out as linear sci-fi shooters largely set in hallways of various grays, purples, blues, and greens, with occasional larger landscapes beyond. Over the past six weeks, I’ve played a lot of Halo Infinite. Despite the size of its objective-peppered map, I’m not entirely convinced it’s an open-world game, at least not in the way we’ve come to think of it.
Clue #1: When I recently spoke with two creative leads on Halo Infinite, associate creative director Paul Crocker and character director Stephen Dyke, neither said the phrase “open world” once over the course of our nearly hour-long discussion.
Clue #2: Halo Infinite, an approximately 17-hour game for most players, is neatly broken into three parts. The first section is a two-hour linear section that doubles as a tutorial (for newcomers) or a walk down memory lane (for lapsed players). The second third is a series of subsequent sprawling open areas, replete with side-quests, hidden collectibles, fast-travel spots, and bases you can capture, with every region culminating in a bombastic mission or two. The final third is a four-hour linear sprint to the finish.
Clue #3: That final section? Once you start it, you can’t fast travel back to what Dyke calls “the more open areas.” And you don’t get a heads-up about the point of no return. It’s a little annoying, for sure. (“That’s on us,” said Crocker.) But it’s also a quiet rebuttal of the formula established by so many true open-world games that have come before.
Clue #4: Halo Infinite is, by most accounts, a manageable game. It eschews the “if you see it, you can go to it” ethos that’s come to define the open-world genre, a genre that so often demands a triple-digit playtime commitment.
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Read More:Halo Infinite Is Harder Than You’d Expect, And That’s By Design
“We never wanted to make a 100-hour drag for the player,” Crocker said. “It still had to be this focused … experience as opposed to, ‘Now Master Chief needs to go hunt some space crocodiles or something just to be able to carry on.’ It works for other games, but it doesn’t work for Chief.”
Master Chief, for those who don’t know, is Halo’s longtime protagonist, and is the backbone of Halo Infinite, following the series’ dalliance with other playable characters in Halo 5. As Chief, you can forgo your primary objectives to rescue a group of stranded marines or take out an enemy commander or track down hidden tech that’ll improve your abilities. And there’s a crop of cosmetic options, typically tucked in the furthest reaches of the map, that you can find for use in Halo Infinite’s standalone, free-to-play multiplayer portion. The optional stuff in Infinite is by and large rewarding.
“Ideally, at least, [players] say, ‘Oh, that was cool,’” said Dyke. “Our goal was never to make those things that are off the beaten path feel grindy or feel like a way of inflating the amount of time.”
Screenshot: 343 Industries / Kotaku
But the constant narrative thrum nonetheless compels you to hit the next main mission. If you veer off course, your companion, an artificial intelligence unit known as the Weapon, repeatedly urges you to get back on track.
“Constantly shouting ‘Go, go, go’ to the player basically encourages them to finish the game as quickly as possible, right? If the story is telling you the world’s going to melt, you’re not going to hang around to investigate that smoke on the horizon,” said Crocker. “The tricky part is making sure it feels important but not urgent—or, very specifically, if it doesn’t break the character of Master Chief, it doesn’t break your intent as a player, but still feels that you’re part of this thing that’s moving forward.”
Halo Infinite indeed moves forward at breakneck pace, thanks to a plot underscored by mystery. Prior Halo games generally sported the same solid if expected narrative chassis: pick up the big gun, beat the big bad guy. Halo Infinite, however, turns Chief into an unreliable narrator for the first time. And then there’s the giant question mark posed by Infinite’s setting: Zeta Halo. It looks like a Halo (an ancient ring-shaped space station) but is inexplicably shattered, and is apparently capable of secret functions beyond the one for which Halo stations are known: galactic elimination of sentient life. (In this regard, Infinite isn’t exactly subtle. At one point, in case you’re not getting it, Master Chief literally says Zeta Halo is “not like the others.”)
Screenshot: 343 Industries / Kotaku
Crocker, who cited Halo: Combat Evolved’s “Halo” level as a north star in development, and Dyke, who said the same about that game’s “Silent Cartographer” level, wanted to capture the bottled lightning that put Halo on the map two decades ago.
Both of those early missions share a similar throughline: You start alongside a crew of headstrong marines, you have access to a minor fleet of futuristic vehicles, and you can approach your tasks—firefights set in expansive exteriors and claustrophobic interiors—in a manner you see fit. But beyond the mission structure, “Halo” and “Silent Cartographer” both conveyed a sense that Halo was far more grand, in terms of scale, than what you could see on the screen—a necessity, given the technical confines of the era.
“I remember, 20 years ago, playing it and going, ‘This is amazing! Look at the grass! Look how wide this corridor is!’ when you first land. Then you go back, looking at it, and it’s not really that wide, but it’s wide enough at the time,” Crocker said. “[For Infinite], we wanted to figure out how many walls we could break down and keep you feeling the same way you did—that sense of awe and wonder and mystery that you had 20 years ago.”
These days, game development isn’t so limited by technology, and the team at 343 Industries has the tools at their disposal to realize the dream posed by those early Halo levels. If Halo’s early levels sketched out the blueprint, Halo Infinite is the finished house.
“To me, [‘Silent Cartographer’] is one of those missions where it’s, like, that, but scaled, is just a great representation of what we’ve delivered with Infinite,” Dyke said.
You can see this most clearly during a mid-game level called “The Sequence,” the final “more open area” before Halo Infinite reverts to the framework of a linear shooter. In “The Sequence,” you have to extract data from four towers in your near vicinity. The region is interspersed with more than three dozen optional objectives—bases to capture, squads of marines to save, high-value targets to eliminate, collectibles to find—that you can tackle en route from tower to tower.
Or you could capture an aerial vehicle and knock out the whole thing in under an hour.
Open-world games sell you the promise of infinity—that you can go anywhere, see anything, do whatever you want whenever you want to. In Halo Infinite, “The Sequence” segment no doubt gives you a healthy sampling, preceded, in earlier levels, by appetizer-sized portions of the same dish. But it ultimately circles back to, and spends a bulk of its time on, the reliable alien hallways that make a Halo a Halo. Yes, Halo Infinite is huge. It’s still finite, though, and those tighter, more focused sections that bookend the game still feel so central to Halo’s identity—too central, in my view, for Infinite to truly bear the mantle of an open-world game.
“We wanted to start in a linear fashion and end in a linear fashion, and then everything in between is encouraging you to go out and explore,” Crocker said. “We wanted to make the end feel very impactful.”
Wasn’t I just commending Halo Infinite a couple of weeks ago for letting me wear cutesy stuff like sunflowers and roses? Now I’m back to sing its praises for a different type of armor attachment that will be a familiar sight to egirls and weebs alike. Yes, Master Chief can now wear cat ears. This is the future Alex Jones tried to warn you about, a world belongs to cat boys and cat girls.
But these ears come at a price—and are only available in multiplayer. Costing about 10 bucks in real-world money, the “Purrfect Audio” cat ears are a part of a larger feline-themed bundle that includes a worn salmon-colored armor coating. Unfortunately, the ears can only be worn on a single armor core. That’s a bummer, because other types of wares have started to become a bit more flexible. The red-and-gold Iron Man colorways being hocked right now, for example, apply to multiple armor cores—including the infamously limited (but soon to be easier to customize) samurai core! Still, when I’m sitting tight with a lil’ teddy bear fastened to my baby-blue military camo, cat ears perked up behind cover, trigger finger at the ready for the mere hint of enemy footsteps, it’s hard to complain. I’m cute and that’s what matters.
Good timing, too. Right now, there’s a big holiday-themed event going on that requires logging in for multiple days to win a variety of different goodies. While some might find this requirement onerous during a stretch of time that can involve tons of social obligations (if not travel), there’s also plenty of incentive here too. By which I mean: That pink-and-green armor advertised in the event sure seems like it would pair nicely with my new cat ears. Nobody said lookin’ good would be easy. My holiday plans just got slashed because of omicron, so I’ve got nothin’ better to do anyway.
And for those of you completely repelled by the cat ear vibes, don’t worry, there’s something for you too: 343 is selling some truly distinguished shades of black, brown, and gray coatings for your trusty battle rifle. Representation matters, people.
Like clockwork, players of Halo Infinite’s free-to-play multiplayer mode are bristling at the price of a cosmetic item. But wait! It’s different this time, I promise. For one, the backlash comes on the heels of a positively received slew of changes in Halo Infinite. For another, it’s only partially due to the price tag.
Yesterday, developer 343 Industries added a bevy of player-requested multiplayer modes and playlists, to general praise across the board. (Boo-yah, Slayer.) Those launched alongside a time-limited armor bundle in Infinite’s store, which has received what can generously be called the opposite of praise, mostly due to what fans say is a steep sticker price, but also because the armor has been standard-issue in some previous Halo games.
Every Tuesday, Halo Infinite’s in-game store resets its slate of offerings, typically featuring an armor set, a vehicle skin, and a bundle of weapon skins. Right now, the main armor bundle up for grabs is the HAZOP armor set, which is currently on sale for 2,000 credits ($18 of real-world money in Infinite’s microtransaction store). Picking it up grants you access to nine cosmetic options for your Halo Infinite player avatar: the HAZOP helmet, a series of similar armor attachments, a murky brown visor coloring, and the “tasman hunter” armor coating (basically a light gray with orange accents).
Responses to the announcement are by and large negative, with players wondering why the price is so high; offering suggestions for a different pricing tier, usually to the tune of $10 or $5; and sharing pictures of Giancarlo Esposito’s pitch-perfect glare. As ever, in addition, there’s also no shortage of vitriol, but we needn’t give that stuff any more oxygen than it already has.
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It’s not just that folks think 2,000 credits is a steep asking price (every weekly set of Halo Infinite armor has the same price tag) but also that the HAZOP helmet has a long history in Halo’s suite of customization options. In 2010, it appeared in Halo: Reach, where you could unlock it relatively easily by just playing the game. It also showed up in 2019 as an unlockable item in Halo: The Master Chief Collection, once that game pivoted to a seasonal model.
And then there’s the matter that, yes, it’s 2,000 credits at face value. But this entire batch of HAZOP customization options is only applicable on the Mark V [B] armor kit. While you needn’t make it far into the battle pass to unlock that kit, you do need the premium battle pass, an upgrade that’ll run you 1,000 credits ($9 of real-world money). In other words, while the HAZOP armor set itself is $18, it’ll cost you $27 to equip it, though of course that $9 gets you a whole bunch of other unlockable items, including cosmetic options and those coveted challenge swaps.
But these price tags shouldn’t come as the world’s biggest surprise. After all, this is the very same game that just yesterday asked players to fork over 700 credits (not totally sure the math there but let’s say, I don’t know, $8 or $9?) on a tea bag charm that’d dangle underneath the barrel of your sidearm.