The Absolute Chaos of Halo Infinite

so it's December 2019 and despite a decade of Abominations the last year had seen three four three Industries apparent change of pace their first well-received game the fixing of the MCC and then remastering and bringing Halo 1 through reach to PC after a decade in charge of the franchise it looked like they were finally getting things right but back in 2018 they've given us another bombshell the next Halo was officially announced to E3 and it looked amazing [Music] foreign was that the classic Halo 3 piano note and the classic helmet my God after a decade of fans begging for a Mainline game that actually looked like Halo it looked like it was actually on the cards under E3 2019 we got our next taste doing this oh my God classic armor classic music classic one-liner no we need a fight this next game was actually looking and sounding like a Halo game my God that suit is magnificent it looks so good dude that suit looks so sick oh my gosh that armor he looks like Halo three four three is also boasting a Next Generation slip space engine that they're built for the future of the franchise but fast forward to E3 2020 and it's big we get another trailer and a ton of details the game's multiplayer is going free to play guaranteeing a massive player base and is it to be live service for years to come meaning there'd be a ton of new content seasons and battle passes every three months Chrisley 343's current Studio head for infinite is even saying the game would be the platform for the next 10 years of Halo and yes he confirms that Split Screen Co-op would indeed be a net launch but most importantly we finally get a glimpse at infinite's actual gameplay however fans noticed something um those Graphics they don't look great it's an Xbox series X launch title yet they look 360 level in fact in some places even Halo 3 actually looked better there are also these weird blocky hexagonal bars everywhere that weren't there before resulting in a map that looks more like a Minecraft world than an x-gen Halo the lighting also looks atrocious the trees unrendered and the dialogue seems a bit over the top [Music] also a freeze frame on a particularly awful looking brute mid-trailer is screen capped uploaded to Twitter and memed instantly someone at 343 had also forgotten to even animate the chief here and this game was supposed to be launching in just a few months time dear God no fans have been abused enough and now this brute is popping up all over the place this hair this looks diabolical please just delay the game van spec but being a launch title for the series X this seemed like a pipe dream at best however a couple of weeks after E3 and Microsoft actually caves him yeah okay the game does look a bit atrocious you're right they then make an unprecedented move sorry guys the game is delayed by a year meaning it wasn't going to make the launch date of the new Xbox it's around this time that some other Microsoft Dev studios are also rumored to join on to help 343 okay this development was not sounding good but at least they weren't rushing it out Microsoft was going to make sure this game was good infinite Studio head Chris Lee is given the boots instantly and Joe Staton Bungie's head writer for Halo 1 through reach joins the team to help fix the clear cluster part going on behind the scenes this man is the father of Halo's story so naturally fans celebrate come on 343 returns to the Shadows a few months go by and in early 2021 343 comes back and they're now claiming Halo infinite is content complete and that they were now just refining stuff fans are rubbing their hands together we get more trailers at E3 2021 including a look at the multiplayer and the game is given a solid release date December 8th 2021 from E3 onwards radio silence no news anywhere so people online are resorting to the next natural source Mega Bloks sets see Halo infinite was supposed to release in 2020 and thus the Mega Blok sets were supposed to launch just after the game but due to the delay they were out before the game and turns out they're giving us more info on the game than the trailers themselves however in August 2021 just a few months before launch and 343 has an announcement we know it was the very first thing we said about the game and we promised it all the way back in 2017 but no no Co-Op campaign for infinite at launch it's coming as part of the game's second season of content three months after launch Forge is also delayed that would now be coming in season three six months after launch Jesus Christ this is just a few months after they'd said the game was content complete three months later and it's November 12th around a month before launch rumors are spreading and word on the street is the multiplayer portion of the game will be out on Halo's 20th anniversary November 15th people are doubtful but the day comes and it actually drops three weeks before infinite's official launch six years of development and hundreds of millions of dollars and we're now on the cusp of seeing the next 10 years of Halo but before that do you like tanks well in World of Tanks they're everywhere artillery tanks light Tanks medium tanks heavy tanks over 800 attacks all completely historically accurate playing World of Tanks is simple just get in your tank hit the clutch and go fight up to 15 enemy players in intense online battles with multiple ways to play Hang back and snipe or run up the front line with your friends and you can rag your tank through Fields forests deserts and cities in over 40 different arenas so many Maps so many tanks and World of Tanks is free to play Wayne are those three tanks yep a tier 5 Excelsior 250k credits seven days premium access and three rental tanks for 10 battles each new players can get them by signing up with the invite code tank Mania through the wargaming portal or going to this link in the description and comments people log on and start playing and wait the game was actually good my God after 10 years Halo fans spree the sigh of relief now going into making this game 343 had a slight problem by completely neglecting what Halo actually was and just doing their own thing for the past 10 years they've cultivated a whole new fan base that had only really been around for the newer games meaning two portions of their fan base wanted completely different things it was now increasingly difficult to please both how could they bring back Halo while maintaining their new fan base well with infinite they'd tried their best and it worked Sprint is still there for the newer fans but it's heavily nerfed and a lot slower aspects of Halo 5's Advanced movement is also there but instead of everyone having it by default bits and pieces of it are now scattered across the sandbox in the form of in-game equipment pickups similar to Halo 3 maps like Behemoth that also a return to the classic Halo aesthetic and layout and the grapple hook equipment quickly becomes a fan favorite the campaign is widely praised the old music Czech the old art style check one line is doesn't that scare you no check its story is also a lot more grounded in halo-esque than both the previous games and basically ditch's Halo 5's plotline entirely it's also completely open world and a ton of fun it looked like 343 had finally done it made an actual Halo game it's not uncommon to see people online even saying it's the best gameplay Halos ever had massive player numbers flood in immediately Xbox claims 20 million on launch day Halo's biggest launch to date also turns out that this year Cod and especially Battlefield weren't looking too hard so much so that an EA executive blames Halo infinite for 2042's awful sales and player numbers in an internal meeting the sentiment was almost unanimous infinite had knocked it out the park oh yeah Halo was back on top [Music] however issues slowly start to rear their head first off 343 had called the multiplayer's early launch a multiplayer beta turns out that was a bit misleading everyone has permanent access to it all progress carries over to the full release and it included all of the full releases online maps and content so when the full game releases three weeks later with no new multiplayer content players are confused uh I thought that was a beta where's the new stuff if this is the full online experience this game is woefully underpacked this is really boring this was to be the start of many issues first things first Halo infinites online is free to play therefore relying entirely on microtransactions to fund itself this leads to incredibly egregious monetization practices first the game uses a rotating in-game store for Cosmetics this would normally be fine but in infinite the prices are absolutely insane twenty dollars for a single piece of armor I'll take five please then there's the battle pass currently the game's only form of progression now there's no General XP system in place for this battle pass getting kills completing games playing the objective and generally just playing well gives you absolutely nothing this is worthless the only way to actually get XP and rank up the battle pass is by completing random tediously specific challenges challenges like three banshees destroyed Five ghosts destroyed or the fan favorite five shade turret kills naturally this challenge system also results in instead of playing objectives everyone in the game beelining for specific weapons vehicles or focusing on incredibly Niche ways to kill people decimating team play and resulting in people leaving games all the time also you can only progress on a few challenges at a time so if they're difficult good luck ranking up even if they're not incredibly arduous and you do end up actually completing them there's only so many challenges per day meaning you'll quickly run out and then there's literally no incentive to play the game this results in the battle pass the only form of progression taking an insane amount of time to complete luckily 343 have thought this through and has our backs difficult challenges simply buy the challenge swaps from the store for two dollars a pot and get some new ones 343 is also using a core system for infinite this means that armor pieces are locked to different bases unlock a few cool pieces of armor on One Core well they're staying on that core what's worse armor pieces are locked to cause for players in-game but cross-core pieces show in the Halo Waypoint app as well as on the multi player Bots then there's Coatings in previous games all customization was free and unlockable apart from some DLC ones and four and at the absolute core of that free customization your Spartans color scheme simply choose your Spartans colors and you're done for infinite 343 decides to mix things up how about we take all the colors away create a few pre-packaged color schemes and sell them in the battle pass for five dollars a pop brilliant a few Coatings are free by default some unlocked via the campaign and some through the battle pass but the rest are sold at absurd prices through the store also let's lock the Coatings to each core as well spent five dollars on the color blue on One Core unlucky son also some different Coatings are literally exactly the same then there's the game's features a lot of them don't actually work Custom Games completely broken you can't select random as a Loadout weapon you can't set default Loadout equipment you can't choose whether you want a team or free-for-all game it's also incredibly hard to actually save your new game types custom games is a feature that worked flawlessly in Halo 2 back in 2004 theater also completely broken there are too many issues to go into here but the gist is this theater just flat out doesn't work this is a feature that works flawlessly in Halo 3. back in 2007 ranked players laughably lenient on ranks meaning a wave of room temperature IQ players flood the highest ranks in droves also if you lag out or disconnect from a ranked game there's literally no option for you to join back and speaking of disconnecting that'll be happening a lot because 343 Industries networking code is absolutely abhorrent you'll often find games with desync issues meaning what happens on the server and on your side are completely different big Team Battle is massively unbalanced as both teams get vehicle drops periodically through the game the problem with that they're just like completely random your team just got dropped to Mongoose unlucky the other team's just been dropped a massive tank this is yet to be addressed to this day by the way the UI well it's just incredibly slow just going into the customization menu often takes more than 20 seconds and the main menu alone almost takes a hundred percent usage of your GPU a lot of people even report their PC is getting hotter in the main menu than the actual game bugs wise the game's actually okay most being small even entertaining glitches so infinite core gameplay itself solid literally everything else absolutely terrible the network the engine the storefront the content the content timeline progression everything sucks and then there were the missing features the game's content bear no new vehicles and barely any Maps it launches with 10. Halo 2 launched with 12 and again that was back in 2004. also a lack of basic community and Lobby features no stats or career page no assassinations a thing that's been in Halo since reach no infection game mode no region selection no player Collision no Forge at launch and finally no anti-cheat on PC this is in the year 2021 on a free-to-play game oh there's also no way to report players in game when it comes to the campaign infinite was touted to be similar to Bungie's original vision of Combat Evolved open world completely explorable and free roam naturally this got people excited and when it released the campaign was quite highly rated but slowly surely complaints arise here too first off the game starts off with a cut scene showing a massive battle that looks more exciting than the rest of the campaign combined and the game ends on a cliffhanger just as things start to get interesting that's it then there's the open world most players agree it adds little to the game and makes for Less set pieces and memorable scenes there's also only one biome in the entire game a grassy Forest each Mission feels samey and sort of Blends into the next one compared to Prior Halos where most missions are distinct from the last also once you actually get into the open world performance absolutely nose types the graphics in the full game are better than what was shown in 2020 but still leaves a lot to be desired the lighting is especially bad then there's no Mission replay if you want to replay a mission you literally have to restart the whole game again and worst of all still no campaign co-op this was literally the first thing announced for the game by the head of 343 Industries back in 2017 and I would say for any FPS going out for we will always have split screen in going forward people grab their pitch folks and take to Twitter and Reddit they are angry the list of complaints is seemingly endless but a big one sticks out there are all these game modes but they're all jammed into a single playlist quick play meaning we can't actually choose what to play want to just play Slayer unlucky you have a random one in four chance every time you search for a game oh look another game of oddball how fun people demand answers and 343 is forced to come out with a statement hey so about those playlists well we have UI limitations with the game right now and uh they affect the way a number of playlists that can be shown as for Slayer itself we're still having discussions around feasibility the feasibility of a team deathmatch playlist UI limitations for an additional playlist on a game that was supposed to be the next 10 years of Halo this of course is memed instantly want more maps added to the game sorry guys UI can't handle it fixing the horrific service nah that UI bro better store prices can't do it the UI literally just an XP system UI people are pissed the UI comment was the Tipping Point and it all comes to a head the Halo subreddit explodes with rage and is subsequently locked down however in mid-December 343 comes out and has a little something to show off turns out behind the scenes they'd been working on the impossible after hours upon hours of work the UI could finally handle it and an actual playlist for Slayer launches my God a miracle they also remove some of the harder challenges in rotation so that it's actually possible to advance in the season pass and with that they kiss goodbye and log off for the Christmas holidays a month later and in mid-January 343 comes back from holiday it's back to work and they've got a lot of it at this point they'd managed to add a couple of standard playlists to the game a massive feat indeed but they had all of the other issues to fix too and turns out now even more problems are Brewing see ever since fully launching on December 8th the game itself had slowly bit by bit just being breaking big Team Battle Is Now outright unplayable for some reason either crashing immediately kicking your mates out before starting or just not starting at all and the net code and lag across all games is absolutely awful and getting worse the servers degrade to the point where people are experiencing multiple seconds of desync they deploy a big Team Battle networking hotfix but it fails to improve anything it's so bad they consider actually temporarily removing the big Team Battle challenges from the game as a result of all of these issues compounded with the lack of content slow progression egregious monetization and so on player numbers nose dive at Breakneck speed also because of that lack of server region selection you're forced to play in your own continent somewhere like Australia or Asia where there's not too many people playing Halo unlucky you'll be on that search screen for a while so yeah things are starting to look a little rocky but hey it's live service 343 have said that infinite is the platform for the next decade of Halo so they'll fix it right up just like they did with Halo 5. fans tell themselves it was gonna be okay while there would be events with new Cosmetics sprinkled about here and there season 1 of infinite is set to last a whole six months so players are strapped in with minimal content for a while but in February 2022 they tell us they're trying to fix the server desync issues I'm trying I'm trying and Halo better when Joe Staton says they're hard at work with a big meaty road map coming up soon nice we wait and wait and wait literal months go by and we see only a few updates with various bug fixes a couple of events with some cosmetics and a few more store rotations which are now a bit more fairly priced at least the networking remains horrendous it's looking a little bit quiet in the infinite front but no worries in the meantime we have a 90 million dollar Halo TV show coming out in March the biggest gaming TV show ever to release at this point this will be good it's not good Master Chief has been replaced with Master cheeks a man who removes a new piece of clothing each episode and is also very angry [Music] add a few insufferable characters and yeah that's enough of that of course there's no integration of this massive Series in Halo infinite besides her message of the day some emblems and a gun charm eventually 343 actually do fix big Team Battle in March and still in the midst of this massive content drought on the 5th of April they have an announcement gentlemen a Halo cookbook recipes from across the Galaxy well why is the front cover a picture of churros a sandwich and fish and chips naturally players are overcome with excitement but on the 23rd of April we finally get the roadmap Stayton promised back in January and it's looking dismal turns out season 3 will be delayed by three months feeling season 2 is six months long as well and Co-op has delayed along with it it's May 3rd and season 2 releases it brings a new battle pass with two armor cores two maps new game modes and some bug fixes there's also a new narrative event however that turns out to be a half-assed three minute cutscene the new armor pieces and effects are perfectly executed and completely aligned anyway throughout season 2 we get a few more developments on June the 14th 343 add to black lives matter emblem to the game one problem the actual name of it is bonobo in June 343 announces drop pod updates these would be monthly quality of life patches and would build towards full cross core in the future 343 also updates us on their work to fix desync which is still Rife our goal is to get into a monthly Cadence of a drop pod a month even though it was supposed to be a monthly thing the next drop pod comes out two months later in August drop pods are canned entirely by September oh that's kind of small in July a redditor discovers a glitch apparently when in infinite's menus the game downloads the new Season's Banner image about 2 000 times wasting almost two gigabytes of data but fast forward to September 1st and we get more info on that juicy season 3 which is supposed to be launching in a couple of months time 343 pulls up a chair and returns with one of the iconic announcements Gentlemen please take a seat listen we know this next season was already delayed by three months but here's the thing it's now six because it's delayed again also that local split screen we've been working on for months and promised years ago permanently canned so season three is moved to March of next year meaning season two is nine months now a week later it's also revealed that a bug in the game allows you to glitch into local split screen and it works almost flawlessly even on Xbox One they also announced a beta for matchmaking XP a beta for matchmaking XP one again people are pissed massive YouTubers are saying infinite is beyond saving with some even questioning Halo as a whole Microsoft finally wakes up from cryosleep seems people aren't too happy here we're gonna have to step in and on September 12th Bonnie Ross has to step down and 343's Leadership is restructured after 10 years of asking Halo fans breathe a sigh of relief Pierre hints will take over a studio head immediately the guy who headed the overhaul for the MCC this sounds promising September 13th and 343 is so unorganized and behind on work they've only just released their Easter and spring cosmetics in the store this is a month before Halloween due to being so behind there would be no Halloween cosmetics again that month 343 comes out with a big worldwide reveal announced for the end of the month fans get excited theories are everywhere was it an early Forge release cross-core desync finally fixed well no it's a teaser for a remake of a Halo 3 map made entirely in Forge fair to say fans weren't too pleased 8th of November 2022 and the winter update releases a whole year after the game had come out and online campaign co-op finally releases along with the ability to replay missions we also get a small battle pass and the forge beta releases and to be fair it's actually really good this time round Forge has essentially gone beyond building maps and is basically now a mini version of what 343 used to actually make the game naturally the Creations are impressive this along with the custom games browser that launches in December gives infinite amazing custom games potential about that custom games browser it's massively broken try to join a game and you'll likely be met with an infinite loading spawn if you do actually get in chances are your ping will be stratospheric there's also no option to join custom games browser lobbies with friends then there's the remade Halo 3 map all armor cores are now free visors and now cross-core Network desync improvements and more bug fixes overall a pretty good update however in total after a year since release we'd had a total of four new maps some new game modes a beta for Forge the ability to replay campaign missions one new full battle pass the start of cross-core and the beta for experience points it took a while but infinite was actually starting to resemble a ready to release Game however there is still a lot missing here's a taste firefight infection a match composer full cross core server region selection and a career stats page theater remains completely broken to this day despite the promising new features and actual content now coming out for the game player numbers remain catastrophic as a result the custom games browser dies within a couple of months going down to about three pages of lobbies in Europe in February 2023 that's a total of about 30 lobbies it's clear the game was woefully underperforming and in January 2023 Microsoft gathers an assembly that was it the hammer was coming down and 343 is hit with a massive wave of playoffs now Microsoft is laying off Talent from almost all of their Studios you're fired but 343 is apparently hit hard according to an Insider almost 50 percent of the studio is axed Tom French infinite multiplayer creative director had also left a month before infinite art director a few months before him both had been at 343 since the beginning the director of art management is also fired along with 30 of his Department even Joe Staton is removed from 343 the studio currently looks like it's imploding and people are questioning if they'll ever even be another Halo game at this point so much so that 343 has to actually come out with a statement reassuring us that there'd be more Halo games we're fine guys totally fine despite 343 promising at least three more seasons infinite Outlook isn't great and 343 is now looking three for three so what actually happened well the behind the scenes for infinite's horrendous outcome is still largely up in the air however based on Insider reports and leaks we do have an idea first off Halo 5's campaign set up Halo 6 to be based on a war against AI but when players absolutely detested Halo 5 story 343 decided to scrap it and go in another Direction meaning a whole new story had to be written from the ground up this takes time and at some point in 2019 the game undergoes a complete reboot and everything is scrapped and built from the ground up throughout that same year a flurry of people are leaving the studio with 343's art director leaving in March infinite's lead producer leaving in August and its creative director in October hmm not exactly a smooth development so far then there's the actual structure of the company see lots of 343 star for contractors especially for technical work Microsoft hires these contractors to save money because if they stay longer than 18 months they get employee benefits and higher pay can't be having that this process is a terrible idea for a Game Dev studio for a ton of reasons I'm kind of but here's too one it leads to newly contracted devs spending a ton of time learning everything from scratch and catching up to whatever the last guy was doing and two the engine Halo has been using the blam engine since Combat Evolved back in 2001. this is a unique and Niche engine so first off the contractors need to spend time learning how to actually use it before they can get to work also turns out that before the development of infinite 343 decided to invest a massive amount of time money and effort into giving this engine an upgrade get this using a ton of temporary contractors naturally this upgraded slip space engine is rumored to be hot dog because it's been taped together between random devs coming in and out of the studio and now after it's finished no one can actually work the thing because everyone that built it is gone with the engine essentially now unworkable people at 343 struggle to add or fix the game because they don't even understand their own engine anymore there's the rumored lack of competent management and effective decision making combined with too much ambition all of this ultimately leading to a lot of useless work being produced from a constant stream of new employees eventually when crunch hits the only way to finish the game was to cut everything that wasn't desperately needed the result is what we see in the masses of cut content which are still in the files 2020 they've now been working on some form of infinite since 2016 and have a somewhat working product and now it's time for E3 naturally the reaction to 2020's reveal is awful and Microsoft are forced to bring in the big guns show stating is brought in a year before release to make sense of the steaming pile of horseshit currently at 343's feet but a year later and through hardcraft they'd finally get the game out in one piece and Against All Odds people seem to love it however post launch and there are development problems here too see historically 343 have relied on a couple of companies to help with post-launch content certain Affinity Who currently have their hands full with a rumored Battle Royale for Halo and sparisoft who they'd Outsource a ton of the post-launch maps too small problem here see sparisoft is a Russian company and in February 2021 Russia decided to invade a neighboring country the Russian invasion is slightly controversial and causes sanctions and the halting of a lot of Partnerships between firms in the west and Russia meaning no more work for spirosoft but it was fine 343 itself would create the bulk of post-launch content right well no apparently instead of creating new content for the game a ton of devs were making prototypes in Unreal Engine and pitching ideas for new Halo games instead a lot of these devs have apparently since been laid off with 343's new leadership they now actually are ditching the slip space engine which they'd spent four years building and going with unreal so at this point it's been almost two years since infinite's release and it's been a somewhat bumpy ride in January it's confirmed there's been no story DLC being worked on meaning we're left on a massive Cliffhanger for years unlike pretty much every update that came before it season 3 brings a lot of new problems including tanking performance increased desync and now a bug where in-game settings are randomly reset every time you log in cross-core camos have been introduced however they're 14 a pop from launch till now infinite player base has tanked from 260 to 8K on Steam even with the latest season having dropped at the time of recording infinite sits at the 18th most played game on Xbox but with big things apparently still in the works like a battle royale new weapons and vehicles forageable AI firefight and almost 30 new maps and with a new leadership structure at 343 a few fans hold out hope that what comes out the other end will be better but with a switch to Unreal alongside the reshaping of the entire Studio it looks like Halo will be out for a while [Music] foreign [Music]

Channel: big boss

Views: 2,285,716

Keywords: big boss, halo, modern halo, modern halo is worse than you thought, halo infinite, bungie, mcc, master chief, halo doc, halo documentary, 343, 343i, 343 industries, halo 1, halo 2, halo ce, halo 3, halo reach, infinite, cortana, halo series, halo odst, odst, covenant, the absolute chaos of halo infinite, The Tragedy of Modern Halo

Id: Y-VnT1QNWPg

Length: 38min 0sec (2280 seconds)

Published: Thu Aug 24 2023