You can get things out of the ring in Halo Infinite, developer 343 confirmed.
You have never been able to do this in a Halo game before.
In a question and answer video below, gameplay director Troy Mashburn was asked if the player can get things off the edge of Zeta Halo, the ring on which Halo Infinite is set.
“The answer is yes!” Mashburn responded, before revealing a situation in which he did just that.
“I can say that I was playing recently and happened to be driving a Scorpion tank. I turned the corner and came face to face with a Wraith. Just by sheer luck, pure coincidence, I managed to push Wraith over the edge and just watched him slowly lean back and fall into the abyss, which was incredible, unexpected and it was such a cool moment that it happened by luck, that I managed to go around a different path and catch them off guard. “
It is easy to imagine a situation in which you are initializing bits and bobs off the edge of the ring and seeing them fall into space. A Grunt, perhaps? That would be hilarious. Halo has always been a wonderful sandbox for physics-based antics, and I imagine players will have a lot of fun testing this feature.
The Q&A video, however, does a fantastic job of giving us a better idea of how Halo Infinite works and plays. I watched in full and highlighted some of the headline quotes from the developers.
There is a wind system that is not just visual, but audio, said Justin Dinges, the campaign’s art leader. There is also a fog system that arrives at different altitudes and times of the day. Don’t expect storms for the launch, but Dinges said he is “very excited for the future”.
We know that Halo Infinite has a day / night cycle. World leading designer John Mulkey explained how the game is slightly different at night, saying that in darker periods you will see more Phantoms patrols moving through space with their search lights on. This “adds a strange element”. You can see Grunts sleeping on the job too.
343 uses Shield Jackals, for example, in the darkest moments simply because they look cool in the dark and it’s fun to fight them in those situations. Some of the wild animals have a quality of bioluminescence and you will see them go out at night too.
Speaking of wildlife, Mulkey confirmed that there is no hostile wildlife in the game. 343 wanted to focus on the battle between the Banished and the Chief. Players have seen what has been dubbed “space squirrels” in previously released images. There are some bird-like creatures flying around as well. As an aside, some of the bird creatures will draw your attention to the locations. If you see birds circling in the air, you can have a look, said Mulkey.
The dual grip is not in Halo Infinite, confirmed Quinn Delhoyo, leading sandbox designer. “We can’t do everything,” he said. Also not in Halo Infinite are playable elites. Delhoyo said that Halo Infinite is “a Master Chief story and a Spartan story in multiplayer mode”. It must look fair, competitive and balanced.
There are also no weapon upgrades in the campaign. Mashburn said that there are things in the game where you can progress. Equipment items can be unlocked as you go and you can update them to improve them as you go. You can also find and unlock weapon variants.
There is a good answer to the question of whether Halo Infinite is an open world or a semi-open world. Here’s Mashburn explaining how it works:
“When you talk about the open or semi-open world, there are a lot of preconceived ideas about what it means. Are you going to be out there harvesting leather, crafts and that sort of thing? That’s not what this is about.
“We were inspired from the beginning by missions like the Silent Cartographer from Halo: Combat Evolved. This mission, one of the things that marked me, was how open it was, how much player freedom, choice of player you had to decide where you wanted to go, when you engage, you can get in, you can get out, you are driving on your boar, you are with marines. When we talked about the spiritual restart of the franchise, we wanted to capture the essence of that feeling of player choice.
“So, when we talk about the size of the world, it’s good to understand how we got to the size of the world we have. If you think about missions in Halo 5, in Viridian there is a mission where you are driving a Scorpion down a road, and it’s cool the space was designed for the Scorpion. After completing the mission, you leave the Scorpion behind and go to the next mission.
“What we ask ourselves is, what if you could keep that Scorpion? What if you could take that Scorpion to the next mission and use it again? And then we started to take this forward: what if instead of going through the front gate from that mission, could you drive that Scorpion up the hill around it and blow up that Wraith that’s parked there before the enemy knows you’re around?
“It really touched us. This is what the experience we felt at Silent Cartographer really was about. It was about giving me a lot of toys to play with, putting me in this world where I can choose how, when and where I want to use these toys , and approaching the situation as I like it.
“So, going back to the size of the world, we expanded the world to handle this type of combat, to handle the Halo combat. So, we have bases that are open – there is a road that leads to the base, but there is also the slope. And you can follow that road to another base behind the mountain, but everything is still Halo combat. It’s not trying to be anything else. And this is what’s really exciting for us: it’s that extensive combat area that you felt like you had in Silent Cartographer now realized with the next generation legal consoles. “
Halo Infinite has a major biome inspired by the Pacific Northwest (which is not surprising considering where 343 is). In this biome, explained Dinges, there are sub-biomes. There are some high altitude palettes, some wetland palettes and more swampy wetlands. There are more areas devastated by the war, too, called the Deadlands. Here you will see an environmental narrative that reveals what happened in the ring.
There is an interesting conversation about the structure of Halo Infinite, and how its open world merges with the main linear story. I’ll leave it to Mulkey to start:
“You cannot interrupt the sequence and interrupt the experience. You can be dropped off at a Pelican location, you can see your main objective, but on the left there is an advanced UNSC operational base that is being invaded by Banidos. to go to the beat of the main story and take it back and maybe pull a vehicle that I can use? On the right, there’s green smoke bursting over the summit. Probably Marines fighting for their lives. Forerunner tower, maybe I want to explore that.
“There is always the anchor element of the central story that is leading you around the world. You cannot move forward in the main story line. We created the story so it’s natural in the way it flows, so it doesn’t seem artificial. That fluid and organic feeling. “
For Mashburn:
“The story of Master Chief, the main story of the game has a linear thread. As you progress through the story, you unlock new areas to explore and new places to enter. That story will progress in a linear fashion.
“In the middle, while you are driving, there are many other activities in the world for you to get involved in. The bases or outposts are one. If you have progressed in the game and unlocked some of these top-level vehicles, it could be Scorpion, it could be a flying vehicle, you are absolutely free to take that vehicle anywhere you want in the game and you can use it to attack a base. Or you can get on your feet. If you rescued some Marines along the way, you can go there and take some Marines with you. The choice is yours.
“Places are connected to the world – you can drive from one place to another. Along the way, you will discover interesting elements of the world. You will see a Pelican that has fallen and skidded on the ground and an area is burned. You can explore this In some of these spaces, you will find things like audio records, and these audio records will tell a lot more stories about the ring, about what happened, about the battles that took place here, people personal stories. space and really see what’s going on, and when you hear that audio record it complements that story. “
The Halo ring you see in the sky – that trademark skybox feature of the main Halo games – is a real 3D model, and it has visual benefits, like creating an eclipse.
“You will see it from different angles as you move around the world,” explained Dinges. “When you’re on the island from the game space and you’re looking at the world, you can see where it connects back to the ring and up into the sky. It works well with the day / night cycle. The light source the sun rises and you can see the shadows on the ring changing because it’s a 3D model.
“At a certain point in the cycle, there is an eclipse. The ring really eclipses the sun and you have the feeling of midnight. It is very brief, but it is a cool moment while you play. Having a 3D model allows us to do interesting things Like that.”
Now let’s go to the scenes. They’re on the engine, Mulkey explained, and there’s a seamless transition between gameplay and scenes throughout Halo Infinite.
“We don’t do traditional scenes,” said Mulkey. “There are no pre-rendered things. Everything is done live on the engine. We focus on making smooth transitions. The Chief will move to a particular interaction and the camera will pull from the head and transition to the scene. whatever the time of day, it’s going to be like this. Whatever weapons you have in your hands, these are the ones in the cutscene. And then you’ll transition back to where you’re playing.
“We wanted to present that perfect experience as you’re going, so we didn’t have that kind of gaming experience, cutscene, back to game, cutscene. We wanted it to flow and the story to unfold as the player’s experience. So there will really be none differentiation. It will be happening live on the engine whenever it happens. “
Overall, I think this video did a decent job of giving us a better understanding of how Halo Infinite really works. I love the idea of starting things out of the ring, and visual effects like the eclipse, as well as the day / night cycle, also look interesting.
Halo Infinite will be released on Xbox One, Xbox Series X and S and PC in late 2021.