The world of Halo Infinite has been greatly reduced compared to the original idea | Xbox One

Last week we told you about a particularly stunning creation taken from the Forge mode of Halo Infinite while waiting for the release of the famous mode, but also of the cooperative campaign. In the meantime, the single player mode of the game remains a safe bet and Joseph Staten, the creative director of 343 Industries, has just revealed new information about the development of the open world of Halo Infinite.

A “significant scaling up” compared to the initial concept

It is on the occasion of a podcast interviewGame Maker’s Notebook from the Academy of Interactive Arts & Sciences that Joseph Staten spoke openly about the choices that caused 343 Industries to change plans and aim lower for Halo Infinite’s open-world design.

“Before I joined the team, and even after I joined, the team had to do many iterations on the scope and variety of biomes. We just didn’t have time to research the level of fidelity on as many strains as we wanted. We made huge progress between the E3 demo and the game’s release, but we still had to make targeted cuts. In the end, we didn’t cut much in the open world, but I know from the initial designs there was a pretty big reduction in what the team was hoping to achieve. »

The choice to make Halo Infinite an open world was particularly innovative and intrigued many players before the game was released. During development, the 343 Industries teams surely had a multitude of ideas and this can be understood when we know the multitude of exploitable biomes existing in the Halo universe since the first games.

Nevertheless, the realization of an open world was an unprecedented mission for the studio and drastic choices had to be made by the teams as Staten explains in the following statements.

“I think anyone who’s tried to tackle an open-world game knows that you don’t get it 100% right the first time. You build over time, you improve, you overlay systems on previous learning, and so for us, it was really learning on the fly. It was about building it for the first time, and so we had to, in order to really deliver a quality experience, just stretch our ambitions to make sure the things we shipped lived up to expectations. »

“We wanted to free ourselves from a lot of the expectations of open-world games, so we struggled for a long time to figure out how to talk about it in our marketing promotion, because we didn’t want people to have a bad impression. We are like an open world game in that our game is much more open than it was before. Halo has always been a relatively open game in terms of geometry for a shooter, but for us we weren’t layering a whole bunch of systems. We talked a lot about crafting, for example, and I think my probably infamous line to the team was something like, “Master Chief doesn’t need to kill animals to make leather shirts. He’s a massively armored super-soldier, and if he wants something, he’s going to kill him, grab his gun and keep going.”

Quite interesting information that testifies to 343 Industries’ aspirations and desire to do well, even if some players may be frustrated to learn that the initial concepts were more ambitious than the final result. The development of a video game is nonetheless a difficult task, especially for a first open-world and Halo Infinite still offers a successful single-player campaign. From now on, it is the cooperative mode of this campaign, currently being tested for insiders, which is expected by the community and we hope to discover it by the end of August.