• waits 5 minutes in a lobby, gets stuck playing Oddball
• goes pistol only when it becomes obvious it's still better than the assault rifle
• gets teabagged after dying for the first time
• gets rocketed from part of the map that looks inaccessible
• spawns into the path of someone's melee
Yep, it's Halo all right.
~ ~ ~ ~ ~
UPDATE (11/18):
In all seriousness, though, the more I play Halo Infinite the more I like it and the more obviously polished it seems. I'll get to that in a bit. But first, not that anyone asked for it: an exegesis of my original review.
I think the snark I felt on Day 1 of Halo Infinite's beta week probably arose out of something I'd sort of repressed: that I've always found the Halo series somewhat alienating, somewhat opaque. Maybe it goes back to high school, when my friends with Xboxes couldn't stop raving about Halo. I joined in for a few of their LAN parties, where my latent GoldenEye prowess at least gave me a fighting chance, but I never really "got" it. The shooting felt good for a console game (I was more of an Allied Assault and, later, original Call of Duty guy), but the washed-out aesthetic rubbed me the wrong way and the Gregorian chants made me snicker.
It wasn't until 2008 that I owned a Microsoft console, and even then, neither Halo 2 nor Halo 3 held my interest for very long. (To date, I have only finished one Halo campaign: the first one, and that was in 2020.) The only game in the series I ever really connected with was Halo: Reach, which I played to fill the hours of one of the loneliest years of my life. Reach was the first Halo confident enough to shake up the series' formula, and to lean into its sillier side by featuring its wackiest, dumbest game modes just as prominently as Team Slayer.
Most of my time in Reach was spent playing Grifball, a "sport" in which one player attempts to suicide-bomb the opposing team's goal while everyone else gives chase with giant hammers. Sure, modes like this technically had existed in Halo 3, as user-created custom games -- but in Reach, they had the full weight of developer Bungie's resources behind them. For the first time, it felt like Halo saw through its own pretentiousness to create the kind of multiplayer experience my high-school friends had raved about a decade earlier.
I think it's safe to say that Halo Infinite is the most comfortable Halo since Reach, and I mean that as both compliment and critique. On the one hand, handling Halo's signature arsenal and piloting Ghosts has maybe never felt better; the presentation is slick beyond belief, every audiovisual aesthetic smoothed to the gaming equivalent of glass. The maps available so far aim for different swathes of the color palette, from a desert marketplace to a neon-glowy nightclub district to what resemble paintball arenas evoking the primary-color blockiness of Halo 3.
But on the other hand, what's missing out of the gate is official support for all the game modes that made Reach a more singular experience. And not only can you forget about playing Grifball, Hockey, Headhunter, or Race, among others -- you won't even find an official playlist for free-for-all Slayer. The lack of variety in game modes disappointingly betrays the obvious efforts developer 343 has undertaken to both improve and diversify Infinite's visuals since its disastrous showing at E3 2020.
Although it will probably be patched sooner than later, it's worth considering the multiplayer's abysmal progression system as effectively an extension of 343's overconfidence in launching with, for lack of a better term, "lowest-common-denominator Halo." The game rewards a flat 100 XP per match played, no matter the length, no matter whether you win or lose, no matter whether you're the top player or the worst of the lot. You might get a few hundred more XP on occasion if you manage to, say, rack up five kills with some non-optimal weapon.
What's egregious here isn't that it takes forever to get enough XP to unlock a single cosmetic that looks like it wasn't designed by an AI. What's egregious is that you could play the best game of your life in Halo Infinite, and you'll be rewarded the same as you would for getting absolutely stomped. This is particularly frustrating for players of average skill, like me. The fact is that I don't have the same twitch reflexes as when I played Reach a decade ago (let alone OG Halo a decade before that). Simply put, I'm not as good at competitive shooters as I used to be. Getting rewarded a little extra for performing well is critical to my engagement with games like this, in which I'm almost certain to be dominated by teenagers and by people who have been playing Halo games more consistently for the past twenty years.
On my second night with the game, I wiped out the opposing team in Oddball with five or six successive swings of that weird little skull, a remarkable feat for a Halo player as untalented as myself. It felt amazing, but it felt almost as bad a few minutes later when Infinite rewarded me the same as if I'd spent the entire match AFK. (You can already start to see players using this as a strategy to farm XP, by the way. The number of AFK players I've been saddled with, especially in Ranked, is nothing short of alarming.)
Needless to say, games can have meaningful progression systems that are also monetized; Apex Legends kept me on the hook for over two and a half years. Even the novelty of a shiny new Halo only lasts for so long. What's more, "new Halo" is not a sustainable identity for this (or any future) game in the series. 343 will need to inject more personality into Infinite and fundamentally rethink its progression systems for me to still be playing it in a few weeks' time.
• goes pistol only when it becomes obvious it's still better than the assault rifle
• gets teabagged after dying for the first time
• gets rocketed from part of the map that looks inaccessible
• spawns into the path of someone's melee
Yep, it's Halo all right.
~ ~ ~ ~ ~
UPDATE (11/18):
In all seriousness, though, the more I play Halo Infinite the more I like it and the more obviously polished it seems. I'll get to that in a bit. But first, not that anyone asked for it: an exegesis of my original review.
I think the snark I felt on Day 1 of Halo Infinite's beta week probably arose out of something I'd sort of repressed: that I've always found the Halo series somewhat alienating, somewhat opaque. Maybe it goes back to high school, when my friends with Xboxes couldn't stop raving about Halo. I joined in for a few of their LAN parties, where my latent GoldenEye prowess at least gave me a fighting chance, but I never really "got" it. The shooting felt good for a console game (I was more of an Allied Assault and, later, original Call of Duty guy), but the washed-out aesthetic rubbed me the wrong way and the Gregorian chants made me snicker.
It wasn't until 2008 that I owned a Microsoft console, and even then, neither Halo 2 nor Halo 3 held my interest for very long. (To date, I have only finished one Halo campaign: the first one, and that was in 2020.) The only game in the series I ever really connected with was Halo: Reach, which I played to fill the hours of one of the loneliest years of my life. Reach was the first Halo confident enough to shake up the series' formula, and to lean into its sillier side by featuring its wackiest, dumbest game modes just as prominently as Team Slayer.
Most of my time in Reach was spent playing Grifball, a "sport" in which one player attempts to suicide-bomb the opposing team's goal while everyone else gives chase with giant hammers. Sure, modes like this technically had existed in Halo 3, as user-created custom games -- but in Reach, they had the full weight of developer Bungie's resources behind them. For the first time, it felt like Halo saw through its own pretentiousness to create the kind of multiplayer experience my high-school friends had raved about a decade earlier.
I think it's safe to say that Halo Infinite is the most comfortable Halo since Reach, and I mean that as both compliment and critique. On the one hand, handling Halo's signature arsenal and piloting Ghosts has maybe never felt better; the presentation is slick beyond belief, every audiovisual aesthetic smoothed to the gaming equivalent of glass. The maps available so far aim for different swathes of the color palette, from a desert marketplace to a neon-glowy nightclub district to what resemble paintball arenas evoking the primary-color blockiness of Halo 3.
But on the other hand, what's missing out of the gate is official support for all the game modes that made Reach a more singular experience. And not only can you forget about playing Grifball, Hockey, Headhunter, or Race, among others -- you won't even find an official playlist for free-for-all Slayer. The lack of variety in game modes disappointingly betrays the obvious efforts developer 343 has undertaken to both improve and diversify Infinite's visuals since its disastrous showing at E3 2020.
Although it will probably be patched sooner than later, it's worth considering the multiplayer's abysmal progression system as effectively an extension of 343's overconfidence in launching with, for lack of a better term, "lowest-common-denominator Halo." The game rewards a flat 100 XP per match played, no matter the length, no matter whether you win or lose, no matter whether you're the top player or the worst of the lot. You might get a few hundred more XP on occasion if you manage to, say, rack up five kills with some non-optimal weapon.
What's egregious here isn't that it takes forever to get enough XP to unlock a single cosmetic that looks like it wasn't designed by an AI. What's egregious is that you could play the best game of your life in Halo Infinite, and you'll be rewarded the same as you would for getting absolutely stomped. This is particularly frustrating for players of average skill, like me. The fact is that I don't have the same twitch reflexes as when I played Reach a decade ago (let alone OG Halo a decade before that). Simply put, I'm not as good at competitive shooters as I used to be. Getting rewarded a little extra for performing well is critical to my engagement with games like this, in which I'm almost certain to be dominated by teenagers and by people who have been playing Halo games more consistently for the past twenty years.
On my second night with the game, I wiped out the opposing team in Oddball with five or six successive swings of that weird little skull, a remarkable feat for a Halo player as untalented as myself. It felt amazing, but it felt almost as bad a few minutes later when Infinite rewarded me the same as if I'd spent the entire match AFK. (You can already start to see players using this as a strategy to farm XP, by the way. The number of AFK players I've been saddled with, especially in Ranked, is nothing short of alarming.)
Needless to say, games can have meaningful progression systems that are also monetized; Apex Legends kept me on the hook for over two and a half years. Even the novelty of a shiny new Halo only lasts for so long. What's more, "new Halo" is not a sustainable identity for this (or any future) game in the series. 343 will need to inject more personality into Infinite and fundamentally rethink its progression systems for me to still be playing it in a few weeks' time.
3 Comments
My original review is now a little too salty for my taste, even if it does accurately reflect how I felt after my first night with this game. Since then I've played a lot more Halo Infinite, and it's an issue I take up in this much more substantive (and, I think, much more thoughtful) re-review.
I've left the original review unaltered at the top, both for posterity and for the ways it informs the roughly 1,000 words that now follow it. I don't know quite how the algorithms on Backloggd work, though I'm guessing this revision won't bump my review to the top of the site the same as if I'd simply deleted and reposted it. Alas, such is life -- and such are the penalties for reviewing a game too early, without the benefit of proper hindsight.
I've left the original review unaltered at the top, both for posterity and for the ways it informs the roughly 1,000 words that now follow it. I don't know quite how the algorithms on Backloggd work, though I'm guessing this revision won't bump my review to the top of the site the same as if I'd simply deleted and reposted it. Alas, such is life -- and such are the penalties for reviewing a game too early, without the benefit of proper hindsight.
Not one word of this is being read. That’s crazy!
Dief88
2 years ago