Halo Infinite - What is it?

So they have no co op when it launches tomorrow?

And the rationale is that they instead had to optimize the game so it would run well on the original Xbox one?

How about we stop trying to support last gen consoles? Because that’s fucking stupid, especially since apparently now you could stream it via gamepass to an Xbox one and it’ll probably run better anyway.

This is the world people in the Xbox eco-system seem to want.

I mean, it’s the world that apparently both Sony and Microsoft seem to think people want… Or I guess the developers think people want?

But the thing is for Microsoft, they actually have an alternative way to support last gen consoles, without making games crappy for them.

Considering we are only 1 year after the launch of the next gen MS consoles and how difficult to buy the Series X still are, they better still support last gen.

Do you really expect all XBox (or PlayStation) gamers to have upgraded to next gen within a year? It’s inane to suggest they shouldn’t be supporting last gen for a big 1st party release like Halo at this point.

Doesn’t matter that cloud gaming might be starting to be a thing. That’s no replacement for most people. Can you imagine the outcry if MS abandoned the Xbox One today?

As far as I am aware, they said co-op would not be available at launch.

Co-op doesn’t happen until May, last I read. It’s supposed to come with Season 2.

For a game delayed a year, it seems weird that they didn’t have co-op ready.

Yeah, they said in an interview in November that the earliest you could expect Forge and Co-op would be May 2022. So it will likely be after that.

I mean… this is how it used to be?

I don’t recall in prior generations of consoles, that anyone bothered to support the last gen. You want to play new games, you get the new console. That’s how it used to work.

Although, like I said, right now if you have an XBox One, you can actually play series games via gamepass, and they end up streaming from a series X in the cloud.

No one went to these lengths to support old hardware before. That is 100% true. By this time any games on those older machines were gimped significantly due to development moving forward on the new hardware without them.

I read an article where Staten says they know that most Infintie players are going to be on last gen. It’s why he plays the game on an Xbone in the office.

It just seems weird to cripple games, which are supposed to be an incentive to buy a new console, in order to support the old consoles.

I guess in some ways this is related to the hardware shortages for both the PS5 and the XsX, but still… it seems bad, as someone who has a new console and wants stuff to fully leverage it.

Also, as a side note:
The digital foundry videos are always interesting, but I gotta say… the stuff they are analyzing at this point seem so far below my level of perception that it seems kind of comical.

Like when they show two side by side screenshots, and I’m like:
image

And then they zoom in on some tiny part of it, and show, “Look at this, you can see there are like 3 pixels that are slightly different.”

Cross-gen games are always problematic, this is nothing new.

There’s no need to provide incentive to purchase an XSX or PS5. They’re in such short supply that you can scalp them on eBay for double MSRP.

Anyway, from all reports the Halo gameplay is great, it just has some technical issues.

The only Digital Foundry-shown issues that concern me about Halo is that constant stutter in the cutscenes. The original Halo 2 cutscenes had that too, it’s so annoying. If they’re really going to fix that in the first patch, then it might be worth waiting for that patch.

Cutscene stutter is an issue, but also the really wonky lighting that would have looked bad last generation and the broken VRR. On the multiplayer side, the desync problems Dave posted about are a real concern too. Just a lot of little buggy/broken technical issues that don’t render the game unplayable by any means but make you wonder how they happened when it was delayed by a full year for polish.

Is the desyc a real problem? I mean, yes, it exists, but it does not appear to be a widespread problem and seems fairly rare. And it hasn’t stopped lots of people from having lots of fun.

It’s supposed to be a real competitive shooter so yes, stuff like that breaks the consistency of the game. Valorant is essentially built on having absolutely zero tolerance for such bullshit. If you’re a casual player like me then sure, you don’t care.

And 343 is going to fix it, so it sounds like they have zero tolerance for it, either.

I’m sure they will, but it never should have gone live in the first place. Contributes to the general lack of polish in a game which again, was delayed an entire year to polish to a fine sheen. Imagine how poorly it would have fared released in Fall 2020!

Which is why it was not released then. That’s kind of a moot point. Imagine how unfinished software was a year before it was deemed ready to release!

The fact that the wrong target release date was aimed for initially didn’t really matter once they course corrected.

But yes, it would have been much better if they had caught the desync in beta testing and addressed that. No VRR might be annoying to a minority, but that’s the definition of a non critical issue for release.