It’s been over a year since we last saw gameplay of Halo Infinite’s campaign, at which point it didn’t look the best, and as more time passes since that last underwhelming showing, the more people are growing concerned about what is going on with the campaign. Especially with campaign co-op and Forge not being in the game at launch, there’s a lot of pressure on what will be in it to be excellent.
343 Industries’ head of creative Joseph Staten has recently provided assurances that campaign gameplay will be shown off before the game’s launch, but the development team is currently focused on “shutdown”, i.e. polishing up the game before its release. In a recent blog update on Halo Waypoint, Staten elaborated on that a little bit more.
“In many ways, shutting down a game is like being on final approach to landing an airplane,” Staten wrote. “And if you’ll forgive a bit of aviation-geekery, the entirety of the team is essentially in a “sterile cockpit,” which is to say: we’re at a critical phase in the flight that is Halo Infinite, so it’s extremely important to avoid distractions and stay focused on mission-critical tasks only. For Campaign, that means putting maximum effort into ensuring the wide-open, adventure-filled experience you’ll all get to play on December 8th is a great as it can possibly be. And gameplay demos and trailers not only take a huge amount of effort to do well, they also take cycles away from bugs and other shutdown tasks.”
He went on to share, however, that he’s currently in the middle of a playthrough of the campaign, and gave some interesting tidbits about the sort of discovery and exploration it will encourage.
“I’m going for a 100% run, which means completing all primary and secondary missions, finding all collectibles etc,” he wrote. “I’ve played Infinite’s Campaign multiple times. But every time I do, I always find something new, tucked away on Zeta Halo. Sometimes these are quiet little bits of environmental storytelling, such as an abandoned but desperately defended Marine recon post, high on a lonely mountainside (fortunately, the Banished missed the fully loaded S7 sniper rifle that the Marines left behind). Sometimes these are combat encounters with deviously polished scripting, for example: a UNSC forward operating base that seemed abandoned… until I heard the laughter and taunts of multiple, energy sword-wielding and cloaked Elites, as I stumbled into their trap.”
Staten concluded by saying that 343 Industries remains “very eager to share all the fun with you through captured gameplay, trailers, and other content once we get this plane safely on the ground.”
Halo Infinite is launching on December 8, so there’s still some time left to show campaign footage in- but the quicker it happens, the better it’ll be for the game.
