343 Industries’ Halo Infinite is currently planned to release in Fall 2021, according to a new post on Halo Waypoint. Joseph Staten, who joined as project lead for the campaign, is now the creative director on the title. But that’s not all – senior concept artist and art director Neil Harrison also provided an update on various graphical improvements that have been made.
These include “better quality of global illumination, ambient occlusion, shadows, volumetric lighting, sky, and atmosphere.” LOD popping and texture quality problems witnessed in the reveal demo have also been addressed thanks to “our GPU-driven rendering and texture streaming solution.” Dynamic lightning has also been re-tuned to “add more punch and contrast to the image. These included adjustments to our sun intensity, fog/atmosphere, and the addition of color grading which did not make it into the July gameplay demo.”
Players can also expect weapons and vehicles to have more wear and tear, characters to have increased fidelity and improvements to foliage, grass and trees. Interestingly, the infamous Grunt “Craig” was the result of facial animation on NPCs not being fully implemented. Along with Craig undergoing a huge change in appearance, one can also expect more variety for Brute faces in general.
As if all of this wasn’t enough, the first screenshots of multiplayer (which will be free to play) have been revealed. Halo Infinite is currently in development for Xbox Series X/S, PC and Xbox One. With a new release window finally confirmed, stay tuned for more details in the coming year.
