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Halo Infinite
Halo Infinite launches tomorrow, and the review embargo lifted for the game yesterday. In this brief moment of limbo, I wanted to talk about the central question I had after I finished the campaign this past month, but no, I won’t be getting into story spoilers to do so.
As I said in my Halo Infinite review, one of my biggest complaints with the game is how abruptly it ends, as you think you’re on your way to uncovering one of the game’s central mysteries, but it’s a pretty big cliffhanger instead. I’ll get into the specifics of that later, but for now, it raises one pretty key question for me that 343 has not talked about at all, really.
What exactly is the plan for future Halo story content going forward in the Infinite era?
343 has spoken repeatedly about Halo Infinite being a “platform” for a full generation of new Halo stories. The implication there is that the current Infinite game will be added to, but we simply do not know how, or when.
The multiplayer plan seems pretty straightforward. 3-6 month seasons, themed battle passes, more maps and modes added, etc. But single player? Outside of the news that we’re getting co-op in 6+ months, there’s been almost…zero indication what the plan is here going forward.
Halo Infinite
In short, we don’t really know if Halo Infinite is transforming into some sort of “live” model with smaller bits of story content added more frequently, or if it will get sizable DLCs, larger expansions or just…full sequels that build off Infinite.
What’s clear is that we are obviously not going to have a yawning 6 year gap like we did between 5 and Infinite, but it’s kind of strange that we really have no idea how Halo is being built going forward, or even really what the model is supposed to be.
My gut tells me no, we are probably not getting seasonal content for the story that arrives alongside the multiplayer. I would also be surprised if we were getting full sequels the same size as Infinite itself, given how long development took on this game, and how long the wait would be for those.
The “middleground” that makes the most sense to me would probably be a Destiny-style sizable expansion each year. Some sort of additional zone added onto the current Infinite map that progresses the story forward. I just don’t think they have the pipeline to produce more content more frequently than that, nor do I think they want to wait to release anything before they build another Infinite-sized sequel.
But the point is they haven’t talked about this at all, so when players hit this cliffhanger after Infinite, we have no idea if more content or answers are coming in six months or three years. If we get a roadmap for Halo Infinite, I’d like to see more than just multiplayer on it, and I want to know what the actual release model is for story content for this game, whether it’s seasonal, DLC or expansion based, or full sequels. Because right now we simply don’t know, and that’s a rather strange position to be in.
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Pick up my sci-fi novels the Herokiller series and The Earthborn Trilogy.