Halo Infinite: Going Beyond Expectations

When I was a kid, there was something of a trend in Christian culture to take a thing that was popular and create a clone of it while injecting some Christian values. Barney had Psalty, Doom had Catechumen. (The irony of not being allowed to battle demons in Doom was only lost on uninformed parents, who got a look at the box art and banned the game. See also: Diablo.) Growing up in a Christian home, I tended to be more aware of these faith-based copycats than the average gamer, so I knew all about Bible Adventures on NES – as well as the fact that it was one of the few NES titles that failed to receive Nintendo’s Seal of Approval and was somehow sold anyway – and other such pieces of entertainment. Good intentions aside, the problem was that these often weren’t very high-quality products, seemingly more intent on just providing a “Christian” alternative to pop culture rather than something of value that would stand on its own two feet. It got to be a source of cringe before cringe was a noun. 

With that in mind, hopefully you can understand how completely uninterested I was when I first read a context-free headline on IGN talking about a game in development called Halo. My mind instantly conjured some angel-themed take on GoldenEye and automatically rejected it as anything I might want to play. I clearly remember thinking that I wished “they” (the un-specific developers of these low-effort clones) would just stop, because the stuff they were churning out was getting to be an old joke. I promptly forgot about the game at that point. 

Later that year (or maybe the next) I got a job at GameStop just before Microsoft started to ramp up their marketing for the Xbox. Part of that push was to provide demo stations to showcase the upcoming console, which also included demos of games. I honestly don’t remember the exact timeline of it all anymore, but what I do remember was catching glimpses of others trying out the demo for Halo and being surprised at how good it looked. It wasn’t long before I gave the demo a try myself. I was blown away. Fast forward to after the Xbox launched. I picked it up along with Halo, as many others had, and was playing as quickly as possible once I got it home. The opening level, running around the Pillar of Autumn, was fun enough, showcasing intelligent enemies and a fresh-to-me take on a human science fiction aesthetic (at the time, science fiction in my mind was largely limited to Star Trek and Star Wars). The next level had players set foot on the alien ringworld for the first time after surviving a crash landing, and this was where the game first truly captured my imagination.  

Starting out with no music, no objectives, no sense of what I was supposed to do next, I simply took in the view of my surroundings. The scale of the Halo ring, so far only seen in cutscenes, had completely escaped me, but now it was clearly an immense structure – so large that I was in a valley in a mountain range located on it. I could see the ring itself curving away in the distance and could only imagine just how much more of this place there was for me yet to explore. If they could fit literal mountains inside this space, what more could there be? Looking into the distance provided only suggestions of what might be there to explore, but it seemed vast at minimum. Walking further into the valley triggered a script and the rest of the game began in a more guided fashion. But for a minute or two at the beginning, anything was possible. Bungie worked to preserve that feeling by having the player traverse varied environments that were more open to exploration, letting players have a little time before being given a waypoint to the next objective. These open spaces were populated with enemies, and players were given the flexibility on how they wanted to tackle these encounters. Would they make a beeline for a vehicle and wreak havoc with it, or more methodically eliminate targets one after the other? The overall sense of freedom, while minimal in comparison to the open worlds of today, was new to me when it came to video games. If Max Payne expanded what was possible with storytelling, Halo expanded what was possible with gameplay. 

This flexibility and freedom in allowing players to direct things, limited though it actually was, was a hallmark of the Halo games. And while the games made by 343 Industries did preserve this to a degree, they kind of missed the mark in other areas that lead to a general decline in quality and hype for the brand as a whole.  

While I’ve generally enjoyed each of the Halo games, the 343 Industries titles were a little...lackluster, never quite living up to the heights of Bungie’s games. Halo 4 was absolutely gorgeous for a 360 game – and still looks good even today – but the shift in art style was a bit jarring when placed side by side with previous titles. The game also felt like it was more on-rails than earlier games and had a convoluted narrative and new characters that relied too much on reading books or lore dumps from sources hidden in the game. Overall still enjoyable, but a little less Halo than I was used to in a Halo game. Halo 5, though, threw up some more significant red flags. Marketing can be blamed in part, as the ads were all heavily focused on a conflict between Master Chief and another Spartan super soldier, Jameson Locke. Except that conflict came to an unsatisfying climax around a third of the way into the game, and then was pretty much abandoned. Worse overall, the Master Chief – the primary protagonist of all previous games – was playable in just five out of fifteen missions. It was 343’s attempt to make Halo 5 their version of Halo 2, where players took on the role of the Arbiter for several missions, but Locke was so poorly developed in comparison that players were less interested in exploring things from his perspective and more interested in simply slogging through Locke’s missions so they could play as the Chief again. Halo 5 also featured some changes to gameplay in an effort to modernize things, to be a little more in-line with other popular shooters. Combined with the anemic story, misleading advertising, and an apparent failure to understand the characters or what the fans wanted, Halo 5 was an unquestionable decline for the franchise. 

To be clear, I don’t think either of 343’s previous Halo games were truly bad games. They were fine as basic action shooters. The problem is that they bear the Halo name, and thus there are expectations that they just didn’t live up to. They aren’t bad games, but they aren’t real good Halo either, and end up reducing the sense of wonder the earlier Halo games traded in regularly in order to provide greater spectacle that doesn’t always pan out. 

And so, once again, I began to hope that “they” would just stop, this time because I feared 343 would do more damage to this franchise that I’ve come to love. 

Fortunately, 343 has learned from the criticisms they received, and not only worked to make a game that lives up to the spirit of Halo better than anything they’ve done before, but to expand it in ways that are surprisingly good. 

Halo Infinite, in contrast to 4 and 5, takes the sense of scale and freedom that I felt when stepping out of that escape pod in the first game, and cranks it up, turning it into the foundation for something new.  

Whether influenced by the glut of open world games, the chance at monetizing Halo in new ways, or simply trying to build something truly new in the franchise, 343 has opened up the world of Halo as I always imagined it could be. While I’ve enjoyed all of the Halo games in one way or another, I was always a little haunted by the Master Chief’s final line at the end of the first game. In a bit of a fourth-wall break, Cortana says, “Halo. It’s finished.” To which the Chief replies, “No, I think we’re just getting started.” Except that, at least narratively, that’s the end of the game. Like any good piece of entertainment, Halo left me wanting more, and I’ve been left wanting more with each new entry in the series. Well, maybe with the exception of Halo 5. 

Halo Infinite is more. There are focused, objective-driven missions that can lead the player quickly through the narrative, but from just after the first mission through the end of the game, players are given freedom to do exactly what we – what I – wanted from the moment we first set foot on Installation 04. To explore this massive alien artifact, to seek out its mysteries and learn more about who built it and why. Infinite smartly doesn’t include the Flood – the seeming reason for the other Halo rings to exist – and narrative clues hidden in collectible logs suggest that the ring in Infinite is far older than the Forerunner installations explored in the previous games, even having been built by someone else entirely. This leaves the mystery of the place wide open to exploration, instead of automatically assuming it’s for containing the Flood, like other structures seem to have been. 

I could dive deep into the lore on this one. There’s lots of resources and materials out there to draw on, and I have no doubt that 343 intends to not only build on that, but to expand it throughout the life of Infinite, which is said to be the start of the next ten years of Halo. 

Instead of going full lore-nerd, I’ll leave it at this: Halo Infinite scratches an itch to explore that I’ve had for 20 years. It begins to answer the question of what this world might be like when players are given real freedom to plumb its depths. It manages to be expansive without being overwhelming in the way that many other open world games can be (*cough*Ubisoft*cough*). And it redeems a franchise that was struggling. I’m truly looking forward to seeing what is built on this new foundation, because I think it’s going to be something new and special. 

The final takeaway? Spectacle is no match for wonder, because one does the job of imagination, while the other fuels it. And that expectations can be misleading even when you think you’ve already learned that lesson. From expecting some terrible Christian clone in the first Halo, to expecting further decline after Halo 5, I’m glad I didn’t let those expectations have the final say in whether or not I gave something a chance.