Halo Infinite Was Originally Going To Be Much Bigger
The launch of Halo Infinite was massively exciting and considered a big return to form for the series. Now that we have some distance from the release, fans are starting to recognise that it could have been much more.
The trend that 343 Industries has been following of electing to finish its game after release - slowly rolling out their co-op campaign and still not revealing Halo Infinite's Forge hasn't been great for fans - and they're massively missing out on content. And now, we have word that the shooter was almost much bigger.
How Halo Infinite Supposed To Be Bigger?
Click to enlargeThe open world of Halo Infinite is impressive by itself, but it turns out that it could have been much bigger than the version we got. Speaking on the Game Maker's Notebook, Joseph Staten, Head of Creative at 343 Industries has revealed that the plans for the open-world of the campaign mode were much grander.
For those asking what went wrong, these lofty ambitions were stripped back before it came to actually developing the landscapes. "We didn't end up cutting that much ultimately from the open world," says Staten. "But I know from the original designs there was a pretty significant scaling back of what the team had hoped at one point that they could deliver on."
Maybe this means that there was simply more room between POIs and more room to explore, but either way, building an open world sounds like immense work - so it's not really a surprise that the game had to be pulled back a bit.
Halo Infinite Wasn't Built Like A Normal Open-World Game
Staten goes on to explain that Halo Infinite wasn't exactly developed with the fact that it was an open world in mind. The team focussed pretty heavily on emergent first-person systems - "Let's embrace those systems," Staten continued. "The other systems that sometimes come with open world games, that's just not for us. So let's not lose focus and spend too much time in that area."
It's reassuring that the team were more focussed on refining the FPS element of the game instead of just going with the motto of bigger is better. Even though we might expect open-world games these days, it's refreshing that 343 didn't simply follow the crowd. Halo is such a huge name in the FPS genre, but even so, it would be interesting to see just how big the world almost was.
