3 mistakes that 343 Industries needs to avoid with Halo Infinite

By Brendan Lowry
published

Halo Infinite will greatly benefit if these mistakes aren't repeated.

Though commercially successful, Halo 5: Guardians was a very controversial release for the franchise. There were several things that the Halo following almost unanimously felt were done poorly, and as a result, Halo 5's reputation — as well as the reputation of the series overall — suffered. Halo Infinite has a chance to repair this damage, but only if 343 Industries avoids making these three critical mistakes once again.

Read: What you need to know about Halo Infinite's most likely setting

Drip-fed content

Halo 5: Guardians

Halo 5: Guardians (Image credit: Microsoft)

Arguably Halo 5's biggest issue was that content was delivered slowly over time instead of at launch. The Halo series is known for its wide array of matchmaking playlists, expansive custom game options, and the limitless potential of Forge, but Halo 5 only launched with one of these three. As a result, many players became bored with the game and moved on. Some of them came back when things were added later, but not all of them.

For Halo Infinite to succeed, it will need to launch with the quantity of content that one comes to expect from a Halo title. This will ensure that fans keep playing for longer and that the game will have a good reputation initially.

A poor campaign

Another problem with Halo 5 was that it had a lackluster campaign. The story, in particular, was very confusing, especially if you don't closely follow the Halo canon, and the fact that there were so many characters prevented any of them from developing well over the course of the narrative.

A good story will be important for Halo Infinite to have because the writing is often considered one of the franchise's strongest attributes. Like with the aforementioned lack of content, the absence of a satisfying story in Halo 5 damaged Halo's reputation. In order to get the series back on track when it comes to its campaigns, Halo Infinite needs to deliver.

Steep grinding for unlocks

Lastly, the way that almost every single unlock is tied to the requisition (REQ) system in Halo 5 is an issue that needs to be avoided in the future. Unlike the previous titles in the series, where you could earn cosmetics by either getting achievements (Halo 3) or choosing what you want with earned credits (Halo: Reach), Halo 5 forces you to roll dice with the REQ system's random number generator and hope that you get your item.

It's a design meant to get you to buy the game's "loot boxes" (disguised as REQ packs) with real money so that you don't have to wait as long as you would by earning packs normally. But if the poor sales of Star Wars Battlefront II are any indication, the gaming community has had enough of loot boxes. Players want to earn their items, not win them in a slot machine. Hopefully, 343 Industries takes note and designs Halo Infinite's progression accordingly.

Your thoughts

What kind of mistakes do you think 343 Industries needs to avoid making or repeating with Halo Infinite? Let me know in the comments.

Read: 3 novels you should read to get prepared for Halo Infinite

While waiting for Halo Infinite to release, make sure to check out Halo 5: Guardians, The Master Chief Collection, and Halo Wars 2.

Brendan Lowry
Brendan Lowry

Brendan Lowry is a Windows Central writer and Oakland University graduate with a burning passion for video games, of which he's been an avid fan since childhood. You'll find him doing reviews, editorials, and general coverage on everything Xbox and PC. Follow him on Twitter.

27 Comments
  • You forgot 4 player split screen.. For guys night 😁
  • This is critical. When my kids have friends over, nobody wants to sit there and watch one guy play!
  • Yes of course, kids. But more so when the wife is out and the guys come over for game night lol
  • Adult game night rules 😀
  • Your wife doesn't play as well?
  • 343 confirmed about a year ago that every future Halo release would have this feature :)
  • Halo 5 was boring, the enemies sucked, and the story was bad.
  • It wasn't my favorite Halo by any means, but I really enjoyed 5.
  • Yeah I hope we get rid off those Prometheans soon. I love the multiplayer but the campaign was mediocre at it's best and terrible at it's worst. I liked Halo 4s campaign though.
  • but best game mechanics tbh. Love more agile design.
  • Ditch the REQ packs and randomize the multiplayer maps. The maps tend to come in and out of rotation which means lots of rounds in the same few.
    REQ packs suck.
    I put in more than a few hours to get the Venerator helmet in Halo 4.
    And I was BAD at assassinations then. Now the armor means nothing.
    I don't play warzone, so I have a ton of items I'll never use. And I don't want to take the time to cash them in for RP...
  • bring back playable elite.
  • Be a little more creative with multiplayer level design. I still think on bungie's reach as my fave multiplayer experience.
    Make cortana good again and back with the chief.
    Improve the realism, see weapons glow red and smoke etc, see drool from aliens... Make it more organic like that.
    Sort out coop, maybe a localised coop option through two Tvs. Remove the pramethians (spelt wrong probably) they're boring to fight and make it more frustrating. Fleshy aliens I. E. Grunts are much better fun.
    Make the story interesting!
    Spice up multiplayer games, include ability to imprison Spartans, have traps etc. There's loads they could do better.
    I still play 5 today religiously so it's not all bad, but definitely room for improvement. Kbone27
  • Split Screen Co-Op is number one.
  • Slip screen was already confirmed. What you forgot to said is 343 needs to support the game post launch. HALO 5 do not have a single new map since 2016
  • 1) Not releasing it for PC
  • Absolutely necessary:
    - 4-way-split-screen
    - 16 player multiplayer games
    - Captivating Story
    - 2-way-split-screen Co-Op Would be nice:
    - 6-way-split-screen on Xbox ONE X with large TV
    - up to 32 Players
    - All weapons and vehicles in a fun-deatmatch game mode
    - Complete community Maps (Something like fun or lan party maps)
    - 4-way-split-screen Co-Op
    - More game modes (such as unreal Tournament 2004 (Fun modes for lan parties)) could be nice:
    - crossplay with pc
  • I could see crossplay happening in social modes, not core ones though.
  • This article is curious. Whilst Halo 5 certainly has its issues, they strike me as often overblown, to a quite absurd degree. 1) Forge coming later was a shame, but the releases of content for Halo 5, leaving it as a far larger game than at launch, and larger than any previous Halo, has been a good thing. It needed more at launch (in particular, only three MP modes in Arena was a shame; but there were custom options that were later expanded...), but the release cadence was regular, and the updates often pretty substantial. Long-demanded things have finally arrived to the series, like a customs browser, but that's forgotten, apparently.
    2) The campaign has too many Wardens, but the criticism thrown at the core story is near hyperbolic at times (the basic storyline is pretty straightforward, definitely more so than 4, which relied on theexternal universe more, imo), and it strikes me that some genuinely terrific levels (the entire Sanghelios run in particular) are ignored in favour of complaints about Locke not being Chief, and some sort of 'betrayal' in that the game isn't a rerun of Hunt the Truth. The campaign is easily the match of several other Halos (if not 3, for my money), in terms of level design, replayaiblity, and scale. H5 is genuinely underrated in this respect, which is ludicrous. It has issues, but they are magnified and exploded to an absurd degree by the 'community'.
    3) Eliding 'loot boxes' a la Battlefront II with REQs is disengenuous. REQs have been generally well received in the context of 'oh, if we have to have MTs'. I'd rather there were no MTs, and I'd rather there was a mix of random and 'buy this with credits you earn', so you can pick your loot, but this is an unfair elision, imo. Split-screen is coming back, as per 343 comments previously, and rightly so. Fewer to no wardens, would be nice, too! Articles like this are fine and dandy as a way of gauging what people want from Halo, but the innate starting point is inherently negative, and comes from a place of weary, overly-defensive scepticism, that isn't, imo, justified entirely. 'What should 343 NOT do' privileges only that which we see as 'mistakes' (and even then, the definition is broad and not entirely defensible on all counts, imo) rather than celebrating what they have achieved before - such as an absolutely superb MP experience, and levels like Swords of Sanghelios.
  • I have my positive and negative thoughts on Halo 5, and here I simply wanted to highlight what I thought were the biggest problems with the game that need to not be repeated. Halo 5's amount of content at the end of all the updates was amazing, it was more than any other game, but the problem is that the game essentially asked its players to wait, wait, wait, until it was there.
  • Amazing? Sorry but can you elaborate more? The updates are terrible in my opinion.
  • I personally didn't play halo 5 do to the fact the game was really expensive when it came out but I honestly think they should separate it out between a mix of ingame currency (like reach) and bring back some long time favorites like the hyabusa armor the old recon armor (make both decently hard to get like they used to be) have some in game purchases like the old map packs for custom games or exclusive stuff for people who purchase a "vip" pack that has the flaming helmets or the election helmet all stuff a lot of people loved about reach and bring back it's own leveling system like they did with the multiplayer reach and halo 4 not any of this ranked and unranked I see with Master Chief collection and I'm not saying add a report system but there are people in almost every halo 4 match making game were i see there reticle is about 6in away from my head but they still hit me (watching death cam) I think people who do stuff like that take a lot of fun out of the game and should get some kind of punishment like start at a 15min ban from multiplayer to 30min and so on clean up the multiplayer I never played the combat evolved multiplayer since I started with halo 2 but in the master Chief collection I don't know what was up but i would be killed in almost 3 or 4 shots if it was the power of the pistol or some kind of mod where the bullet always hits the head but let's not have that BS in this new game let's just have it were everyone can enjoy it please anything i say that makes you mad just message me on my Xbox account I'll gladly talk more in depth I've fallowed a lot of the story and have played for a long time my gamer tag is CAPT. Mason
  • It would be easier to read your comment if you used a "." (period) at the end of a sentence. ;-)
  • The campaign seemed like a CoD game, eplosive and in your face, hopefully 343 doesn't mess up Infinite and go the opposite way the trailer showed us.
  • As a gamer approaching middle-age (still a few years away), one of my biggest issues aside from a short and uninteresting campaign was the inconsistency of the multiplayer modes. They changed several times early on. After finding one that I liked, they changed it a few times and then finally took it off completely. Sorry 343i, but you do that too much and I'm out.
  • Biggest thing they could do to boost Halo 6 is launch it on the damn PC!!!
  • Any chance it will be an Xbox Anywhere title?