How Microsoft’s Halo Infinite Went From Disaster to Triumph

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After a messy reveal in 2020, the company’s signature gaming franchise needed a rescue effort to get across the finish line.
By
Dina Bass
and
Jason Schreier
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Joseph Staten, 343 Industries’ creative director.


In July 2020, Microsoft Corp. showed a nine-minute trailer of Halo Infinite, the latest installment from its blockbuster gaming franchise, which has sold more than 81 million copies and brought in almost $6 billion. Halo fans had been waiting to get a taste of the game since the company first told them about it two years earlier, and Microsoft was counting on their enthusiasm to propel sales of its newest Xbox, which it planned to release in the fall. The trailer showed an expanded playing field and new weapons, but gamers immediately fixated on the graphics, which were so blocky that cynical fans began to joke that Xbox must have mixed up its Halo and Minecraftfranchises.

Even within Microsoft, there was wide acknowledgment that releasing a half-baked demo was a big mistake. “We should have known before and just been honest with ourselves,” Phil Spencer, Xbox’s head, said in a recent interview with British GQ magazine. “We were there not out of deception, but more out of ... hope. And I don’t think hope is a great development strategy.”

Microsoft reluctantly decided to push back the release date. It then tapped Joseph Staten, the lead writer for the first three Halo games in the early 2000s, to get things back on track. Staten had stepped away from the franchise in 2009 and was serving as a senior creative director for Microsoft, where he worked on other big games, including State of Decay and Crackdown. A month after the debacle with the demo, Staten rejoined 343 Industries, the Microsoft-owned gaming studio that makes Halo, as its creative director. One of the first things he did was remind the studio’s demoralized staff that the franchise’s long-running success had actually been marked by several bumpy introductions, including a disastrous demonstration of the very first Halo game in 2001 that almost doomed the series before it even got started. “We’ve had some rough demos over the years,” he says.
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Staten also persuaded Microsoft’s leadership to give 343 as much time as it needed to fix things. Microsoft saw Halo as critical to influencing gamers to buy the new console, but releasing a buggy version could have soured players on the game.

The studio made that mistake once before, with its 2014 release of Halo: The Master Chief Collection, whose multiplayer version was so glitchy that 343 ended up making multiple public apologies. Serious gamers still remember the episode as a significant breach of trust that Microsoft couldn’t afford to repeat. “There’s nothing worse for a game than to release it and have all sorts of bugs or things that are going to ruin the gameplay experience,” says Jason Brown, who once competed in Halo’s professional e-sports league under the name Lunchbox.

The risky decision to slow down seems to have transformed a potential disaster into a real success. In November, 343 surprised fans by releasing a free multiplayer mode of Halo Infinite on the 20th anniversary of the release of the first Halo game. By the next day, the game had set an Xbox record for most concurrent players on the online gaming platform Steam. The full version went on sale Dec. 8 to positive initial reviews. “Halo Infinitecan’t just be another Halo. It needs to be the Halo that exists in your imagination,” wrote CNET reviewer Mark Serrels. “And incredibly, against all odds, it pretty much is.”
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Gamers, notoriously difficult to keep happy, seem ready to forgive Microsoft for its false start. “I don’t want to say the Halocommunity has done a 180, because gamers now are just kind of skeptics, but they’ve turned maybe 130 degrees,” says Matt McDonald, moderator of a Haloforum on Reddit.

Halo pits a genetically modified Marine—the Master Chief—in a battle against a religious cult of aliens, with the future of humanity on the line. Coming into being alongside the first Xbox, it’s been produced in-house at Microsoft since its inception. In 2007, 343 took over production of Halo from Bungie, the studio that made the earliest versions. The Microsoft-owned studio has been characterized by flawed internal tech tools, infighting, and high turnover, according to interviews with more than 20 current and former employees, who requested anonymity because they weren’t authorized to speak publicly.

All those factors played a role in the difficulties with Halo Infinite, which the studio began planning in 2015 just after Halo 5, the last full installment of the game, was released. After kicking around various formulas, the developers landed on an idea that stuck: Halo as an “open world” game. Rather than progress through a series of levels, players would explore a giant land mass, completing missions in any order, as they did in Nintendo Co.’s 2017 The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, which is considered one of the greatest games of all time.

Video games are built using software tools called gaming engines. The engine used to build Halo was one that 343 had based largely on old code from Bungie. Parts of the engine, a set of tools called Faber, became infamous at the studio for being buggy and difficult to use. Within engineering, there’s a concept known as “tech debt,” which refers to problems one puts up with because the previous programmers of a system chose quick, easy solutions over more sustainable ones. Faber’s code, some of which dated to the early 2000s, had so much debt that some 343 engineers mockingly referred to its “tech bankruptcy.”

The staffing at 343 was also unstable, partially because of its heavy reliance on contract workers, who made up almost half the staff by some estimates. Microsoft restricts contractors from staying in their jobs for more than 18 months, which meant steady attrition at 343.

Halo Infinite’s creative direction was also in flux until unusually late in its development. Several developers described 343 as a company split into fiefdoms, with every team jockeying for resources and making conflicting decisions. One developer describes the process as “four to five games being developed simultaneously.”
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By the summer of 2019, Halo Infinitewas in crisis mode. The studio decided to cut almost two-thirds of the entire planned game, leaving managers to instruct some designers to come to the office and do nothing while the studio figured out the next move. Eventually the game’s open world was cut back from a vast, Zelda-like experience into something far smaller. It soon become clear to some on the team that, even with the compromises, getting Halo Infinite into decent shape by the following fall would be impossible. Still, the timing of the release didn’t seem up for discussion. Microsoft told 343 that it had to be a launch game for the next Xbox, which meant releasing it in November 2020.

The demo changed all that. Microsoft said on Aug. 11, 2020, that it would delay the game, though it left the exact timing vague. When Staten arrived, he pushed his bosses to let 343 take its time, presenting them with a list of features that would make Halo Infinite a success if time weren’t the only factor. “Here’s a list of all the things we could do to make this game excellent,” he recalls telling them. “Here’s what more time buys us.”

As a player, Staten liked how computer-controlled Marines in earlier versions would join up with him on his battles. At the time he took over, he says, Marines in Halo Infinite were programmed to stay frustratingly close to the spots where the player first encountered them. “Every once in a while I run into a couple of Marines,” Staten says. “But they kind of stay where they are, and they don’t join me on my adventure, and they’re not part of that heroic feeling that you get from classic Halo games.”

In the end, 343 fixed the graphics problems, and Staten got his roaming Marines. But Halo Infinite isn’t yet a finished product. That’s OK in a way that wouldn’t have been true for past versions. Since the release of the last full version of the game, the industry has moved more toward regularly updated games than periodic releases of entirely new titles. The studio is planning to add some key features as updates, including co-op mode, which lets gamers play the campaign with a friend, and forge, which allows for the creation of multiplayer maps.

For now, Halo players are content to play the version 343 is releasing. “It just has a really good balance of new and old, which can cater to classic and newer fans alike,” says Marcus Lovejoy, who competed in Halo’s professional e-sports league under the name “Elumnite” before becoming a team manager. “That has been one of the biggest game changers.”
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How Microsoft’s Halo Infinite Went From Disaster to Triumph
 
TruStyle

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Triumph? It's been out for a hot minute now and streets still saying it's some mid.

:mjlol:
 
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