Back in 2019, 343 Industries' Bonnie Ross told the Academy of Interactive Arts and Sciences that Halo Infinite's development was slow and deliberate in order to avoid creating the same sort of crunch conditions that produced Halo 4 and Halo 5. Now, we’re finding out that despite the delay, Halo Infinite’s development is being just as crunchy as its predecessors.
That’s according to a ResetEra user translating a video on Chinese social media site Bilibili from someone claiming to have worked at 343 Industries. As the video is in Mandarin, TheGamer has not been able to independently verify this information. However, what’s presented certainly sounds like crunch conditions by all definitions.
"The team at 343 (especially the low-level employees) works very hard," writes ResetEra user random0_point, "and many of them have experienced working overtime until the early hours of the morning in the past few years."
Additionally, the former 343i employee talked about the disastrous demo from last summer that led to Halo Infinite's extended delay into 2021. He called company executives "overly ambitious" in wanting to create both a new game engine and a semi-open world game at the same time. This meant that resources were constantly being swapped back and forth as engine defects were discovered and needed to be corrected.
The engine itself can largely be blamed for Halo Infinite's poor demo performance last year as the engine hadn't been fully completed yet.
Lots of content was cut from the single-player and multiplayer games in order to get the game content complete back in January. "This has led to some things I've made over the years that no one will probably ever see."
However, the anonymous employee says that he still thinks that Halo Infinite is going to be a great game when it eventually arrives later this year. "In fact, I think the finished product will still be great. The story is a big improvement, and the gameplay is much richer, though the development cycle is too long. Don't expect it to be an epoch-making masterpiece."
The nameless dev eventually transferred to Certain Affinity, the independent developer that has been contracted to help finish Halo Infinite, and is happy to be free of “343’s baggage.”