The Halo Infinite delay is certainly unfortunate, but it will almost certainly result in a special edition Xbox Series X relaunch later in 2021.
In case you hadn’t heard, Halo Infinite isn’t going to come out this winter as initially planned. Instead of launching alongside the Xbox Series X, Microsoft’s fancy new console, it’ll come out sometime in 2021.
For Halo fans, that sucks. We get it. That probably even sucks for Xbox fans that weren’t even that into Halo. After all, Halo is sort of Xbox’s flagship property. You get an Xbox to play Halo--or at least, you did until they released the Master Chief Collection on PC.
So why the delay? Microsoft didn’t say, but we’d wager a guess it had to do with the poor reception the game received back in July’s Xbox Games Showcases. People thought that Halo Infinite didn’t look pretty enough to be a next-gen game, with Xbox Marketing head Aaron Greenberg even going as far as defending the game by pointing out that a YouTube stream isn't coming at you with 4K graphics so there's no point in rendering the game at that level for a livestream.
Likely the delay is to make sure that Halo Infinite will release with ray tracing, which was our first sign that Halo Infinite might not arrive on time.
In Microsoft’s announcement, they did make a point of all the games that will be out by the time Xbox Series X hits store shelves, including Assassin’s Creed Valhalla, Dirt 5, Gears Tactics, Yakuza: Like a Dragon, and Watch Dogs: Legion. But none of those are first-party titles. That’s like if Nintendo launched the Switch without Mario Kart or Breath of the Wild--it’s just weird.
But then again, Microsoft has sort of pivoted away from exclusives in recent years. Releasing Halo and the Xbox Game Pass on PC is sort of making them out to be just a general gaming brand. Yes, the Xbox Series X is a great piece of hardware to play games on, but it’s not specifically about playing Microsoft games--it’s about just playing games in general as best as they can be played.
That said, we’re still totally expecting Microsoft to make a big deal out of Halo Infinite’s eventual launch up to and including the release of a special edition Xbox Series X with Master Chief plastered all over the box. The only question is just when we’ll see it in stores.