At the end of last year I said that Halo Infinite was my most anticipated game of 2022, despite the fact that it came out in November 2021. It was missing some essential features at launch, like campaign co-op and Forge, and the lack of standard game modes, map variety, and customization made it feel more like a beta than a triple-A, live-service game. Over the last ten months, it doesn’t feel like that much has changed, and we’re still waiting for those core features that were delayed beyond the start of Season 2. In a rather dire dev update published today, new head of live service Sean Baron laid out the studio’s goals, namely, to achieve something he calls seasonality, make playing more rewarding, improve customization, create a fair and competitive environment, and to ensure a stable, high-quality experience. Baron hopes to make “significant progress” on all of those goals by the end of 2023.
The outline and roadmap for the future of Infinite sounds great. Eventually, there will be 13-week seasons, events and seasonal challenges will be improved, players will feel more rewarded for playing, there will be a richer selection of cosmetics, the cheaters will be dealt with, and the bugs will be fixed. The only problem is that the game has been out for a year, and it’s going to be another year before the team is able to make significant progress on all of their goals. Baron and other developers in the update video, community director Brian “ske7ch” Jarrard and head of creative Joseph Staten, talked a lot about accelerating development and getting content updates to players faster, while also revealing that Season 3 has been delayed until next March and couch co-op has been completely canceled.
It’s hard to understand how a game with such a massive budget and fanbase could have fallen so far behind. This kind of course-correction update feels like the kind of thing you’d expect to see within a month or two of a rocky launch, not a year in, and certainly not with a timeline that extends through another full year. The idea that Infinite will start to shape up by the end of 2023 is almost incomprehensible. Infinite wasn’t ready for launch in 2022, and this studio wasn’t ready to tackle a live-service model.
That’s where Sean Baron, who has worked with the Halo franchise for ten years, but is now stepping into the head of live service role, comes in. New faces can be important, especially when public perception is negative, and Baron does a great job laying out the studio’s plan to achieve seasonality, AKA, the three-month seasonal model that practically every other live service game already has. “[Our players] should think of this season as the beginning of what seasonality is,” Baron said. “We should start getting to that goal of 13-week seasons. Not saying that’s a 13-week season, but I’m saying this is the beginning.” So in six months we’ll have a season that’s shorter than this ten month season. It won’t be a three month season, but it will be the start of shorter seasons in general. Got it, I guess.
There’s still a big update in the hole left behind by the former Season 3 start date. It will have a short, free battle pass so they can test out the new XP system they’re working on. It will deliver network co-op, mission replay, and the Forge beta. There will also be two new maps and a new game mode called Covert One Flag. I understand why 343 wanted to delay Season 3 a few months and make it a big starting point for the new vision, but “The Winter Update” undersells this pseudo-season that starts in November. At the very least, it could have been called Season 2.5 and saved them some of the grief they're getting for running Season 2 for ten months.
Ske7tch says that the team needed to take some time and move a little slower so that they could ultimately move faster later, but I don’t think anyone expected “faster later” would mean two years later. Staten responded “we can feel that acceleration, which is good.” It also sounds good, but I wish we could feel the acceleration too. I’m hopeful that Infinite isn’t going to become my most anticipated game of 2024, but until it can achieve industry-standard seasonality, this is all one long, painful beta.