I've just completed Halo Infinite and the campaign was absolutely brilliant, minus the open world elements. Did not care for that at the slightest and it felt tacked on in the same way Ubisoft games artificially add pointless shit for the sake of it. Final boss battle was really shit though. Felt unfair with waves of enemies and her tracking balls that follow you.
I take it the planned 'Endless' DLC is canned?
I'm also curious why they've switched from their current engine to Unreal Engine. Halo Infinite actually looks pretty sharp. The graphical effects are
really good. The art style is also beautiful. I was so impressed at how pretty everything looked.
The campaign was fun for the first third/half and then got repetitive and boring. The speeches, oh the speeches. I hated the story of Infinite, another reset and non-delivery. Please just forget the Banished already. Atriox is awesome, what's his face from Infinite was whatever.
The graphics at demo AND launch were nowhere near the current state. I went back end of last year with a buddy to play coop and the love plus detail that has been put into Infinite's campaign is striking between my launch solo playthrough and coop about 3 months ago. How 343 haven't put out marketing, ViDoc, social media, Waypoint articles etc or even a before and after type presentation is beyond me. It's night and day, seriously.
Another aspect of a huge enjoyment with our coop, me and one buddy, was the sheer fun of the outdoor open world stuff. We were loading up hogs and weird marine weapons while one of us went on foot and long ranged the big enemies and the motorised UNSC death hog cleaned house. By corridor 3 of the "story/missions" were just blasted through those, the setups in the big rooms, mini bosses and waves of enemies were awesome and really sing like Halo 2. Some of the fixed tunnels to get there fall well short of say CE experiences like the two bridges and tunnels etc.
I don't believe it had to do with the capabilities of the engine. From everything that we have heard it sounds more like it was just a highly difficult engine to work with, to the point that every aspect of development was taking exponentially too long.
EDIT: Are they still planning to release DLC? I thought it was all scrapped lol.
Armchair opinion inbound - there is no way SlipSpace was built from the ground up as a new engine, it's just engine modules being refactored mostly from what I can tell. I know engines/frameworks etc all have things to keep and retain that "Halo look and feel" but this SlipSpace was one of the worst things MS/Xbox allowed 343 to attempt, especially after MCC. Had Infinite started with Unreal 6+ years ago imagine where the show and game would be now. Mandalorian levels would not be out of the question for the show. Hogwarts IQ, world building and attention to detail would not be out of the question. Shame.
Campaign DLC has been cut, no go captain. The next Halo absolutely, categorically must have PvE. You want big numbers, GaaS, Azure backend....Cortana replies with 3 letters on repeat...PvE.