The gameplay - the core of the game - is FAR from garbage.
Actually, the fundamentals of the game - an online multiplayer game - would be the technical underpinnings that enable the multiplayer to function. From poor connectivity, rampant simulation desync issues, PC cheaters, and laggy games, the fundamentals of Halo Infinite are actually pretty terrible. Some of these issues were also present in Halo 5, and they were never properly fixed. As of today, 343i has made zero progress in resolving any of them. In fact, some of the issues are becoming worse as the player base continues to dwindle.
From the blog post, it’s clear that most of these required some thought that go beyond basic ‘customs’.
Not really. A version of most of them have been created in previous Halo titles by fans. The amount of work to throw them together should be minimal at best. If it required more than a few hours for any one mode, 343i are in serious trouble.
Doesn’t apply to Halo Infinite. Nearly 9k Peak concurrents on Steam, and many more on console isn’t ‘little to no players’
A massive AAA F2P shooter that is less than six months old has fewer PC players than The Sims 4, an eight year old single player offline family simulation game. That's not just "little to no players" that's a painful embarrassment. Halo Infinite flopped.
This is false. MCC got a bump from some new content, but it’s back below Infinite by some margin.
As of today, sure, Halo Infinite, Microsoft's brand new massive budget high profile F2P shooter from their premier franchise, now has a massive 800 daily average players more than the MCC, a collection of old console games spanning two decades that launched in a fundamentally broken state that took years to fix. This isn't the "win" you think it is.
Head over to the Halo subreddit and the reaction to these new modes is quite positive, with a lot of folks excited for these updates.
Hand a person dying of thirst a bottle of piss and they'll still thank you for it. As I said in my previous post, more content is good - but it's not enough. As I said, 343i are stuck pretending people care about their miniscule content updates for years to come.
I can’t think of any fixes the community is clamoring for that are years away...
Think harder.
Removal of the challenge progression system and an addition of a pure XP progression system is slated for late this year, meaning it will be likely delayed. Taking them at their word, that's over eighteen months since the community explained during the flights that the progression system was fundamentally broken, and a year after everyone who played the game explained it made the game worse. And they're still in the design phase, according to their blogs.
According to 343i's blog posts, a complete overhaul of the armour customisation system to remove the garbage "armour core" restrictions will require a complete re-working of every item in the game. This was explained to be an on-going set of work that is set to takes years to complete.
A re-do of the UI is apparently almost impossible due to engine limitations, which means things like simple game-mode selection, armour selection screen improvements, and even changes to their MTX store layout require fundamental re-writes of the game's engine. This places that type of improvement squarely in the Infinite 2.0 basket, which is at least two years away.
A complete overhaul of the MTX approach to the game is also set to be on-going. They haven't figured out how to make XP boosts work properly, for example, because the challenge system prevents it from functioning logically. To date, 343i have no solution.
The investigation of the aforementioned networking issues has only just started at 343i, with the "mid-season patch" adding in telemetry systems for them to start tracking the issue. They took care to set expectations for fixes here: this will be an issue that will take years to properly resolve, and its worth not this was never fully fixed in Halo 5. Their recent GDC videos, in which the two-simulation system of Infinite was explained, has led some in the community to believe the desync issues cannot be resolved at all.
In addition to the above, 343i need to ship all of the missing features that past titles launched with - Co-op, Forge, Firefight, Campaign mission selection - and all of the respective content. Co-op was delayed two times already, Forge is MIA, and 343i refuse to acknowledge Fightfight. We're talking years for the full set of features, just to get Halo Infinite to where it should have been when it launched last year. Only then can 343i can actually start making anything new that would advance Halo Infinite.
Fixing all of the above is going to take eighteen months to two years of full time work, and that's being generous considering the glacial pace 343i have been operating at.
I don't begrudge people their enjoyment of the game, so please continue to have fun it - but please don't try and pretend that Halo Infinite is doing great. The game's on life support, and 343i are years from pulling off a turn around. It'll see a bump when Season 2 launches, sure, but it'll die off just as quickly as it did at launch because none of the issues are actually fixed. And 343i have told us those fixes are months and months and months away.