We’ve seen two trailers, yet somehow most of Halo Infinite remains an enigma. Here is everything we know about the next installment of the popular franchise.
It has been quite the wait, but Halo Infinite ‘s development seems to be going well, despite its recent delay. First revealed during Microsoft’s E3 presentation in 2018 and once again in 2021, the highly anticipated game is now scheduled to hit shelves in the fall of 2021. Although much of its contents are a mystery, there’s still quite a bit we know about Halo Infinite. Over the past few years,343 Industries and Microsoft have been cautious about what content is offered to the public. The curtain was pulled back slightly during July’s Xbox Games Showcase, which showed off its gameplay debut, but the best look we’ve gotten of the final product came during their 2021 E3 presentation. Here’s everything we know about the next installment of the popular series. See more Halo Infinite will launch on Xbox One, Xbox Series X/S, and PC on December 8. Halo is the Xbox’s biggest exclusive, so obviously, it will be coming to all of their consoles from the Xbox One, Series S, and, of course, the Series X. As a first, it will also launch day and date on the PC as well. After the success of porting The Master Chief Collection to the PC and how Microsoft has embraced the PC platform as an alternative marketplace, it makes perfect sense to launch their most massive title on both platforms. Much of what we know about Halo Infinite comes from the three trailers released by Microsoft — as well as developmental updates via 343 Industries. The first was the announcement trailer from E3 in 2018 — and although it didn’t reveal much, it did show off the new Slipspace engine. That vague trailer was followed up with the Discover Hope trailer in 2019. This time, we watched Master Chief interact with a UNSC Marine after being rescued from orbit; then, he held a brief conversation with Cortana. There’s a lot more going on in this trailer than the one from 2018 — be sure to check it out below if you happened to miss it the first time around. Other than these two trailers, we’ve also seen a bit of concept art from 343 Industries. While the images on their own didn’t reveal much, the accompanying blog post provided fans with some of the best Halo Infinite details to date. In July, we got our first glimpse of gameplay that confirmed Halo Infinite will be a more open title and pits Master Chief against the Banished, enemies most well-known for their involvement in the Halo Wars games. At the end of July, coinciding with the gameplay reveal,343 Industries released a blog post with a slew of information about Halo Infinite, including updates about the game’s beta and what to expect from its gameplay. Following multiple delays (which we’ll get into later on), the development team has updated the community on the game’s new release window and has provided us with more details about the art — which was heavily criticized during the reveal in July 2020. 343 has trickled out details in their blog posts, including some new screenshots and art. February’s post was all about what exploring Zeta Halo would be like. The team expressed that their goals with the campaign could be broken down into two components: Legacy and Simplicity. They want older players to feel as though they are playing something that fits in with their memories of classic Halo games while avoiding overly complex and distracting designs that many criticized Halo 5 for suffering from. The latest story trailer came during E3 2021 where we got a much more expansive, and better-looking, glimpse at Halo Infinite. As the devs state, this game will spotlight the Chief, but also emphasizes the relationship he will have with the pilot and a new artificially intelligent companion. Cortana’s voice still haunts the Chief as he navigates a zero-gravity space, where he encounters a new A.I., made to imitate Cortana, that informs him she “has been deleted.” The mystery then becomes who actually deleted her, and why this A.I. wasn’t deleted if Cortana actually is gone. In what will likely be the final look at the game before release, we finally saw the campaign for the first time since its initial reveal. This new trailer serves partly as a recap, briefly explaining the key players and events of prior games to Halo Infinite, as well as what the main plot will be. Details surrounding Halo Infinite ‘s narrative are still murky, but we do know one thing: Master Chief is the star of the show like in almost every Halo storyline. Infinite will take place after the events of Guardians, and it sounds like players won’t be switching off between Chief and an auxiliary character, as they did in the last installment. In a post by Chris Lee, Studio Head at 343 Industries, he mentions that the team “heard feedback loud and clear on the amount of time spent playing as the Master Chief in Halo 5 ” and that they will “focus on the Master Chief and continue his saga.” The team listed terms including Super Soldier, Story Driven, and Spiritual Reboot as concepts they kept in mind when designing this chapter in Master Chief’s saga. Xbox tweeted a video teasing Master Chief as the central character in the game, honing in on the digits “117” branded on his armor, which refers to his other name of John-117. July’s gameplay reveal gave us the biggest clues yet as to Infinite ‘s story. The demo opened with a date: May 28, 2560, which places it two years after Halo 5: Guardians. It mentions that this is “167 days after we lost” and is based on dialogue from the Banished’s leader toward the end of the demo that would be a loss to his troops. The demo shows the UNSC soldier from the previous trailer, whom 343 officially refers to as the Pilot, and Master Chief crash-land on the Halo ring. The Pilot seems a little resentful at the fact that ever since he found Master Chief floating in space, he’s gotten into nothing but trouble. Master Chief promises that the pair can look for a ship to get them off the ring once he has taken out three anti-aircraft cannons. Master Chief heads to one of the three cannons and comes across a message from the Banished’s leader. He asserts that he has control of the ring, says that he shares the same goal as “the Harbinger” of carrying out the Banished’s founder Atriox’s will, and challenges Master Chief to face-off against him. The Banished leader is revealed in an interview to be War Chief Escharum, with speculation that the Harbinger he mentions is actually Cortana. What has happened to the rogue A.I. and the rest of the UNSC? Not even Master Chief knows, and uncovering that mystery is a journey the player and the Chief will go on together. The last Halo Infinite campaign overview trailer goes into more depth. The Banished have full control over Zeta Halo, the ring we’ll be playing on. It is spelled out that Chief’s first, or one of his first, missions will be to find this new AI called “The Weapon”, who explains her purpose is to contain Cortana, while attempting to uncover the mystery surrounding Cortana’s fate after the previous game.
