Halo Infinite’s Scope and Biome Variety Was Scaled Back Significantly Mainly Due to Fidelity, Joseph Staten Has Said

Halo Infinite’s scope and biome variety was greatly scaled back compared to the original designs, the game’s creative head has said.

A lot has been said and written about Halo Infinite over the past few years. Microsoft and 343 Industries first showed off the game’s campaign during the company’s E3 2020 showcase, and following community backlash over the game’s visuals, Infinite was delayed.

“In many ways, we are in agreement here – we do have work to do to address some of these areas and raise the level of fidelity and overall presentation for the final game”, 343 Industries wrote in a blog post back in July of 2020. “The build used to run the campaign demo was work-in-progress from several weeks ago with a variety of graphical elements and game systems still being finished and polished.”

343 Industries and Microsoft managed to polish the game’s visuals before its release late last year, but as now revealed by Halo veteran and creative lead, Joseph Staten, the team had to significantly scale back the game’s biome variety and dome, mainly due to the visual fidelity.

“The team went through a lot of iterations on scope and biome variety before I joined,” Staten revealed, speaking to the Academy of Interactive Arts & Sciences (thanks Techradar). “Even after I joined the team, we had to make choices about where to scale back.”

The Halo veteran added, “We didn’t have time, the time to go after the level of fidelity across as much variety as we wanted to. We made huge strides from the E3 demo to when we shipped the game, but we still had to scale back, make targeted cuts.

“We didn’t end up cutting that much ultimately from the open world but I know that from the original designs there was a pretty significant scaling back of what the team had hoped at one point that they could deliver on.”

Staten’s words only leave us wondering how Halo Infinite would have ended up looking and playing if the game was further delayed. Following the above-mentioned delay, Halo Infinite was released in November of 2021 for Xbox Series X|S and PC.