Halo Infinite is the ultimate Schrodinger’s Cat right now.

Like an AI past it’s lifecycle, with so little information since the cinematic trailer a year ago, imaginations have run rampant. Speculation and hype is at an all time high with the planned Xbox Games Showcase in just a couple more days, with Halo Infinite being the biggest draw by far. The only information that fans have been able to get a hold of ahead of the event comes in the form of leaked toy screenshots. Every scrap of information that could be gleaned has been picked apart in hours of Youtube footage and commentary discussion.

Suffice it to say, there is a lot of anticipation.

Indeed, the success of the next Xbox console could be riding on the hype train that is Halo Infinite. One has to worry whether this is a similar case to the No Man’s Sky debacle from 4 years ago, where many felt betrayed by what was shown and what was available at release. If there ever was a game that was a victim of hype and overexpectations, especially from a small indie games studio, it was NMS, and some speculate that we are seeing the same situation here. I disagree.

Halo is a franchise that changed the gaming industry. The “30 seconds of fun” and the trifecta of gunplay/melee/grenade was the perfect formula that shook the FPS genre. Halo provided a masterful single player experience, a universe of deep lore for nerds to explore, all while creating a multiplayer experience that rivaled (and in my opinion, exceeded) Call of Duty. The Master Chief has become truly iconic; the faceless, unstoppable tank of a hero that any player could superimpose themselves onto, and epitomized the holy grail of game development, which is that the skills are easy to learn and hard to master. The original trilogy is considered by many to be the peak of the Golden Era of Gaming, with very good reason.

Which is why Halo Infinite is a pivotal game for 343Industries and gaming as a whole.

Halo 4 and 5 were...less well received. I personally really enjoyed Halo 4; I felt it explored the depths of the relationship between Cortana and the Chief, while not taking away from the overall threat of rising of the Forerunners. The gameplay loop was solid, and the story stayed true to the lore. The multiplayer was definitely a step down from the quality of Halo 3, but most people were satisfied. Halo 5, however, is where things went off the rails.

I won’t turn this into another scree of whining about what Halo 5 did wrong. It’s been said a million times by those a lot better than me at analyzing the psychology around why the game failed on so many fronts. From my perspective, even during the Hunt The Truth marketing campaign, which I do applaud for being original, I never connected with Locke. The Chief is the face of Halo, and while I do understand that 343 may have been looking to pass the torch to a new titular hero, since he does have to...retire at some point, the way it was handled in game was simply atrocious, not to mention how Cortana was handled. Not bringing the Didact back as the protagonist was a colossal failure, and 343 rightly bears the blame.

So, public opinion has been sour on Halo as of late. Add to the fact that the Master Chief Collection was also a complete disaster at launch, and you have the makings of an IP in danger of losing relevance on the scale of the new Star Wars trilogy. This is what sets the stage for Halo Infinite.

As I said in the byline, Halo is Schrodinger’s Cat. So little is known about it, even with the supposed release date only 6 months away, that people don’t know what to make of it. Is it following the story by Halo 5, or is it a reboot? Is it going to be an open world, or a guided run-and-gun? Is multiplayer going to be scaled back from the wannabe E-Sports series that Halo 5 tried to set up, including game breaking elements like sprint and armor lock, or is it going to be closer to the perfection that was the Halo 3 multiplayer, which was both E-Sports and casual player friendly? Will it include Forge, or not? If it's an open world, does that mean that you don’t play as the Chief all the time? If that’s true, we could assume that we create our own Spartan, and the game will play similar to Destiny. Side note, I think this will be the case, as I believe that the goal will be to create an ever evolving game with periodic expansions, since this is the way the game industry has been heading for the last few years.

The game is both possibly great, and possibly terrible. The savior, or the demon. It exists in both worlds right now, because so much is hinted at, but nothing is for sure. It could be one or some of the possibilities above, or none at all. All that is for certain is that the hype around the gameplay reveal this week is building at an incredible rate, and should it be a success, it’s possible that we will have the kind of anticipation not seen since Halo 3.

I truly hope that the gameplay blows us all away, and the conference ends with those glorious words… “Open beta now available.”

Prime Status:

--> Hyped!!!

Excited

Interested

Bored

Pass

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