'Halo Infinite' Will Arrive Fall of 2021
The team addresses fans’ concerns.
After a controversial game demo earlier in the year for Halo Infinite — which was originally intended to be an Xbox Series X launch title — 343 Industries decided to delay its release until 2021 in order to further polish it up. Now, the developer’s senior concept artist and art director Nicolas “Sparth” Bouvier, director of art manage Neill Harrison, and development manager for the graphics team Ani Shastry has given yet another look at the work in progress, accompanied with a Q&A that addressed many of the fans’ concerns.
“The primary goal for the Campaign demo in July was showing Halo Infinite gameplay for the first time. While that aspect generally landed as we wanted, the reality is that the art and visuals weren’t at the bar we hold for Halo – even in a work-in-progress state,” explained Harrison. “Much of the feedback we heard from the community aligned with our own views and work we were already committed to doing around things like indirect lighting, material response, foliage and tree rendering, clouds, level-of-detail transitions, and character fidelity. Still, the feedback was humbling, and it also pushed us to look at additional opportunities for improvement.”
The three went on to discuss some of the changes the development team has already made since the last showcase. “Some of the key areas of progress include better quality of global illumination, ambient occlusion, shadows, volumetric lighting, sky, and atmosphere,” Shastry revealed. “We have also addressed issues with our GPU-driven rendering and texture streaming solution that should mitigate the LOD popping and texture quality issues that were prevalent in the July demo.”
Along with answering some of the crucial questions relating to the gameplay experience itself, the developer also finally revealed a launch window for the title: fall of 2021.
For the full Q&A on Halo Infinite, you can head over to 343 Industries’ website.
Elsewhere in gaming, World of Warcraft: Shadowlands has become the fastest-selling PC game of all time.
