By ISAAC SERRATO
Staff Writer
Halo Infinite multiplayer has come out not too recently and to be quite honest it has really promising pros but has horrible issues that are hindering its potential.
343 Industries first released the multiplayer to the public (the multiplayer is free if you have Gamepass for Xbox) during November, after several weeks fans were having a blast with the gameplay. The gameplay feels like old school Halo, with exciting gameplay, amazing graphics, along with a good frame rate for console users. When I played the multiplayer I noticed I did not encounter one internet connection, lag, frame rate, or glitch/bug issues whatsoever. 343 Industries tried their best to run the game well while also making sure the game wasn’t ugly (343 Industries had to delay their game, doing a makeover after they were embarrassed at Microsoft E3’s conference where a Brute NPC character looked ugly, poorly made, with the internet mocking the mistake calling the NPC Craig, funny enough 343 embraced the meme, adopting Craig as a mascot of the game, hiding his character model in the game as a cover for a music album for an Easter egg). After the Craig incident, 343 ramped its efforts, delaying the game to fix it, it obviously shows, because the game looks amazing with good, fun gameplay.
However the game faces some challenges that ruin its experience. The problem is the lack of content, why did 343 Industries release a multiplayer game with hardly any content? There are only a few maps, few game modes to play with being very repetitive, not much customization, no Forge (a staple of Halo), with the glaring problem of not being able to customize the multiplayer or being able to create your own multiplayer match. It takes so much time to progress, the challenges given to you to complete in order to level up are ridiculous as they rely on you to play certain game modes but you can’t choose your game modes as Halo Infinity only allows you to play quickplay. This is a problem as quickplay puts you into random game modes, with no choice of game modes, or letting you customize game matches which was a common thing with previous Halo games. There are also no playlists, as in other Halo games multiple game modes were put into playlists (categories) where you can easily find a game mode you want to play but Infinite does not have that. The vehicles feel underwhelming as well as underpowered, along with no class customization for your Spartan. The Campaign for Infinite comes out on December 8th, with THIS BEING THE MULTIPLAYER! This is downright embarrassing considering their budget/time to develop this. 343 has to release massive updates to fix this or gradually build up back to the original standard Bungie made for Halo multiplayer.
Overall, Halo Infinite is promising with good gameplay but 343 has to fix their sloppiness, lack of content immediately if they want Halo fans to forgive for their blunders of Halo 4 & 5 (Halo 4 was alright, Halo 5 multiplayer was fun but many fans felt backhanded with the story being a slap to the face in both games along with the lack of content in Halo 5) they have to fix these problems. 343 has also said Halo will be a platform for the next 10 years with no sequels planned to be a live service game, if this is the state their releasing the game in, 343 really needs to start improving to show Halo fans that they’re being serious because right now they are making Halo fans along with me being nervous with the state the game is in right now.