343 Industries has admitted that it’s not at the point with the public testing (or flights, as they like to call it) where they want to be.

„When we first revealed Halo Infinite back in 2018, I spoke of our ambitions to kick off an early flighting program to bring the community along on our development journey. The Halo Insider program and public flights have been instrumental in bringing the titles in Halo: The Master Chief Collection to PC, providing critical feedback and input to help shape the best possible experience. With Halo Infinite, we are also committed to building the game in partnership with our community but given the unprecedented challenges of this year, we’re not quite where we expected to be in terms of broader public flighting.

While not the full program we had envisioned, we have been working very closely with the community on nearly every facet of the project. From the earliest planning where we focused on broad feedback around art style and story to actual hands-on playtesting and focus feedback with confidential groups of community representatives over the past two years, Halo Infinite is being created in partnership with the community. The team is still working and assessing options for broader hands-on opportunities before launch and we’ll share an update when we can, but this process doesn’t stop with the launch. In fact, in many ways, feedback and community flighting will be even more important after launch as we partner together to continually evolve and update the game into the future,” Chris Lee, the head of the studio, wrote in a blog post.

In an interview with IGN, he also revealed what the studio wants to achieve with Halo Infinite: „We want Infinite to grow over time, versus going to those numbered titles and having all that segmentation that we had before. It’s really about creating Halo Infinite as the start of the next ten years for Halo and then building that as we go with our fans and community.” Where have we heard this ten-year comment before? Oh yeah, with Destiny! And it got a sequel three years later. PR talk…

He also called the game a „platform for the future,” and IGN claims it’s not going to mean a live service game. Instead, it means Halo Infinite is going to be a platform for further updates and expansions, which could deliver separate campaigns instead of them all tying into a single story. And that, to us, sounds like a live service game…

Lee says you don’t have to know the previous games and spin-offs of Halo to understand Halo Infinite, but it will be rewarding if you do. We’ll see this Holiday season when it launches on Xbox Series X, Xbox One, and PC. Unlike what rumours say, the game will ship with multiplayer. (Microsoft would be a fool if they skipped it!) However, the game will not have ray tracing on the new Xbox at launch.

Source: VG247, PCGamer

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