No joke: even per match, 343 Industries’ game generates a staggering amount of traffic.
An Xbox spokesperson gave GamesRadar a devastating statement about the still unavailable co-op campaign mode in Halo Infinite: “Online matchmaking will not be available with final co-op. We encourage you to continue to use the Halo LFG and the new Discord voice call feature on Xbox to find players to party up with as you continue playing the beta.”
It’s sad because 343 is making it much harder to get into co-op than it should be, even though the studio has put a lot of work into it. Recall how the studio’s John Mulkey explained the processes within the studio regarding the co-op campaign: “The goal going in was to ‘allow everyone to play their campaigns together.’ It meant that all progress made in the game would be retained, regardless of whether it was through Solo or Co-Op play. I could be playing a Solo campaign, jump into a Co-Op session for a few hours, launch back into Solo play and all the mission progress, acquired collectables, equipment found, achievements earned, and upgrades made in either session would be intact. Gone are the days of playing someone else’s game while earning no progress.
We are handling this through something we internally refer to as ‘No Spartan Left Behind.’ When players join the Fireteam and choose their save slots to play on, the game aggregates the states of all missions across those saves. It sets up a world state in which any missions completed by all Fireteam members are marked as complete while any missions not completed by all are marked as incomplete.” A decent approach, but the execution may be flawed at the “gate”.
On Twitter, NicmeistaR pointed out that Halo Infinite generates 350-900 megabytes of data traffic during each multiplayer match so that the data cap can be reached in a reasonably short period. To this, the Halo customer support account responded that 343 Industries had launched an investigation into the additional data downloads that occur after multiplayer matches. It will be remedied in the August Drop Pod update. However, it was not well received by gamers, as it is still common, especially in the US, to have data limitations on essential, desktop (not mobile!) internet.
We would add that this game was supposed to be one of Microsoft’s big 2021 launches…
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