Following what was probably a long day of hard work at 343 Industries, the Halo Infinite technical preview is now live on Xbox consoles and PC. Select Halo Insiders received an invite for the technical preview earlier this week, but providing access to the build yesterday proved to be more complex than expected.
On Xbox, Halo Insiders who got an invite can download the technical preview from the Xbox Insider Hub, while the PC beta is happening on Steam. On Xbox Series X|S, you can expect an 11.7GB download before getting your hands on this first Halo Infinite beta.
As 343 Industries previously detailed, this first technical preview is pretty light on content: The Bot Slayer mode currently lets you play against bots with 3 other players on 3 different maps, and the Weapon Drills mode lets you test 12 different weapons against stationary targets. According to Halo Community Director Brian Jarrard, 343 Industries plan to make the bots a bit tougher starting tomorrow, and a fourth Bot Slayer map should also make its debut.
And lastly – thank you everyone who stuck through a long day with us! We've already gotten great data, insights, and bug reports and we're just getting started. We knew it'd be bumpy and this is why we flight. Thank you for helping us and it's great see folks having fun! <3 (9/9)
— Brian Jarrard (@ske7ch) July 30, 2021
“If we’re able to hit our target engagement and testing goals for the Bot Slayer before the flight concludes, we’re looking to enable a brief opportunity for some good old fashion 4v4 Social Arena Slayer. If we hit this phase, expect it to land sometime in the final stretch of the flight (i.e. Sunday evening) and expect there to be a few potential hiccups with your experience,” 343 Industries also said on Wednesday.
Keep in mind that this is the first technical preview for a game that is still a works in progress, though it’s probably best to keep your expectations in check. 343 Industries also shared the following list of known issues in this build:
Here are a few of the issues we’re aware of in this build:
- AMD players should make sure the AMD Graphics Driver is version 21.6.1 or later. Earlier versions are not compatible with this version of the game and may result in significant performance and/or stability issues.
- We have a pesky bug related to Matchmaking that can result in a player being unable to join into a session, timing out, and then returning to the main menu. When this occurs, the match will proceed but you might be missing a player from your game for a brief period until another player joins-in-progress.
- We’re aware of and tracking a few different crash scenarios though the overall average failure rate is well below our targets. We’re particularly interested in getting more crash logs from a wider breadth of platforms as stability work continues internally.
- Various situations can cause stuttering, de-sync, warping, and other abnormal behavior.
- Occasionally, player scores will not appear during the victory screen at the end of the match and/or the post-game carnage report may not load after some matches.
- Rarely, a player may begin a match unable to see their own weapon and have reduced audio.
- Rarely, a player’s melee attack may not register as expected.
- Sometimes after pressing A at the title screen, Challenges, Customization, and Commerce screens take a while to appear on the main menu.
We did get our invite for this first technical preview of Halo Infinite, and we’ll have more to share very soon. If you also got the chance to play this first build, let us know in the comments if you think the much-anticipated Halo game already looks promising or not.
