Yesterday, 343 Industries kicked off a series of monthly “Inside Infinite” updates to provide insights on the development on the next Halo game, now expected in Fall 2021 on Xbox consoles and PC. The blog post is a long interview with members of the Sandbox team, which is tasked with creating all the vehicles, equipment, weapons, and objects players will interact with in Halo Infinite.
While the blog post is pretty light on new details overall, the Sandbox team shared some interesting comments about 343 Industries’ in-house Slipspace Engine, which has apparently been rebuilt after the prior version was too focused on optimizing things for last-gen Xbox One consoles. Here’s what Game Foundation Architect Daniele Giannetti said in yesterday’s blog post:
Here’s something that excites me as an engineering architect: For Halo Infinite, we rebuilt the engine multi-threading solution to ensure high execution efficiency across all platforms and PCs, instead of running optimally just on Xbox One. We used this new system to transition the renderer to a massively parallel multi-threaded framework to support the increased cost of all our new rendering features and achieve high graphics efficiency on PC CPUs of various size as well as Xbox Series X/S and Xbox One X/S hardware. In practice, this means that we are doing our very best to make sure Halo Infinite runs optimally on any device you may choose to play on! –
Halo Infinite was officially announced at E3 2018, which was before Microsoft revealed its next-gen Xbox consoles. The first E3 2018 cinematic trailer was made with 343 Industries’ brand new Slipspace engine and looked really impressive at the time. However, the visual downgrades were quite obvious in the first Halo Infinite gameplay demo we saw back in July, which was actually running on a PC. The poor reaction led 343 Industries to delay the game to 2021, and after seeing Cyberpunk 2077’s horrible performance on last gen consoles last month, many Halo fans are still wondering if shipping Halo Infinite on Xbox One is actually a good idea.
According to the Sandbox team, things seem to be doing well within 343 Industries right now. “All of our launch content is in-game and being played daily but it takes a strong effort to get something from 90% to a full 100% ship quality. So, we are pushing hard to squash bugs and tune our toys so they are in a good spot as we get closer and closer to launch (and public flighting before that),” said Quinn DelHoyo, Lead Sandbox Designer at 343 Industries.
We’re really looking forward to getting more details about how Halo Infinite will run across platforms. 343 Industries announced back in July that the game would run in 4K at 60FPS on the Xbox Series X, and that’s pretty much all we’ve heard so far. 343 Industries also announced yesterday that Halo Infinite would allow players to fully rebind and remap their controls regardless of platform, which will be a first for a Halo game.
We hope the team will be back with more exciting information next month. Future “Inside Infinite” updates should be published on Halo Waypoint, the last Thursday of every month going forward, and we definitely recommend Halo fans to take the time to read the first one here.
