Ever since the first trailer for Infinite dropped two years ago, the hype has been building like mad. Five years since the hotly divisive Halo 5 Guardians released. People wanted to see a lot of changes with this new Halo, especially in consideration of the faults Halo 5 had. Less sprinting and advanced movement (which I honestly didn’t mind much, sue me), change the Elite design back to what it was, bring back the Brutes and the Banished seen in Halo Wars 2, and gameplay flow that reminds us of Halo CE. I can safely say we got all of that in the new trailer, but some pretty big problems arose…

On the first viewing, things look pretty good. Nice skybox, some nice textures and details, and some great soundtrack alongside an electric speech at the end. Seriously, that speech from the elder Brute made me wanna run through a brick wall. But let’s start the issues with that scene. When he was a hologram, things looked ok. But when he got nice and close to the camera with his actual textures, shit didn’t look good, lets be honest. He looked very plastic-like, which is a problem shared with pretty much all of the NPCs. For example, this picture here isn’t very flattering.

They look like toys.

And that’s supposed to be a promotional picture. This is the type of shit you would see in debug mode or something. The graphical issues extend past plastic ass models. There was heavy pop-ins for stuff like grass, clouds, and mountains. Pay attention to stuff far way and you’ll catch some pop-ins. Why do some parts of the game look drop dead gorgeous while enemy models look dog ass? Ray tracing.

https://twitter.com/Nibellion/status/1286347490619543555

For those that don’t know what ray tracing is, its a rendering technique for generating an image by tracing the path of light as pixels in an image plane and simulating the effects of its encounters with virtual objects. It basically enhances realism. This does take up a lot of power but the Xbox Series X is more than powerful enough to handle it. That’s why it’s so disappointing this is coming post-launch in an update.

Not everything is doom and gloom. The gameplay looked great overall, with the exploring element from Halo CE taken to the next level. Plenty of new and interesting weapons were introduced like a triple burst Covenant Carbine and an updated Mauler from Halo 3. Elites look like actual Elites (sans the plastic), and the Banished are here. This does come with some question marks pertaining to the story and Cortana’s role but we’ll cross that bridge when we get there. People are nitpicking that sprint is still in the game and Chief now has a grappling hook. Gee, I wonder where they got that idea from…

The Halo Infinite gameplay reveal overall made people worry a bit, wondering what the hell has been happening these past five years. Others are hopeful, knowing this is just a demo with plenty of unfinished aspects. At least the meme potential is already high.

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