Five hundred million dollars. That’s the elephant in the room that has put 343i and several Microsoft executive’s future in doubt, and that’s why they’re all currently lying and kicking the can down the road.
Halo Infinite is never going to look or play like a next gen game - unless it goes into a whole new development cycle, jettisons Xbox One support, and has every-single-part of it reworked or remade to take advantage of the Series X. They all know it looks and plays like horse shit, but the reaction has set off an absolute firestorm of panic, with poor graphics barely scratching the surface of trouble.
You can tell from the few tiny little skirmishes they used as their big reveal, with a Warthog traversing an empty, silent landscape, horrific pop-in that they couldn’t even be bothered to record a new video to hide by looking somewhere other than directly at the mountains, and that laughable purple monkey *thing* having multiple close ups, those were THE BEST parts they could show.
That means we can safely assume that the game is not only unfinished, but that any more impressive moments literally don’t exist. Add to this the weapons being wildly uninspiring, the grappling hook mechanic exciting pretty much nobody, and you can understand why questions are being raised over whether 343i can be trusted to finish this. The 10 year plan for Halo is in tatters, and there’s now less chance of this game coming out than there is of a press release early next year saying “Technical obstacles could not be overcome”, and something something something welcome back Bungie, see you in 2023. $500,000,000 is a mind blowing amount of money, but Microsoft would sooner write that off than let 343i fuck both Halo and the Series X forever. Anyway, hi Gaf, this is my first post after lurking for fucking years.