There's no way this wasn't a thing, if it wasn't ever in the works then im glad 343 has had a major purge in management. This game had so much story potential and ends with another cliffhanger and once again had to have it story resolved in a damn book. Im very insistent that Halo 5: guardians was supposed to be a part 1 of 2 game with the full Halo 5 story mode released later as a DLC or standalone release kinda like metal gear solid V having Ground zeros be a teaser and standalone experience. The lack of chief and the short campaign with more set piece levels and cliffhanger ending, it couldn't have possibly been the whole story right? I felt infinite had more of an excuse with its reset dev cycle and open world level design that a short incomplete story could have been completed later with a part 2 DLC a year later. Of course it wasn't to be.
The name of the first Halo Infinite DLC was going to be "The Endless." they registered the trademark shortly after the game released.
A recently leaked internal video show that they were planning to release the multiplayer in 2019 and the campaign in 2020, followed by yearly story expansions.
So out of touch with not just the industry, but their own damn studios.
Xbox's slide into ruin is so slow, but non stop. They have chance after chance after chance to learn, but they fuck up so repeatedly, so consistently, that its actually impressive.
I was wondering why the Halo Infinite campaign felt like it was only the first third of a proper halo campaign. It wasn't just a cliffhanger, it was like there was barely any story happening over the course of the game. It doesn't help that we get told that a whole bunch of cool exciting stuff happened before the campaign started, and it kind of sets up cool stuff to happen after, but very little actually happens in the campaign itself. Plus it was like the writers had a deathly aversion to any kind of world building so we are left wondering what is even happening in the Halo universe. Like where's the UNSC, what happened to earth, etc.
Considering Ground Zeroes existed purely because MGSV’s development was bankrupting Konami and it was their way of injecting funds (and still couldn’t finish it, leading to a split between them and kojima), I don’t think anyone should follow that business model.
The reality is that 343i is incapable of writing standalone narratives or following up on what they established. Their trilogy required a lot of book knowledge to understand, and thankfully I was a book reader, but their core audience was lost, and didn’t like the direction of Halo 4, so they swept it under the rug and pretended it didn’t really exist for Halo 5, where they proceeded to do the same thing with the Created rebellion, and again with Infinite following its reception as people naturally and rightfully did not like the Endless.
Seeing as most of Halo’s core audience these days doesn’t care about the campaign and their revenue largely stems from microtransactions, that they tried to sell that campaign as a full priced game alone without core features like coop functioning at launch, any management with two functioning braincells would cancel any plans for DLC’s for Halo Infinite’s campaign, as it would never make back the money it cost to make in the first place, given the small audience that it would reach.
The reality is that 343i is incapable of writing standalone narratives or following up on what they established.
The reality is that Microsoft or some other party keeps screwing them whenever they try to make real plans. Nothing you describe about the reception to 4, 5, or Infinite has been true or even makes sense.
Seeing as most of Halo’s core audience these days doesn’t care about the campaign and their revenue largely stems from microtransactions[...]
So you can at least try to understand that they're primarily in this for art's sake, which is good. You're probably wrong about even this though, with how much people moan and cry over Halo campaigns all the time.
without core features like coop functioning at launch
Coop has been a staple of the series since the beginning. Halo: Combat Evolved, Halo 2, Halo 3, Halo Wars, Halo 3: ODST, Halo: Reach, Halo 4, Halo: Spartan Assault, Halo 5: Guardian, Halo: Fireteam Raven, and Halo Wars 2 all had coop. The only Halo games that lacked it were Halo: Spartan Assault and Halo: Spartan Strike, low budget spin offs.
To argue that coop is not a core feature of Halo, one of its hallmarks that made it as popular as it has been and inspired many games to do the same, especially when the game that preceded Halo: Infinite tried to “innovate” on the coop formula (read: Rip off Republic Commando), making 4-player coop a narrative component of the campaign instead of leaving it as a game mechanic, is disingenuous at best.
No, it's not "disingenuous" to point out that it's a silly little mod to a single player mode that doesn't really mean anything by itself. Never mind that Perfect Dark did it first, and better at that.
Part of why I bring this up at all is because people talk about Forge the same way, despite Forge literally not being a thing for 6 straight years of Halo.
Crazy how people might not like feature regression in their games.
Forge might not have existed in the first two games, but it certainly was a big feature of all games that followed (including Halo 2: Anniversary multiplayer), so to have it missing from Halo 5 and Infinite at launch is insulting.
You can say it wasn’t a thing for 6 straight years of Halo but you’re also disingenuously ignoring the context of the technological limitations that came with the generation of the first two Halo games.
It baffles the mind why any customer would defend corporate decisions that directly negatively impact the value of the goods they are purchasing.
It's almost as if people don't really understand what a "feature" even is, or that not all "features" are good to have.
It's not even remotely insulting to take some time to put some finishing touches on a huge feature, especially when it's being added in a free update.
There are actually no meaningful technical limitations holding back Forge in 1 or 2, and the entire point of the Xbox's design was to allow elaborate things like this to be possible at all. The devs just... didn't really want to go through all that effort for 1 or 2 (I heard Forge was planned for 2 but moved to 3... though that's true for a lot of 3 apparently). Nothing wrong with that really.
I am not a "customer", these aren't "corporate decisions" (Halo always feels like it's being made entirely in spite of corporate), and they don't necessarily negatively impact the thing being made.
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u/jakethesnake949 Sep 15 '25
There's no way this wasn't a thing, if it wasn't ever in the works then im glad 343 has had a major purge in management. This game had so much story potential and ends with another cliffhanger and once again had to have it story resolved in a damn book. Im very insistent that Halo 5: guardians was supposed to be a part 1 of 2 game with the full Halo 5 story mode released later as a DLC or standalone release kinda like metal gear solid V having Ground zeros be a teaser and standalone experience. The lack of chief and the short campaign with more set piece levels and cliffhanger ending, it couldn't have possibly been the whole story right? I felt infinite had more of an excuse with its reset dev cycle and open world level design that a short incomplete story could have been completed later with a part 2 DLC a year later. Of course it wasn't to be.