343 Industries’ Joseph Staten has revealed that Halo Infinite’s open world was significantly scaled back compared to the game’s original scope.
Speaking on the Academy of Interactive Arts & Sciences Game Maker’s Notebook podcast (thanks, TechRadar), head of creative at 343 Industries Joseph Staten explained that 343 had to scale back the original design of Halo Infinite’s open world.
343 had to “scale back” and make “targeted cuts” with Halo Infinite’s open world
“The team went through a lot of iterations on scope and biome variety before I joined the team, and even after I joined the team, we had to make choices about where to scale back,” Staten said. “We just didn’t have the time to go after the level of fidelity across as much variety as we wanted to.
“We made huge strides from the E3 demo to when we shipped the game, but we still had to scale back and make targeted cuts. We didn’t end up cutting that much ultimately from the open world, but I know from the original designs there was a pretty significant scaling back of what the team had hoped they could deliver on.”
Halo Infinite was 343 Industries’ first-open world game, so it’s understandable that the studio didn’t quite realise its original vision for the game and had to par it back and revise its plan in several places.
“I think anybody that’s tried to crack an open world game, you know you don’t succeed 100% out of the gate on your first try,” Staten said. “You build up over time, you become better and better, you layer systems upon prior learnings, and so for us, it was really learning on the fl