Speaking recently on Game Maker's Notebook, 343i's Creative Director, 343i's Re-Interactive College of Arts and Sciences podcast, said that Halo: Infinity's open world has shrunk considerably compared to its original vision.
Halo: Infinity is the first open-world Halo game. As with other open-world games, it is inevitable to make cuts during development. But Staten says the game has made a lot of changes to the size of the open world and the variety of biomes.
"Before I joined the team, the team went through a lot of iterations in terms of scope and biome diversity," says Joseph Staten, "and even after I joined the team, we had to choose to downsize. ”
The main reason is graphic fidelity: "We don't have the time, we don't have time to pursue the fidelity of as many varieties as possible. We've come a long way from the E3 demo to the time we released the game, but we still had to scale back and make targeted cuts. “
"We didn't end up cutting that much out of the open world, but I knew that from the initial design, a considerable amount of what the team had hoped they could achieve had been scaled back."
Staten also discusses what an open-world game even means, balancing expectations for genre with the high quality of the Halo series.
"We wanted to get ourselves out of a lot of the expectations we had for open-world games, which is why we struggled a lot with how to talk about our marketing pitch because we didn't want people to get it wrong."
"Our open world is just kind of more open than our previous games. Halo has always been a relatively open game for shooters, but for us, we didn't stack a whole bunch of different systems. ”