Halo Infinite -or- How to Screw up the Open World Formula

Monday, February 2, 2026

A note going in…

Before I start talking about this, I want to lay out my bonafides. I’m part of the sick and twisted portion of the gamer^TM audience who actually fucking loves open world games. Yes, It’s me, hi, I’m the problem, it’s me.

Having said that for what it’s worth, I don’t particularly enjoy that every goddamn AAA game is now an open world. While I enjoy an Ubisoft sandbox, seemingly everyone wants to make yet another Ubi-open-world map-covered-in-icons repetative-grindy-same-damn-mission-over-and-over mess. As fun as I find those, they are big commitments and as such, I only play a handful of them. I mean good grief I just bought S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2, and I’ve already sunk nearly a hundred hours into the thing. But I digress.

When my friends somewhat depressed ask me, like you might ask a family member who’s life choices you think are legitimately bad, “Why do you play these things” I actually have a pretty solid answer. Do I want to navigate this world for the couple hundred hours to complete all the icons and fill/empty the map and go through probably dozens, perhaps hundreds of missions built on the same foundation. Or, to put it short: Do I want to be here?

If I do, I’ll buy it and play it and probably crush the life out of it by the time I’m done.

If not, I won’t.

So… you wanted to be on Halo?

I mean yeah, who wouldn’t? For all the complaining I’m about to do, this game does an incredible number of correct things:

• The art style is, frankly, iconic. It pulls quite a lot from Halo CE, the most iconic IMHO with perhaps Halo 3 as a close second in terms of art style. To be clear, we’re drawing a distinction here between art direction and graphical fidelity. Halo Infinite is not the most graphically insane game I have (which would have to be the aforementioned S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2) but the graphics are excellent, sharp as a razor, and clearly communicate information. Halo CE is almost cartoony, using bright colors to distinguish enemies from terrain, and Infinite walks in those well-trod footsteps, a notable departure from many entries, perhaps best exemplified by Halo 5, where enemies can blend in to the surrounding scenery and be difficult to spot.

• The combat is frenetic, insane, and gives me the most genuine experience of being an improvising spartan I’ve yet experienced in any Halo game. Getting into a flow-state in Infinite’s combat scratches my brain in the same way Titanfall 2 does. The multiplayer reflects this; since firefight was added, I’ve played a TON of this. (I’m too old for PvP)

• The story is lovely and was deeply meaningful for me, and me alone. I loved it, no notes, my sole critique is it has absolutely nothing to do with Halo 5, which itself had nothing to do with Halo 4, which is arguably the topic for another post someday.

Alright, so how did it screw it up?

As a last component of the setup: when it was announced that the newest installment in the Halo series was an open world, I was skeptical, but tentatively excited. The first teaser trailer’s last shot, Cortana’s dialogue, and the music legitimately brought me to actual, physical tears, and can prompt hot eyes even today years later on.

Also, from an industry perspective, as I said: everyone and their mother makes these things. This is a pretty set formula, and that sucks in certain ways, like it’s tough to get an open world game that breaks out of the standard mechanics, and most of them tend to look and feel the same. That said, it also means, generally, you can go in with fairly high expectations and have a great time. You will get some combination of:

• Incredible vistas to find and later explore, massive, beautiful landscapes that stretch out in front of you, and oftentimes can themselves be traversed in search of further vistas;

• A crafting system that idles at obligatory, and sometimes either becomes super fun and engaging (Horizon Zero Dawn) or becomes the main obstacle preventing you from furthering your quest and slowly driving you insane (Avatar);

• A map system wherein the map is covered in a fog of war, of whatever sort, that will slowly clear as you explore, replaced with map icons denoting your activities;

• Be populated by an array of activities, repeated ad-nauseum, oftentimes some combo itself of bandit camps, radio towers, and if the developer is fancy, some other stuff for flavor.

And one more that I’ll discuss later.

So there we go, there’s the blueprint. Simple right? Halo Infinite does all of these pretty damn well. For modern standards the Halo Infinite world isn’t… huge? But it feels plenty large enough moment-to-moment. It would take a notable amount of time to cross the entire world in even something quite fast like a Banshee, and the times you’re whisked from area to area, as a result of story events feel far apart enough to sell the illusion.

In the case of Infinite we have several things: Our bandit camps are played by the Banished, who have established bases all over the place for all manner of things, from simple patrols, to specific things like ammo printers and digsites. There aren’t really radio towers per se, instead we have USNC forward operating bases we capture, gaining fast travel points, places to get upgraded weapons and recruit marines, with the notion that we’re helping the UNSC remnants regain control of the world. And, we have a few other misc. activities: we have to hunt down Banished forces that have Extra Health, i.e. enemy heroes, we have occasional squads of marines to rescue, who then gleefully travel with us likely to a rapid demise. And… the bosses.

Each area has a mini-boss one must kill to advance to the next plot point. Truly a visionary decision here, taking the most hated game mechanic in the Halo series, and make it the central planetary gear the rest of the game turns on. This has been a meme in the community since the first awful one dropped; The Prophet of Regret, in Halo 2. No balance at all, you run around trying to punch this jackass while elites come in and murder you with swords, chased in rapid succession by Tartarus. It’s awful, it’s glitchy, the puzzle to the fight is both extremely obtuse and also really simple once you understand it. You know, I’ll say, the one with the Blademaster is actually thematically interesting and fucks with the formula enough that it’s pretty cool. The rest are fine, at best, and drop to the level of being hot ass; they are basically just bullet sponges with gimmicks. But again I digress.

All of this, is fine. The world is going to be your pull point, as we’ve established, either you’re here because you care, or you’re not because you don’t, and I don’t grudge you either decision. But throughout this journey, you develop a vibe of what’s going on: you help the UNSC gain territory and control, and in exchange, you get ammo and guns. Your FOBs become locuses of control, as they should be. You capture one after a grueling story mission and you immediately celebrate by emptying the armory of the upgraded pistol which fucks harder than the SOCOM from ODST, and finally get some bullets for your Battle Rifle. You repeat this numerous times, your FOBs becoming your familiar homes, your stops between missions out, and where you get proper guns before you burn off the ammo and start grabbing Banished weapons.

Now, this is actually a solid hook. But. There’s one way that you can make it absolutely fucking suck. How?

You take it away at the very end.

They did what!?

After an emotional cutscene where you get in a fight with the Weapon, and she resolves to be left behind, your pilot buddy is kidnapped by the Blademaster, so you’ll come to the end base that you were definitely going to anyway cuz it’s the only red part of the map left, but whatever, this works. You get the location, you go there… but you can’t use your weapons. And you get UNSC backup… in the form of the soldiers that were imprisoned there. That’s it.

Like, I’m not a child, right? I understand these games are pointless, merely software cleverly designed to punch dopamine from my mind. You know the only way this can be made worse? Make me acutely, visibly aware of how pointless in what should be the emotional and achievement chatharsis of the experience.

And the worst part? When you move on to the actual last level, after you send Escharum to be with the rest of his people in the Brute afterlife, they do it again. You take a pelican ride, keep your weapons, and land on the last base without even an opportunity to re-arm!

No marines, no special guns. Whether you completed every damn map icon in the game, or absolutely none, it matters not one damn bit. You will pass through this last level exactly the same.

You know what bothers the shit out of me!? Even Outer Worlds got this right. The end of the game plays wildly different depending which factions you have worked with, which you’ve made friends with, which choices you’ve made, and yeah the combat makes it utterly boring but still, you get a payoff. A minor, dull payoff, but a payoff.

Halo Infinite changes nothing. Halo Infinite’s open world doesn’t work, because it is, at the end of the day, the most elaborate and complex level selector. You use it to navigate a predefined set of, at times, quite good Halo missions, but you do it with a massive 3D map instead of buttons. And, even worse, you can’t even select the level you WANT. You can ONLY pick the one that’s next.

I just. How. How 343. I will die wondering who on earth thought it was a good idea to include all the content of an open-world game, with absolutely none of the point whatsoever.

End rant.

- Madison