Halo Infinite to Release Fall of 2021, Multiplayer to be Free-to-Play

343 Industries has announced that Halo Infinite will release during Fall of 2021.

Originally Halo Infinite was supposed to be an Xbox Series X|S launch title but following negative feedback following the games reveal earlier in the year the release was put back to 2021.

However we had no decent release window other than the year in which it would release but at least we now know it will launch towards the end of 2021. I know this is a huge delay for a game that was supposed to release November 2020, but this is Halo we’re talking about and it needs to be the absolute best that it can be.

So in my humble opinion I’d much rather the game to get a distant release window rather than a near one for it to only get pushed back multiple times. Hopefully this will give 343 Industries plenty of time to fine-tune this iconic first person shooter.

Details of the improvements made to the game were revealed on Halo Waypoint where director of art management at 343 Industries, Neill Harrison said: “Much of the feedback we heard from the community aligned with our own views and work we were already committed to doing around things like indirect lighting, material response, foliage and tree rendering, clouds, level-of-detail transitions, and character fidelity,” says Harrison.

“Still, the feedback was humbling, and it also pushed us to look at additional opportunities for improvement.” continued the art director.

Ani Shastry, the development manager on Halo Infinite also highlighted some of the visual improvements that will be made to the game.

“On the graphics technology front we have made improvements along with fixing bugs that were inherent to some of the techniques, as well as iterating and polishing the features that were still in development,” said Ani Shastry.

Shastry continued: “Some of the key areas of progress include better quality of global illumination, ambient occlusion, shadows, volumetric lighting, sky, and atmosphere. We have also addressed issues with our GPU-driven rendering and texture streaming solution that should mitigate the LOD popping and texture quality issues that were prevalent in the July demo.“

In the Halo Waypoint blog post they also confirmed that the multiplayer of Halo Infinite will be free-to-play and they shared a couple of screenshots from one of the multiplayer maps. You can read up on further details which includes Spartan customisation on the blog post. 

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