Halo Infinite Creative head, Joseph Staten, during an AIAS (Academy of Interactive Arts & Sciences) session with Ted Price shared different aspects of Halo franchise. While talking about the scale and scope of Halo Infinite, he shared that there was “significant scaling back” when it comes to open-world of the game including the variety of the Biomes:
The team went through a lot of iterations on scope and biome variety before I joined. Even after I joined the team, we had to make choices about where to scale back. 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 at one point that they could deliver on. We knew that we needed to truly deliver a quality experience [and] scope our ambitions to make sure that the stuff that we did ship met expectations.
So in order to meet the quality and standard fans expect from Halo, the had to cut down things. When Halo Infinite was released, some of the reviewers complained about lack of Biome variety which he apparently accepted during the AIAS episode.
The team also discussed about crafting a lot but Joseph explained that a super soldier like Master Chief shouldn’t need to kill animals to gather stuff.
We talked a lot about crafting, for example, and my infamous line for the team was something like ‘Master Chief doesn’t need to kill animals to make leather shirts. It’s a huge armored super-soldier. If he wants something, he goes and kills him, grabs his gun, and then moves on.
Scoping is a necessary part of development process and scaling down things to maintain the standard and quality is usually preferred and is a logical choice. If 343 Industries hadn’t made those choice, we wouldn’t have received the quality Halo Infinite Campaign experience we currently have. Now that experience will further be enhance through co-op.
