Halo Infinite’s early December campaign launch saw the arrival of a massively anticipated title that delivered on many levels, but couldn’t shake many of the technical issues we highlighted throughout the preview/flighting process. However, towards the end of February, the Halo Infinite Season 1 mid-season update arrived, promising a fix for one of our biggest issues – the fact that first-person animations operated at a lower frame-rate than the rest of the game.
So where does Halo Infinite stand in the here and now? The truth is that while key problems are addressed with the arrival of the recent patch, there’s still a range of issues that haven’t been touched, to the obvious detriment of the presentation – especially evident in the single-player campaign.
Let’s be clear here though: there’s nothing game-breaking as such in our line-up of criticisms – the fundamentals are there, but there’s just the nagging sense that the polish typically associated with a mega-budget release isn’t there. And to an extent it still isn’t, despite improvement. HDR is a good case in point – Dolby Vision support for Halo Infinite didn’t look right at launch. There is improvement – the dynamic range doesn’t look so clipped now – but the game still looks unimpressive in HDR mode, which is surprising bearing in mind that titles such as Forza Horizon 5 and especially Gears 5 and Ori and the Will of the Wisps just look absolutely tremendous.
There’s a similar sting in the tail with Halo Infinite’s fix for the lower frame-rate animations, especially evident in actions such as lobbing a grenade, mantling, crouching or reloading weapons that occupy a lot of screen real estate (the rocket launcher and spiker, for example). Interpolation between keyframes seemed to be missing in the flighting period and the launch, but the good news is that has been completely fixed. The thing is that related issues elsewhere have not: cutscenes in the campaign still have distracting judder where even when a new frame is rendered, camera movement and character animation is not.