Not much is known about Halo Infinite. At Microsoft’s E3 2019 press conference earlier this year, the company revealed that Master Chief’s latest adventure would be an Xbox Scarlett launch title–in addition to releasing on Xbox One and PC–sometime during holiday 2020.
Now, corporate vice president of Xbox Games Studios, Matt Booty, has revealed some more details on the upcoming title during a recent interview with Game Informer.
“The first thing that is really cool and where that game is headed, is how they’re [343 Industries] thinking about expanding the world,” Booty explained. “I won’t go so far to say ‘sandbox’ because we bring up sandbox and people seem to overload that term with a lot of other things. But what the team is doing to build a bigger universe and a bigger set of gameplay scenarios, and sort of more things to explore is awesome.”
Halo Infinite runs on 343 Industries’ brand-new Slipspace game engine, which studio director Chris Lee said is aimed at supporting Halo titles for 10 years to come. “The things they’re working on are really cool. As they bring the Slipspace Engine up to date with where we’re at in terms of graphics these days, there’s just some cool stuff,” Booty went on the say. “Design-wise, it’s been really cool to see them get back to some of the shape-language and design-language of some of the earlier Halos. It could be said that, Halo, when you get into Halo 5, maybe it was getting a little ‘busy’ design-wise. [For Halo Infinite] it feels more modern and more clean, but also there are stronger echoes back to the roots of Halo. I would say visually impressive and more expansive.”
Getting back to the roots of Halo has been a common thread amongst the drip-feed of information regarding Halo Infinite. Earlier this year, Brian Jarrard, community director at 343, shared a blog post revealing the long-awaited return of split-screen support to the series in Infinite. The studio also announced that it would support LAN multiplayer, and confirmed that characters in Infinite will have black undersuits–a small detail, but one that harkens back to Halo’s beginnings.
During the interview, Booty also revealed that Microsoft sees The Outer Worlds as an exclusive franchise.