Recently Halo youtuber HiddenXperia Reported on Leaks and speculation on Halo Infinite. Among other things, there is a leak that Halo Infinite will feature an open world. Now this has been done before in Halo 3 ODST. It featured a city that could be explored and had missions and secrets scattered around the map. Despite the fact that Halo 3 ODST is remembered as an excellent game, I feel that going this route is not going to work for Infinite.
Halo 3 ODST was excellent, and a good example of what spin offs should do. They should experiment with the formula of the game to see what could work without risking the waste of a failed mainline title. In this case ODST was an attempt at an open world style. At the time open world games were not as common, but were going in popularity. Many games had been doing open worlds for a while like Elder Scrolls and Grant Theft Auto. In regards to Halo, it had large maps but was still a linear story. So Bungie dipped its toes in with ODST. The story, music, gameplay and design of the city all came together to make ODST an incredibly memorable game. Since then many open world games have come on to the scene and been really popular. So much so that the market has become supersaturated with them. This might sound strange coming from me since I just said 76 is worth another try. But with how the industry has been for the last 7 years is precisely why I think Infinite shouldn't be an open world.
In recent years many games have adopted the open world approach sometimes to their own detriment. In fact it has become almost an industry standard to make the game open world. Just like how many have opted to be multiplayer focused instead of single player focused. Even the metro series opted for a more open world look. A game that used to focus on the closed in spaces of tunnels to be contrasted by the brief dangers of a hostile outside world. In some ways this serves to break one of the themes of the story.
As the number of open worlds expanded a focus on making them larger and more easily monetized has come in. The fact that they have gotten larger does not mean they have become better unfortunately. Usually it means that there is just more empty space or using auto generating systems. When it just turns into empty space, this is just as bad as a pointless chapter in a story. It only serves to make the game feel too large. When they use the auto generation approach it is similar. The world feels very big, but yet many areas feel very much the same. Parts of the open world will be functionally identical and in great amounts. Like Hundreds of dungeons but yet they have no loot worth getting. This Makes for very uninteresting worlds. There is such a thing as too much of a good thing. In halo ODST the city was smaller than many open worlds of even it’s time. The reason why it was memorable was because each area, even areas that were similar, were different and served to tell the story of what happened in New Mombasa. Alien Isolation was also a very good world but was constrained due to being a space station. But the map was just the right size. Each location was visually distinct and helped create the necessary atmosphere and location to tell the story. None of the space felt wasted. Contrast this with no man's sky, big infinite world. Huge and impressive in size. But it is a whole lot of nothing. Also in most AAA open worlds there is an excessive amount of transactions that have been getting wormed in. Fallout 76, Assassin's creed, Mass Effect Andromeda. They all ended up having micro-transactions along with the game that turned off many.
Personally I just want 343 to try to make a good Halo game. They shouldn't be trying to break the mold if they haven’t even mastered the basics of it. Maybe they should do some spin off games to try to improve their abilities with making Halo. If they take a note from ODST and improve on that format then the game might end up being really good. But if not it could end with the studio wasting time and resources, while making the game worse. They may succeed at the open world. They may make a masterpiece. Hopefully they do. But I fear they might not.
Rooty
04/20/20
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