We want to always say 'yes' to the player. "But early on, we hit on this idea that we wanted to not hold the player back. It affected how we designed the story and it affected how we designed encounters – everything," Crocker continues. So you can go and have fun being Chief, doing whatever you want to do in the world. "We designed the game to be both a linear story which you can progress through, but we also designed freedom around that path. This pacing and progression is perfect for Halo.
#Direct play couldn't be installed upgrade
Once you capture an FOB in a new sector, a manageable number of assassination targets, side-objectives, collectibles, and resources (necessary to both upgrade your equipment and to make better weapons and vehicles available for requisition) will appear on the map around you. Once completed, it will open access to a new and massive section of Zeta Halo. When you're satisfied with the progress you've made in an area, you take on a story mission. We go in-depth on how exploration and progression works in Zeta Halo. Halo Infinite's wide-open world feels like a throwback to a simpler time. You're cordoned off into sprawling, self-contained areas of Installation 07 from there, you reclaim occupied UNSC Forward Operating Bases, shut down massive Banished facilities, and rally Marines you find along the way to your side. Instead, Chief is fighting for inches of ground against an embattled enemy force. In this context, a linear campaign just wouldn't have made sense. When Master Chief steps out onto Zeta Halo with the war against the Banished already lost, he's fighting to rally the scattered remnants of the UNSC together to save the human race from extinction. There's a tangible difference – I promise. Notice I didn't string the words "open" and "world" together there? The truth is, while Halo Infinite has clearly taken great inspiration from modern open-world trends, its space is more accurately described as a "wide-open world". To achieve this, Halo Infinite is set across an open and expansive world, a playable space that the studio estimates is several times larger than Halo 4 and Halo 5 combined. "Because even though it felt huge and open at the time, it isn't when you go back and look at it." "We wanted to basically build that same kind of world, but knock down the walls that kept you where you were," he continues, pointing back to the legacy of Installation 04 and its second mission, 'Arriving on Halo' as a touchstone. But what that statement fails to convey is just how expansive 343's creative vision is for Halo Infinite, or how impressive Slipstream, the new proprietary game engine that had to be engineered to support it, truly is. When Crocker says "our goal was to try and recreate that feeling you had when you first played Halo 20 years ago", I think it's a direct appeal to those who may have been turned off by the linearity of Halo 4 and split-focus of Halo 5: Guardians.