Halfway through Halo Infinite, Master Chief wanders through one of the several identical Forerunner hallways scattered across the world he’s exploring. “Just dust and echoes,” the ghost of Cortana whispers in his ear. It's a quote from the ending of the first Halo, and one that’s been used time and time again throughout the Halo series, whether it be on loading screens, achievements, or even song titles. It’s a memorable quote, like many throughout Halo, a work built upon self-reference and self-reverence. As Master Chief explains his past to The Weapon, his new Cortana, she solemnly muses, “I don’t know how you keep doing this.” Master Chief responds: “I don’t have a choice.”
Halo Infinite is now the third Halo game made by 343 Industries, a subsidiary of Microsoft that took over development of the series after Bungie’s departure back in 2010. Despite acting as a “soft reboot” to “draw new players in,” it tells the story of Master Chief fighting “The Banished,” the main antagonists of the largely unremarkable spin-off game Halo Wars 2. The Banished are comprised of the same aliens that made up the antagonistic Covenant in past Halo games, except this time all their guns are Red instead of Blue. In Infinite, Cortana has once again died, in an off-screen storyline that exists almost entirely through a collection of audio logs scattered throughout the main campaign. Throughout Infinite’s plot, Master Chief often quips about his nature as a soldier. “It’s all I know how to do,” he says, between reiterated one-liners from Halo’s past. But his contemplation never goes anywhere, because it never can. Because Infinite can’t change anything. Because Infinite can’t be anything else.
When 343 picked up the series, it had in mind a long-term story told over the course of another trilogy of games (Halo 4, 5, and 6). They called this the Reclaimer trilogy, a spin on a term from the pre-existing Halo lore that also signaled a dissection or “reclamation” of the humanity Master Chief has lost. The end of their first release, Halo 4, seemed to establish what would have been the core examination of their planned saga (then merely intended to be a trilogy). Glancing out of a window, Master Chief reflects on “being a machine;” a final shot of his armor being taken off reveals a shadowed, tired face underneath and establishes the metaphor further. With the loss of Cortana, the last person he could trust or consider himself close to, Master Chief must re-examine what has led him to where he is, or learn about who he could be. Basic as far as science fiction narratives about cyborgs go, but still attempting to examine deeper topics than the standard-fare: “Master Chief kills all the aliens and wins”.
What 343 is, and what Halo became, however, reveals that its interrogations into the true nature of the series ultimately bore no fruit. With the release of Halo 5: Guardians, what was once the Reclaimer trilogy became a larger “saga,” no longer “limited” by a three game storyline. The narrative immediately brought back Cortana, dismissed the notion of any sort of self-discovery or examination, and trudged along to the next big collection of mysterious ancient machines you can go and buy a series of books about. Halo 5 in particular would love you to go and buy past books, with much of the game’s story drawing from the extended universe of Halo novels, podcasts, and ideas, instead of developing a new one all its own.
Mining the mythos of the extended Halo universe quickly became 343’s go-to solution for how to tell yet another Master Chief adventure. The various Halo novels are hit-and-miss, penned by a collection of different writers over the years. Still, they were able to exist alongside the games as a work because they were expanding concepts established throughout the more straightforward and bombastic games proper, rather than scribing their own blueprint to be followed. The limited format of the Halo games, where Master Chief endlessly goes from battlefield to battlefield, offers little in the realm of dramatic introspection. The medium of long-form text, on the other hand, offers a sort of playground to fool around with what the various ridiculous contrivances inherent to a videogame could represent.
Bungie had eventually worked the extended universe constructed in those novels into its games via hidden terminals scattered like Easter eggs throughout each level, but it was never integrated into the core delivery of the series’ stories. Sure, you can know that Master Chief was a member of Blue Team during the Fall of Reach, or that Mendicant Bias is operating mysteriously behind the scenes, but none of that is required to understand why characters like The Arbiter do what they do, nor does it dictate the trials they undertake. With Bungie out of the picture, however, this changed. Instead of stories being self-contained, or fixed to a specific throughline, it became immediately clear that the focus of the series had shifted to a more interconnected and inter-reliant canon as 343 took the reins. Throwing around buzzwords like Rampancy, Spartan IIIs, and Shield Worlds, the 343 games offer a reward for the devout reader, but in the process create an incomplete work built off of an entirely different medium. Bungie had a fixation with looking and sounding mysterious, having characters talk about a cool proper noun like “Reach” or “Forerunner,” leaving the rest to the imagination; 343 exhaustively made each word crucial.
Bungie’s Halo got away with its cryptic musings because of the limited nature of storytelling expected from the average first-person shooter in the 2000s. The Covenant could just be crazed religious space aliens in the text because, at the time, most shooters weren’t expected to provide any further justification for their enemies' wanton murder sprees. Even still, Bungie’s later entries dealt with the concessions that had to be made for the sake of Halo being a videogame; sure, Master Chief is still fighting the Covenant, but with each new game those aliens inevitably become less alien. To work alongside this, the Covenant’s language becomes comprehensible, humanizing them more and more as the situation evolves, and characters like the Elites grow from game mechanics that must be overcome into yet another narrative wrinkle in the game’s world to explore.
With each subsequent Halo game, Bungie worked with what it had established while expanding on ideas of what Halo could be. Halo 2 shifted its narrative to provide a look through the eyes of its supposed antagonists. Halo 3 experimented with the idea of user-generated multiplayer maps through its customizable Forge Mode, while its companion game ODST featured a pseudo-open world with an entirely different cast of characters. Even Reach, a response to and celebration of every game that came before it, worked with its self-reverence to not only fit neatly into the series’ canon, but to also continue innovating new ideas of what an arena-based multiplayer game should become. Yes, Bungie had to make a Halo game every few years, but it was interested in making videogames period, and all of the concepts and techniques it honed and learned over the course of its ten years with the series fed into its continued work, evident today with Destiny.
343 Industries, regardless of its individual developers’ passions, is a collective designed with the intent of making sure that the Halo series would continue indefinitely in whatever way it can. This means steering the series over time into less of a cohesive body of work, and more into what is perceived as necessary for the franchise to perpetuate its relevance. For Halo 4, this meant an immediate shift to Call of Duty-inspired multiplayer, with loadouts and killstreaks and a more “realistic” military aesthetic. For Halo 5, this led to the creation of a nightmarish MOBA mode, with microtransaction card packs to unlock new weapons and gear because League of Legends and Hearthstone were where the money was at. For Halo Infinite, it’s undoing most of those now-passé trends, copying three of the most recently popular FPS games (Far Cry, Apex Legends, and Doom Eternal), and haphazardly smashing them into the framework and aesthetic trappings of a more ‘nostalgic’ Halo experience.
By fixating on what the idealized average player is looking for, there’s no room or time to meditate on which aspects of the existing experience should be improved or adapted. The multiplayer has to be redone from the ground up each and every time to keep up with trends, rather than optimized and tweaked over the course of a decade to establish and cement a unique style. The story has to be deep enough to not feel too outdated, but it can’t be too referential like Halo 5, or have a running time greater than the six to eight hours expected out of a Halo campaign. There can be new enemies sometimes, but make sure to keep the old ones around first and foremost, because they’re what makes Halo Halo! With no consistent route between each of their entries, Infinite ends up as a reactionary work; a solution for its corporate owners, a response to the message board complaints, and an answer to the “brand” of Halo.
That’s exactly what holds Infinite back from truly becoming a defining work. Rather than take the ideas of other games and implement them in a way that makes sense for the standard Halo experience, that experience is used as a modular baseline where ideas from other, more successful games can be slotted on top. Does it make sense for Halo to have boss fights with huge health bars where Master Chief slowly whittles away at an enemy that bizarrely has more vitality than any of his nearly identical comrades? Perhaps if the game was designed more like, say, Doom Eternal. But without shifting the game’s design to accommodate these ideas, you end up with the large set-piece design of the traditional Halo experience book-ended with inexplicable clashes of attrition.
And this says nothing of the aesthetic reversals Halo Infinite brings in favor of fidelity and recognition. As a “delivery on the promise of Halo: Combat Evolved,” Infinite regresses away from the complex and colorful environments the series has become known for. The first Halo game was limited by the budget and technical constraints of the time, and as solutions to those problems were created, the environments became more diverse and fantastical. Even 343’s earlier games operated under this same design philosophy, featuring some of the most dense and visually striking sky-boxes in the medium as a whole. Infinite is redundant fields and hallways made up of greens and blues and grays all over again, because the design philosophy of the series isn’t what’s perceived as a selling point, it’s just the memories it can regurgitate.
Perhaps most damning of all is Master Chief, a character who has been nearly untouched since his creation over twenty years ago. While Halo 4 started to examine what the character of Master Chief has to mean and represent—the horrors of a human transformed into an immortal machine of war—the backtracking to become more in-line with the type of narrative mysteries that are to be expected from the Halo series means that Master Chief can only be what he’s always been. He can dream about his nature from time to time, but he must remain an immutable faceless symbol in the end, a testament to the very nature of AAA games as a whole.
Each time Master Chief acknowledges himself throughout the campaign of Halo Infinite, it is interrupted by an aside about how tragic the life of new character ‘The Pilot’ is, or how confused the new AI is. Even when these characters develop through their interjections, it never leads to any sort of mutual growth or understanding—it’s all one-sided. The Pilot gets to grow past his anxieties and loss; The Weapon can learn and choose her own fate; Master Chief is left as a tool, a means to their ends. The Master Chief has to remain a promise. An implication of something deeper, a future of possibilities, never beholden to one interpretation. Master Chief has to be the cool helmet they sell you to put on a desk. Master Chief has to be the action hero selling Mountain Dew. You can know that his name is John, but he can never just be John, because then he’s nothing special.
Halo Infinite fails as an answer to the ambitions behind the original Halo, because it doesn’t have any interest in what the conceits behind its ideas could have meant or evolved into. It doesn’t have an interest in creating a cohesive mystique, it’s interested in creating questions with an answer that can be sold to you repeatedly, indefinitely. Halo Infinite isn’t a modernized Combat Evolved, it’s the concepts of the series homogenized into a brand; a series endlessly pushing itself forward and then back, a perfect ouroboros.
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Rosarie Teppelin is a games writer focused on examining critical themes and industry trends. You can find her on Twitter @horngal or her VTuber streams at twitch.tv/currydraco.