Halo Infinite was originally supposed to launch in Holiday 2020 but has been delayed to sometime in Fall 2021 for the Xbox Series X, Xbox Series S, Xbox One, and PC. It’s known that the development for the game has been problematic, to say the least, with several lead members of the development team leaving the studio since.

Now, more details and information have allegedly come to light thanks to a former 343 Industries employee (Skybox Artist). He shared some insight about the development of Halo Infinite. However, the original video is in Mandarin and was posted on the Chinese social media site Bili Bili.

You can check out his story below, courtesy translations from ResetEra user random0_point:

• His overall feeling on Halo Infinite: “In fact, I think the finished product will still be great. The story is a big improvement, and the gameplay is much richer, though the development cycle is too long. Don’t expect it to be an epoch-making masterpiece.”
• The company executives were overly ambitious. They wanted to make Halo Infinite a semi-open world game, so the engine needed to be changed significantly. They had to make the game and develop the engine at the same time (due to engine defects, many workflows were not ideal, though they are now much more improved than before).
• Last year’s disastrous demo was because many engine features were not fully implemented at that time.
• For a variety of reasons, the game content compared to the original idea has been cut (same for multiplayer). “This has led to some things I’ve made over the years that no one will probably ever see.”
• The team at 343 (especially the low-level employees) works very hard, and many of them have experienced working overtime until the early hours of the morning in the past few years (crunch confirmed).
• Now he works at Certain Affinity, still doing some HI outsourcing work, and he feels good to be out of 343’s baggage.

That’s a lot of stuff to unpack. Basically, the developers at 343 Industries tried to develop both the game and the game’s engine at the same time, which is a gargantuan task that led to even more problems for the game. A lot of content had to be cut and employees were forced to work overtime.

All of this doesn’t bode particularly well for the release of Halo Infinite, whenever that may be. We haven’t seen any new gameplay footage of the game since that awful demo unveiled all the way back in July 2020. The developer has since made several updates to the game’s development, including as recently as March 2021, but now we have more insight into what actually happened behind the scenes.

Let’s hope the final product is worth the wait and all the hard work of the developers at 343 Industries.