How to think about Halo Infinite (Gaming)

by Cody Miller , Music of the Spheres - Never Forgot, Friday, July 24, 2020, 11:17 (1374 days ago) @ Schooly D

Point 1: The Minecraft Aesthetic

A lot of people see the flat polygons and make jokes about "is this next-gen??" as though a Triple-A developer forgot how to do graphics. No, it's intentional: the blocky aesthetic will work very nicely with toys and other plastic playsets.

I think this is too conspiracy oriented. It's probably because of the dumb ass 4K60 target. When you have to render 8x as many pixels as 1080p30, you're going to have to cut down on complexity.

Point 2: The Open World, Under Construction

This concept works better, more naturally, if the source video game behaves like this from the start. You can obviously have toys of characters, vehicles, and structures from a more linear and narratively driven game, but things are more in harmony if the game is already setup in an open world format. And even better, it appears from the media we've seen that the ring itself is constantly under construction, where its layout is constantly changing.

Or maybe this is the reason. The geometry may be simpler because it can be moved around in real time.

Halo Infinite puts the Big Bad front and center. This is not "helpful floating orb on mysterious ring eventually turns out to be a very big threat." This is He-Man and Skeletor, Lion-O and Mumra, red panda and pumpkin. It's cheesy and low-effort but it's going to sell action figures from Day 0.

I think it's just simplistic writing, not a conspiracy to sell toys.