There is a lot of panic and worry about the quality of the visuals and performance for Halo Infinite and I wanted to add some of my personal perspective to the situation.
I'll try to avoid anything speculative, since I don't know what exactly happened that led them to show the vertical slice that they did, and does not do much for the discussion besides endless worry for something we cannot control. This is just an educative view on how wacky game development can be and that 343i is far from being abnormal. This is not to shame people who do express their own opinions on how they felt towards what they showed, but I hope it provides some useful nuggets of knowledge that you may use to better empathize with the staff at 343i.
Who am I?
Games can look and perform terribly for 90% of their development
So what is happening at 343i? No idea, as it could be a million little things that has piled up over the course of 5 years. It is actually kind of commendable that they would show such an honest look at their game, bugs and all. Was it a good one? Hindsight is 20/20, but we shall see come release. I don't speak for 343i, but people are not kidding when they say it's a miracle that any game is ever shipped.
I hope this was at least a little bit helpful or you at least got some fun nuggets of knowledge out of.
I'll try to avoid anything speculative, since I don't know what exactly happened that led them to show the vertical slice that they did, and does not do much for the discussion besides endless worry for something we cannot control. This is just an educative view on how wacky game development can be and that 343i is far from being abnormal. This is not to shame people who do express their own opinions on how they felt towards what they showed, but I hope it provides some useful nuggets of knowledge that you may use to better empathize with the staff at 343i.
Who am I?
- My day job is working in the QA department of a global AAA game publisher, by night I develop indie games.
- Because I see lots of AAA games in their worst state throughout the latter half of their development, and I've enjoyed the fun involved with shipping my own games, though not to nearly the same scale. This does not make me the authority of all things game development and is still just a single perspective
Games can look and perform terribly for 90% of their development
- This is mostly true for probably any art form, but games can look and perform terribly for the majority of their development. You would be surprised how buggy a game can be right before the finish line. There are multiple reasons for this, but a big reason is because performance is not optimized till the end of development. Usually the big nasty bugs like progression blockers (bugs that block the player from progressing through the main game path) and crashes are pretty stable leading up to RC (release candidate) submission, but they still rear their ugly heads when you think you're safe. I have seen missing assets, broken animations, bugs that only appear in a single system language, asset pop-in, slideshow frame rate and plenty of others right up to a few weeks before submission. You would be surprised how much can change in a matter of weeks, let alone a matter of months.
- Because every game, dev tools, team structure and platform needs can be so drastically different from project to project, it becomes incredibly difficult to have a standardized workflow, causing production pipelines to be all over the place. Even for something as simple as the definition for Alpha and Beta can have different meanings across studios (Beta? Nah, we be jumping right to RC baby!). This can create issues when you have a lot of external collaboration, and being that they are working on a new engine this is probably amplified two-fold.
- They are companies, big ones, which means all the corporate nonsense that you'd come to expect. Investor meetings, marketing people making decisions they are far from qualified for, people getting promotions because they are the CEOs friends nephew, disconnected communication between departments, office squabbles, and every other boring thing you can think of. This is not to say all the above happens at 343i, but there are business realities they have to deal with for better and for worse.
- Though games are a multi-billion dollar industry full of suits and business people, it is still a creative industry filled with clashing personalities. Arguments are made over the smallest of features that 99% of players would not even notice, content-lock (when no more features should be added) is frequently ignored by a passionate developer which causes a snowball effect, designers and writers bicker at each other because one wants to make Bob the hacker bake cakes while the writer has to somehow implement this into the story without sounding dumb or generating any new assets, and an endless amount of scenarios that sound absolutely dumb outside of the studio but inside the studio the placement of the map in the left or right corner is the most important thing to that developers life since sliced bread.
- There are a lot of external factors involved that affect game development that is not directly involved with the development process. I've seen some ambitious dreams get dashed against the rocks of budget and time. I'm sure plenty of developers would love to implement every single cool mechanic or system to reckless abandon, but they suddenly realize they are running out of time and the producer has to come in with their surgical knife and start chopping out everything that is not absolutely crucial.
- Every single game you have ever played has bugs. even if you think it doesn't. There are some bugs that may only happen in the most obscure of circumstances, but every developer has to ship a game with a list of bugs they know they cannot fix (known shippables). While the demo we saw is not the final game, I would be absolutely surprised if their QA people did not flag those issues that we all saw, and someone had to make the call to deal with the risk with showing a build that had bugs and all.
So what is happening at 343i? No idea, as it could be a million little things that has piled up over the course of 5 years. It is actually kind of commendable that they would show such an honest look at their game, bugs and all. Was it a good one? Hindsight is 20/20, but we shall see come release. I don't speak for 343i, but people are not kidding when they say it's a miracle that any game is ever shipped.
I hope this was at least a little bit helpful or you at least got some fun nuggets of knowledge out of.
