“Whatever tools you have access to, the other team has access to as well. “Every player starts with the same loadout and there are no abilities on cooldown,” says game designer and Halo veteran Dan Pearce, my favourite person to speak to about shooter games. All the complexity is systemic rather than inventorial. This is something Halo Infinite’s combat perfectly recalls. The holy trinity of gun, grenade and melee actually provided a vast arsenal of attack options, just like the basic kick/punch moves did in many a quality old 2D fighting game.
Instead, all the complexity came from the ways the weapons worked perfectly together with the game’s physics and environments to offer an array of emergent possibilities. You were given a limited number of perfectly balanced weapons and abilities, so you didn’t have to worry about perks, stats, builds or loadouts. Old-school Halo’s design aim wasn’t realism or even variety: it was fun and feel. In early interviews around the game, developer 343 Industries talked about how they thought of Infinite as a spiritual reboot of and love letter to the first three Halo titles, which were released between 20. With Halo Infinite’s multiplayer mode, it’s the other way around. In modern shooter games such as Call of Duty: Warzone, Fortnite and Apex Legends, older players like me tend to get absolutely destroyed by teenagers. Sign up for Pushing Buttons, our weekly guide to what’s going on in video games.