I have been playing Halo Infinite early access for a few days now. Since it came out as a celebration for Xbox's 20th Year Anniversary, I figured I would indulge in a big budget FPS like Halo Infinite to see what modern developers can do for a game.
At the time of writing, I have 53.2 hours of time played.
System & Graphic Settings
Motherboard: ASUS TUF X570
CPU: AMD Ryzen 5950X (4200MHz All Core OC)
RAMM: 16GB (2x8) 3600 MHz DDR4
GPU: AMD VEGA Frontier Edition 24GB HBMII
SSD: Crucial P2 1TB
The game is not optimized well and I average about 70-90 FPS in combat sequences.
Ambient Occlusion: Low
Anisotropic Filtering: Low
Shadows: Medium
I found dropping the settings much more didn't produce a higher frame rate. The rest is on ultra or extreme.
My friends with brand new Nvidia GPU's didn't see much better performance either, up to 150 frames would be considered high from what I have seen. If you see someone getting over 200 FPS please do drop a link in the comments, i am curious what they are running.
Gameplay
The gameplay is competitive like you would expect from a Halo title. I have played all of the game modes intensively, for at least 50 matches in each mode. There is some lag noticeable as well as significantly different weapons sets, that aside once you have got past the learning curve, this game will start flowing smoothly.
I spent a lot of time originally in the Academy to hone my accuracy and make sure I was comfortable with each weapon I planned to use.
In the video at the bottom, I will show you the new human vehicles. The Gungoose, is a mongoose rendition with grenade launchers mounted to the front. The WASP is an Air vehicle with 2 attack modes, it is very powerful, but weak against the Sniper.
The new sniper will take out most vehicles with 2 or less shots, the mongoose always 1 shot.
Arena Quickplay
This playlist is a casual 4v4 game experience with a variety of game modes. If you are good with the Battle Rifle you may enjoy playing Ranked more, as some players are still figuring out Halo, and the default weapon is a BR in Ranked vs.
Ranked Versus
You will play the same 4v4 maps as in Arena, but without power weapons. You start with a Battle Rifle and will want to be prepared for quick engagements with the enemy. 4 bursts to kill, and if you miss 1 bullet you will find yourself consistently dying in ranked. This type of competition is what I expect in ranked.
2 Different Playlists with the Same Maps
I am happy with the 2 small playlists. They provide a comfortable gaming experience if you like FPS, although they need much tuning on the spawns as with all halo titles. The main difference you will notice between the 2 is BR starting weapons and power weapons on the field.
Big Team Battle
In this game mode I have been getting insanely high kill to death ratios commonly reaching over 25 kills with fewer than 10 deaths. I have made it my goal to go 30-0 on this game mode. The maps are well designed and include competitive multiplayer vehicle combat. The vehicle combat smoothly transitions into on foot gameplay when the vehicle begins to explode, giving players a few seconds to jump out before death.
Custom Games
A select few custom game modes are available, not zombies unfortunately, I did look. There is also no forge yet, we will need to wait until the 8th of December to see the full release for all of the features.
Overall Impression
I am very happy and still planning to continue lengthy daily sessions of this game as my new go to competitive game. Previously I would play Gears of War 5, but I had been looking for something in the shooter category to have fun with.
If you are looking for a break from the other main stream shooters, this will provide you with a great free to play experience. The final product is yet to be released.
I Decided to Participate in Theta Tryouts
The tryouts are to get a Stream Key for Theta. If one of the developers see's my tryout video, there is a chance I will get to stream on the front end CDN instead of just the Edge Node.
When you first join Theta, you are restricted to 30 Frames Per Second at 720p, as well as only using the edge cast. This works as a quality filter to keep spam and low quality content off the front end of Theta. I would like to think I am more than spam and low quality.
Please do take sometime to consider joining theta, it is free and you will be paid to watch streams for sharing bandwidth. I have placed a referral link in the footer.
Watch Tryout: https://www.theta.tv/video/vidre0jk7kmm6kcb1ic
Halo Infinite in the latest First Person Shooter in the Halo series. This footage is from early access multiplayer that was released ahead of time to celebrate the 20th Anniversary of Xbox & Halo, which was a launch day title for the original 2004 Xbox.
I would like a Theta Stream Key please and thanks.
In this video I will carry a team of 12 including myself to victory. I had just met these players through a looking for group on the Xbox app, I had never played with them before and they are lucky they had me from the looks of it.
Resources
Learn About Theta Tryouts: https://community.theta.tv/theta-tryouts/
Join Theta: https://www.theta.tv/invite/30i85
Join Blurt (75% off until December 15, 2021): https://joinblurt.com