It's been a longer than anticipated road for Halo Infinite, the latest entry in the massive popular Microsoft franchise. Originally intended to be a launch title for the release of the Xbox Series X/S in November 2020, Halo Infinite was shockingly delayed after a less than ideal reveal during a summer event Microsoft held in place of the then canceled E3 2020. After all of the excitement and anticipation, the first gameplay left fans feeling more than a little disappointed.
Thankfully, the delay has seemingly resulted in a better game overall as indicated by community response to the previous multiplayer test flights and recent trailers such as the campaign overview. One thing that has seemingly been fixed is the popular meme character known as Craig the Brute, something that the community latched on to during the original gameplay reveal, unintentionally added by 343. Craig's discovery occured after Master Chief knocked a helmet off of a Brute, exposing a character without a ton of detail.
Naturally, the community ran wild with this image, which even made it back to developers working on the game. While the Craig the Brute meme was embraced by pretty much everybody, it was undoubtedly a big focus for the studio to correct for the final release of Halo Infinite. In fact, the official Xbox Twitter account showed off the progress that has been made, incorporating Craig into another meme showing how it started and how it's going.
Naturally, the picture on the left shows off the classic textureless character model seen in 2020. On the right is where these brutes currently are, complete with way more detail including face paint, a little mohawk, as well as facial hair. The two models, when compared side by side like this, are generally night and day, showing a major upgrade from where they were last year. The overall improvement seems to be consistent with the other parts of the game as the recent Halo Infinite campaign overview trailer has come a long way when compared to the original 2020 gameplay trailer.
Many players were surprised to see how open the Halo Infinite map appears to be, with numerous gameplay moments revealing massive open spaces as well as plenty of verticality such as when Master Chief appears to be freefalling while also battling two Banshees in the air. Not only that, players have more options on what they want to tackle, with the trailer showing master chief selecting a target from the map, bringing him to a refueling station of sorts which he intends to destroy in a similar manner to what Just Cause fans would expect to see from protagonist Rico Rodriguez.
Halo Infinite releases on December 8 for PC, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X/S.