The first beta test for 343 Industries’ upcoming first-person shooterHalo Infinitebegan on July 29, much to the excitement of fans. When theHalo Infinitemultiplayer tech preview went livein the evening, the Halo Waypoint website began to chug, as the domain presumably got inundated with people looking for Steam codes, as well as PC and console installation instructions.
The players selected to participate in the test, which is officially called a flight by 343 Industries, were warned to expect crashes and other hiccups because the gameis still in development. For some people, technical issues made it difficult to even begin theHalo Infinitetest flight.
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However, to the dismay of the developers at 343 Industries, it turns out that a slow website and issues with matchmaking weren’t the only problems. A small number of spoilers forHalo Infinitewere accidentally included in the files of the tech preview build. They are spoilers that could ruin the campaign experience for some, including major story points and even the ending of the game.
The files can be data mined by anybody who got into the test flight for PC, and some people have chosen to leak the information online. SoHalofans who do not want to spoil a game they have waited six years to play should be wary when visiting social media or watching videos about theHalo Infinitetech preview. Considering thatHalo Infinite’srelease date isn’t slated until Holiday 2021, that will mean being careful for several months.
In addition to that unexpected stumbling block, the launch of the first beta test forHalo Infinitedid not go smoothly for some participants. TheHalo Infinitepre-release build for Xbox consolescould only be downloaded by joining the preview through the Xbox Insider Hub app. For many people, trying to join resulted in a “pending” message that would time out after a couple of minutes, and the advice given on social media by well-meaning testers was to simply keep refreshing until it worked. This caused many people to stay glued to their Xbox consoles for hours, while it turned out that the issue ultimately needed to be fixed on the backend.
Once players successfully downloaded and launched the game, a number of them were unable to matchmake. On PC, some participants have been experiencing crashes, likely due to not quite meeting the game’s current minimum specs, while a few players with high-end GPUs have had poor performance caused by framerate issues. And on Xbox, broadcasting, screenshots, and clips were blocked for several hours, even thoughlivestreaming theHalo Infinitetech previewis permitted. Despite these issues encountered by a subset of players, the firstHalo Infinitetest flight seems to have been an enjoyable experience for the majority of participants thus far.
Halo Infiniteis in development for PC, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X/S.
