From Season 4 onwards, Halo Infinite’s season passes will no longer contain cutscenes.
The news comes directly from 343 Industries, the current custodians of the Halo franchise. Brian Jarrard, the community manager of 343, Tweeted out a message revealing the news, describing it as a trade-off for the team wanting to focus more on delivering heavily requested features and content.
The game’s cutscenes have been terrific thus far, but I think this is a step in the right direction for 343. Halo Infinite launched to great success, but since then 343 have struggled to maintain a steady stream of content which has resulted in many people abandoning Infinite entirely.
It’s something 343 themselves have addressed. In an interview on Xbox Wire, 343 admitted that they haven’t been putting out new content consistently enough. It doesn’t seem to be a resource problem, either, as 343 is currently listed as having nearly 500 employees and, of course, has the backing of Microsoft’s massive bank account. The company did, however, recently lose around 60 people as part of Microsoft’s bigger layoffs.
In January of this year, former 343 Industries developer Patrick Wren, who now works at Respawn, placed the failures of Infinite squarely at Microsoft’s feet.
Considering Microsoft themselves have admitted to managing the development of Redfall correctly, either, perhaps Patrick is correct in his assertion.
While it does suck to see the excellent cutscenes being dropped from the seasonal content, perhaps it will help 343 focus on speeding up their content delivery. Despite the issues, the core gameplay is heaps of fun