INSIDE INFINITE – JULY 2021
Welcome to our latest Inside Infinite, our monthly blog series that provides a closer look at the development of Halo Infinite. This month, we’re diving into efforts supporting the upcoming multiplayer technical preview, often referred to as “flighting”, to share insights into our goals, process, and what Insiders should expect. We’ll also take a closer look at the content and experiences included in this inaugural tech preview which will focus on Bots and Weapon Drills – two brand new additions to Halo.
TECHNICAL PREVIEWS, FLIGHTS, AND BETAS
What’s in a name? Quite a lot, as it turns out. Different games across the industry, and even Halo games over the years, have had all sorts of pre-launch hands-on releases and tests that carry various official labels. Terms like “alpha” and “beta” often convey a certain expectation around polish and stability, breadth, marketing implications, and more. We’re further along than what would be truly considered an “alpha” but also not really at a level of overall completeness some expect in a “beta.”
We are specifically calling this a “technical preview” because we feel it best represents the goals we have, the build itself, and the experience that Insiders will have. As you’ll read below, our key driver and goal is truly technical in nature – we are looking to push our systems and services at a larger scale than we’ve been able to thus far as an important step towards ensuring we are as ready as possible when the flood gates fully open at launch this holiday. Feedback and other insights are certainly valuable, but first and foremost we are testing and stressing the technical side of Halo Infinite.
We also want to be very up front and transparent about the fact that we will certainly have some bumps and rough edges in this build. Our teams have been working hard to ensure that the build and experience is such that it can deliver on our goals, but this is very much still work-in-progress, and we expect some hiccups of varying degrees over the course of the technical preview. For further context, this technical preview is a couple months behind where the development team and ‘main’ game build currently is given the process and time it takes to go through all the gates and steps before releasing to the public.
All of our key known issues will be listed so participants will have a better understanding of what to expect and what to look out for. Of course, gathering support tickets on brand new issues is also immensely helpful at this scale – despite our team’s best efforts, nothing can truly substitute for true real-world large-scale testing, and we’re sure to find some new areas of opportunity over the course of the preview.
And lastly, we’ve already mentioned this a few times in the blog, but the word “flighting” is fairly new in a lot of circles so when you hear us mention a “flight” – we are simply referring to a work-in-progress, hands-on release on the road to launch. Flighting is the process by which pre-release builds are put out into the wild to pursue specific goals, review data and outcomes, iterate, and repeat – all with the overarching goal of delivering the best shipping experience come launch time.
With that nomenclature and expectation-setting out of the way, let’s take a closer look at the key goals the 343 Industries team has for the Halo Infinite technical preview.
GAME & SERVICES PERFORMANCE FOCUS AREAS
Stability: How stable is the game across various hardware specs and platforms? Is the game freezing or crashing at a certain time or on specific hardware? Getting a large-scale sampling of real-world hardware profiles is something we can only really accomplish via a large flight of this nature and as we launch on PC for the first time, this is a critical focus for the team.
Online Services: Can all our interconnected online services function well at an immense scale? This is our largest bucket since it includes so many intertwined services that need to function in perfect harmony. Matchmaking, server scaling, playlists serving the proper content, challenges, stats (Post Game Carnage Report), Battle Pass progression & Store functionality, armor customization, partying up with friends, etc.
Halo Insider / Waypoint vNext: Can our Halo Insider communication systems and flighting tools function at scale? How do the Waypoint vNext app (iOS & Android) and web experiences feel and function as extensions of the game?
MEASURING GAME PERFORMANCE
Our team has already put in the hard work developing the tools to measure and collect information about nearly every scenario imaginable, such as game crashes or matchmaking failures, so technical previews will give us a unique opportunity to compare our internal data to what we see show up in the wild. Measuring the game’s stability and performance, especially at scale, is an integral part of a game’s journey to launch.
Now, let’s hear from members of the Halo Infinite team to see what they’re monitoring and how they’re measuring it during our upcoming technical previews.
WHAT ARE YOU/YOUR TEAM MONITORING DURING FLIGHTS?
Sam Hanshaw – Producer, Live Team: We’re always looking at the rates of matchmaking success and the availability of our servers, after all it’s hard for people to playtest the game if they’re unable to play matches. We also keep an eye on how many matches are getting played to completion, and we receive data about how many people crash while playing.
Brian Dunn – Multiplayer Test Lead & Brian Hughes – Live Test Lead: The test team monitors a large number of specific areas over the course of a flight. First, we are watching for overall crashes and stability. We analyze this data on a per-platform basis and identify specific things like most frequent crashes and differentiate between known and new crash instances. We use a metrics such as “MTTF” (Mean Time to Fail) or “crashes per 1,000 hours of gameplay” as a way of quantifying overall stability.
Next, we are also closely monitoring the overall quality of matchmaking which includes reliability, load times, and skill matching. In addition, the performance of our dedicated servers, performance of the game itself (particularly across different PC configurations) and our overall netcode quality are all under scrutiny. And with Halo Infinite's greater emphasis on player customization, we’re going to be paying close attention to progression, challenges, and which customization items people are unlocking and using.
Lastly, we partner with the Halo Support team to review tickets and bug reports to cross-reference against our telemetry and to help understand real-world player impact and scope of an issue. We also lurk in the Halo Waypoint forums, Reddit, Twitch, and social to keep an eye out for anecdotal reports.
Nate Jones – Engineering Lead, Services Lifecycle Team: If everything’s going well, I’m able to play some matches during a flight and I’m not glued to logs/monitoring. I keep the lobby service dashboards up to the side during the flight (watching backend service performance health, dedicated server usage, number of players connected, matchmaking ticket success rates, etc), and I’ll occasionally get pulled into a mid-flight investigation and have to dig into the logs. Most of my (and my team’s) flight monitoring takes place after the flight ends. Our normal post-flight plan is to thoroughly look over the lobby and skill service logs for errors, warnings, or ‘weird stuff’; that’s on top of any deeper dives into specific experiments we were running during a flight.
Jeff Guy – Producer, PC Team: I’m going to be monitoring Brian Dunn for cheating because he wipes the floor with me every time I play against him in a match. I’m only half joking.
We've built a TON of different player-controlled settings into Halo Infinite, as well as support for a vast array of player hardware and peripherals. The PC team will be monitoring how the game holds up across that matrix of player choices. We’ll be looking for things like drops in framerate and crashes that happen with specific hardware configurations. We’ll be combining that information with their graphics settings and peripherals – how many people are rocking ultrawide setups, who is pushing 4K or 8K resolution, who is playing with unlocked framerate versus locked at 144, what custom key bindings are players choosing, etc? Ensuring our PC players can play Infinite the way they want is everything to us, and we’ll be closely watching for any problems when they do.
PLAYER FEEDBACK
Gathering input from our players during a technical preview is critical to our success at launch and beyond. The sooner we receive feedback, the sooner we can plan and action on that feedback. On that note, we want to clarify that with this technical preview we are entering the next step in what’s been a multi-year process and journey where the team has been regularly getting critical feedback via user research and private flights. Naturally, the scale of the technical preview is greater than anything we’ve done to date – and that brings unique value and opportunities to capture even more perspectives – but just know that community feedback has been at the core of development since the very beginning. And, it will continue to remain a critical pillar going forward beyond launch.
Now, let’s take a look at what areas of the game we’ll specifically be focusing on for feedback during the technical preview.
FEEDBACK FOCUS AREAS
Core gameplay: We want to know how you feel about the core combat experience. How do you feel about player movement, weapon balance, equipment, etc.? How fun is it to engage in a battle in Halo Infinite?
Maps & Modes: How did you feel about the design and flow of the maps? Are the maps and mode both fun and fair?
Academy’s Weapon Drills: Did Weapon Drills give you a good understanding of how a weapon functions? How fun were the various Weapon Drills?
Menu & Battle Pass UI: How intuitive was the menu navigation? Were you able to understand your progression through the Battle Pass? Were you able to find and equip customization items easily?
UPCOMING TECHNICAL PREVIEW
Now, with the foundation of flighting set, let’s talk about the content and goals of our first upcoming technical preview, which will focus on Bots and a slice of the new Academy experience.
This technical preview is intentionally focused on these specific areas to help us gather some scale data as we bring these new experiences to Halo for the first time. As we look further ahead, we plan for future flights to expand into more content including traditional PVP Arena and Big Team Battle.
With this and our higher-level feedback goals noted up above, we land on the following specific focal points. With this in mind, the focus areas for our technical preview are:
Arena gameplay vs. Bots
Arena Maps
Academy’s Weapon Drills
Menu & Battle Pass UI
New Waypoint experiences on web, iOS, and Android
To gather specific feedback on these areas, our first flight will contain the following content and experiences.
In this upcoming technical preview, we’re planning to include the following subset of Weapon Drills:
MA40 AR
BR75
MK50 Sidekick
CQS48 Bulldog
Needler
VK78 Commando
S7 Sniper
Plasma Pistol
Pulse Carbine
Ravager
Heatwave
Skewer
There have been times at the studio when people would compare their best scores in these Weapon Drills. It always leads to some fun and healthy competition - especially when it comes to the BR and Sniper. Share your best Weapon Drill scores with us by tweeting us @Halo!
BATTLE PASS, CHALLENGES, MENUS, CUSTOMIZATION
On top of the gameplay-focused experiences above, we also want to make sure that the game’s menu navigation feels intuitive. We’re especially interested in seeing how players move through the UI to unlock their Battle Passes, check their Challenges, use the Store, and apply their earned customization elements in the Armor Hall.
In order to allow Halo Insiders to unlock their Battle Passes and unlock various customization options, we’ll be granting invited accounts a set amount of in-game credits (cR). Players will be free to use their cR how they see fit, but customization items unlocked during technical previews will not carry over when the game releases later this year.
Similar to how we’re only flighting with a subset of Arena maps and modes, this technical preview will feature a truncated Battle Pass and a small fraction of the Customization options planned for launch. The key focus is to ensure the Battle Pass and Challenge unlocking systems and customization equipping systems are both functioning properly, and hold up at scale. The reasoning for having these Battle Pass, Challenges, and Customization systems in the flight is purely technical, and isn’t meant to be a showcase of our launch content - so please don’t read into it that much.
Plus, wouldn’t you want us to save some of the super cool content for launch?
TAXIING TO THE TARMAC
We know the largest question now is, “When is the technical preview!?” The release of this blog means we’re getting very close but flighting itself is a fluid process, we need to ensure we’ve successfully cleared our final gate before we’re officially a go. That said, we’ve been given the okay to say our first Bot-focused technical preview could happen as soon as next weekend. Prior to the flight starting, we’re planning a live stream where we’ll dive into the actual build and walk through nearly every facet of the technical preview. Stay tuned.
We’ll be hosting hundreds of thousands of Halo Insiders during the first technical preview and then, if all goes well, we’ll invite even more eligible Halo Insiders for the next flight. We want to start at a reasonable number of participants before potentially going to a much larger player pool, but our goal is to eventually get every eligible Halo Insider a chance to go hands-on and help us achieve our goals on the road to launch. Remember, if you don’t get in this time, please don’t despair – more opportunities will come.
The most important thing now is to make sure you’re a Halo Insider. You will need to be a verified Halo Insider (see instructions at the top of this article) to ensure you can be invited to any and all Halo Infinite flights.
And yes, the technical preview will be all good to stream and create content around. Feel free to share your experience with us and with others!
We’ll have even more specifics to share about the technical preview as soon as we’re locked, so be sure to follow @Halo on Twitter for the latest news and info. Until then, stay frosty and thank you for your continued support, we can’t wait to take this next step together!
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