343 Industries has revealed in a new Inside Infinite blog post that it relied on character and enemy designs from the Halo 3/Halo: Reach era of the franchise for inspiration.
Microsoft and 343 Industries have been pretty open about their desire for Infinite to harken back to the days of classic Halo. It’s set on a single Halo ring – Zeta Halo – much in the same way Halo: Combat Evolved was set on a ring, and the designs retain the more streamlined look of Bungie’s Halo games. Now, we know it’s because Halo 3 and Halo: Reach were the inspiration.
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“The spiritual reboot actually made it easier for us to incorporate some more legacy designs into the characters,” Halo Infinite character and combat director Steve Dyck writes in the blog post. “One of the best examples of this is the Elites, Grunts, and Jackal who all have a much more ‘legacy’ design to them than we had in Halo 4 or 5. In terms of which part of the legacy we looked to for inspiration, we settled most around the Halo 3/Halo: Reach timeframe and then incorporated the Banished aesthetic where it made sense along with the Halo Infinite art direction.”
Halo Infinite’s campaign character art lead, Bryan Repka, added that 343 Industries knew early on that it wanted to “spiritually reboot” Halo’s characters, and doing so meant taking a look at every single character in the franchise. As a result, “every character in Infinite was redesigned in some way,” Repka said.
“Like [Steve Dyck] mentioned, we really relied on the designs of the past,” Repka continued. “We wanted to get back to the legacy designs that made Halo characters iconic, but we didn’t just want to just up-res them. We wanted to add our own flair while staying true to the 20 years of history.”
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Repka used Elites as an example – they were bigger and bulkier in Halo 4 and 5 compared to Elites of older Halo games and Repka said 343 Industries “ended up scaling them down and giving them a more sleek look” so that they looked “fast, agile, and intelligent.” The idea was that Elites would once again contrast heavily against the bigger and more hulking Brutes featured in Infinite.
For more about the character and enemy designs in Halo Infinite, be sure to check out the full Inside Infinite blog post. Read about Craig the Brute’s new glow-up after that and then check out Game Informer’s breakdown of everything we know about Halo Infinite so far.
Do you like the new designs? Let us know in the comments below!
