According to John Linneman, senior writer and video producer for Digital Foundry and Eurogamer, the game itself looks and plays great, but was dissapointing in some technical areas. One area specifically that has now drawn attention from fans is the way that the Halo Infinite disc does not contain enough data for the game to be playable on its own.
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Apparently, when plugging in the game disc and letting it copy over all of its data to start playing, the system will claim that the application is incomplete and requires a download in order to be finished. This means that even when playing Halo Infinite through a physical copy, internet access will be required in order to download the remaining data before the game can be loaded. From this initial information, this also appears to go beyond a simple day-one patch that will fix some nasty bugs, and goes all the way to being a base requirement to boot up the game.
This isn’t entirely uncommon with modern games that have too much data to include on a single disc, with titles like The Last of Us 2 and Final Fantasy 7 Remake requiring so much data that they include a second disc with additional data to download. From these early impressions of what were likely review copies, it is unclear at the time of this writing if the final retail versions of the game will include the necessary data on on a separate disc. However, at the moment, it appears that the upcoming day-one update for Halo Infinite will likely also include, or launch alongside, the remainder of the game that isn’t available directly on the physical copy.
As is often the case with titles that require an additional disc, such as the two mentioned above, this excess download could be brought on by how much video and audio data is needed for cinematics included with Halo Infinite. The cause of the data offload can only be speculated for the moment, until more fans start to dig through the information and figure out what was on the disc and what was left out. This does still unfortunately have the potential to leave a significant amount of players out of the campaign if playing the game does require a download, especially considering that a quarter of households still don’t have internet access in the US alone.
Halo Infinite is set to release on December 8 for PC, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X/S. The multiplayer beta is available now.
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