The Halo Infinite multiplayer beta is now officially live — and if you’ve been able to log in and play a successful match, then you’re one of the lucky ones. It’s safe to say that the Halo Infinite tech preview is off to a rocky start, from difficulty logging in, to games crashing once they finally get underway. The bad news is that this state of affairs may continue until the current preview ends on August 2. The good news, however, is that these issues are precisely what a tech preview is supposed to evaluate.
Information comes from the 343 Industries website, as well as a Twitter thread from Brian Jarrad, the community director for Halo. Together, the two resources explain the kind of issues you might run into while playing the Halo Infinite tech preview, as well as why said issues are all par for the course.
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“Just a friendly PSA this is a technical test at a scale unlike anything we’ve done to date,” Jarrad wrote. “Driven by production. Not a game launch … Also a great scale test for our systems as we’ve seen [Halo] Waypoint load dramatically increasing. Team has already been able to work out additional deployments but it’ll likely get bumpy when everyone slams the site for their messages.”
As we are all eager and increasingly impatient, just a friendly PSA this is a technical test at a scale unlike anything we've done to date. Driven by production. Not a game launch. Things are proceeding but there are many steps to navigate. (1/5)July 29, 2021
In other words: There are a ton of people attempting to play the Halo Infinite preview, and stress-testing is an important part of the process. Your obnoxious crash is useful data for the 343 team — and it may well prevent an even more obnoxious crash when the game is in full release, and your multiplayer rankings count for something.
343 lays out a number of issues that players have encountered, including “a pesky bug related to Matchmaking that can result in a player being unable to join into a session, timing out, and then returning to the main menu.” If you haven’t been able to successfully join a Halo Infinite game, rest assured that you are not alone.
“We’re aware of and tracking a few different crash scenarios though the overall average failure rate is well below our targets,” the post explains. “We’re particularly interested in getting mor ecrash logs fro a wider breadth of platforms as stability work continues internally.”
Other bugs include incompatibility with certain AMD drivers, stuttering frame rates, missing player scores, disappearing weapons and ineffective melee attacks.
While these would all be glaring issues in a full release, it’s important to remember that you should expect to see these in a beta version of the game. As Jarrad points out:
“I worry that folks who aren’t able to handle the unpredictability of this release timing and who are getting outright angry, already have the wrong expectations going into a technical preview,” he wrote. “There will be hiccups.”
If you want a flawless Halo multiplayer experience, you’ll probably have to stick with Halo 5 or The Master Chief Collection for the time being. If you want to help 343 Industries gather data to potentially improve the next game in the series, however, consider hopping onto the Halo Infinite preview this weekend — if you can log in successfully.
