Halo Infinite was rough around the edges on release with animation issues, frame-pacing woes and extra problems in cutscenes. Some issues were tackled post-launch, but it’s with the release of the Season 2 patch that some long-standing issues have finally been resolved. We took a look at the fixes that 343 Industries has put in place on PC and Xbox Series X/S, covering animation, cutscenes and graphical modes, and identified some lingering issues with frame-pacing, v-sync and VRR that unfortunately still persist.
Let’s start with the good stuff first: Halo Infinite makes a much better first impression on PC, Series X and Series S, thanks to fixes to long-standing issues with the game’s pre-rendered cutscenes. After the patch, colours and black levels are now correct and the pre-rendered video sequence plays back with proper frame-pacing, making it feel much smoother and more polished as a result. This might not sound like a big deal, but this sequence cost a lot of money to make, it’s key to the game’s initial story-telling and for it to present the way it did at launch is a mystery. Still, the problem’s now solved – and the improvement is palpable: it looks right, the washed out look is gone and the jerky playback issues are finally fixed.
Cutscene playback – an issue we highlighted pre-launch and that Microsoft told us would be patched – has finally been fixed too. This one is weird: even if the game ran consistently at 60fps or 120fps, actual movement within the cutscene was very jerky and very offputting, giving the illusion of a much lower performance level. This fix comes as a real relief, greatly improving the visual quality of all cutscenes, working nicely in comination ith smaller fixes like the prevention of lights flickering when you fly out to do the first open world mission. That said, one issue still remains: facial animations of all types still play out at 30fps, something that didn’t occur in pre-release footage circa 2020. Hopefully this too can be fixed in an upcoming release, so that cutscenes can look as good as they should.
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