(Linus humming Halo theme song)
- Yeah that's right my friends!
It's been six long years
since we wore the armor and suited up.
But now at long last,
Halo Infinite is arriving to herald a new dawn
of spartan combat.
Or at least the beta's here.
And frankly speaking,
it's already off to a pretty rocky start,
beginning with of course the name of the game.
Microsoft has proven once more
that they have no idea how to number things.
One, two, three, four, five,
infinity.
In all seriousness though,
there were some technical issues delaying the flight window,
but now it's ready.
I'm ready. The camera crew's ready.
And there's just one remaining question.
Are you ready?
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(upbeat electronic music)
Now admittedly, I haven't played a ton of Halo
since Combat Evolved launched back in 2001.
Although I did play the Halo 2 single-player campaign
when they eventually launched it on PC.
So I didn't actually live through a lot of the dark times.
And I'm really excited.
I mean, this is the first Halo game in six years,
and it's the first time in six years
that I've really had any time for gaming anyway.
So yeah, that's an appropriate disclaimer.
There are some issues.
This is a technical demo.
There's matchmaking problems in multiplayer,
which by the way, is the only thing available right now.
There's collision issues.
There's pop-in issues
if you're running low details with a wide field of view.
Now, as with most betas,
the build we're playing on today is actually an older one.
So if you see anything that looks super unpolished,
there's a good chance that it's already actually fixed
in preparation for the final release,
which should be sometime this holiday season.
Let's go ahead and have a look at the settings
that Ploof has dialed in
because this right here
is the quintessential Steam hardware survey
average gaming PC.
We've got an Nvidia GeForce GTX 1060,
and we've got it running at about, well low.
Really?
Is that what we needed to make it playable?
Wait, we scaled to 8k?
This is what it defaulted to?
- [David] Why?
- Why?
Why would it default to 200% resolution?
Okay, let's go to-
Let's go to something reasonable.
Oh my God. It changes every time you touch the slide.
I can't-
You can't go to 1920 by 1080 if you have a 4k display.
It's borderless fullscreen again.
Where's normal fullscreen support?
1920 by 1018?
- [David] What? - It's cause of the
bottom on the task bar.
- Apparently all we're getting is Slayer on Live Fire.
So that's what we're going to play.
Okay. We're getting 51 FPS now though.
Okay. My poor team.
Oh. They got dead.
Wait, that's an enemy?
Oh.
We're both blue!
- [David] What did you think the red outline is?
- I had no idea.
I mean, that's literally the basics.
Red versus blue, okay?
This is definitely playable.
Once they sort things out a little bit
this is going to be fine on a 1060.
And honestly, I mean looks good considering it's at low.
Some games you turn down to low, like Apex,
Apex looks like poo on low.
I mean the idea for a game developer
should be that when you turn it down
from high to medium to low,
it doesn't go from looking good to terrible,
it goes from looking new to looking older.
That should be the objective.
And I think they've done a pretty good job of that here.
It doesn't look like a bad ugly game,
it just looks like an older one.
I gotta give credit, these bots are a lot better
than like a CS:GO bot.
Like they zigzag walk and stuff.
How you doing buddy?
Wow, it ducked. It freaking ducked!
It got hit in the head and ducked.
Look at that.
How neat is that?
How do I tell how I'm doing?
Oh, I'm terrible.
I have one kill?
Wait, is that even right?
I want to kill!
Wait, what? I did melee.
Oh, no, I pressed the wrong button,
I pressed right click.
(Linus laughing)
That's normally my binding.
Come on. Yes!
I killed a bot!
How many deaths do I have?
Three?
- Okay. If I can at least get
a positive kill to death ratio,
I will consider that to be acceptable.
Damn.
Damn!
You know what? I'm actually feeling pretty good.
Movement feels good. Guns feel good.
It feels like Halo.
And on our 1060,
once we got past-ish some technical weirdness, it's smooth.
We're getting like a pretty steady 50 FPS in game.
That's with a bunch of character models running around.
I think this is going to be a great experience
for someone running a couple of years old graphics card.
I mean, I guess 1060 is like four years old now,
isn't it? - [Nick] Yeah.
As for the CPU we're running,
we wanted something good,
but not brand new.
So we went with a 2700X,
and as long as you've got anything Intel's made
in the last five or six years,
or anything AMD's made since Ryzen 2000,
you are going to be in really good shape.
Let's kick it up a notch?
- [Nick] Yeah. 2060?
- Yeah, let's go to a 2060.
Oh, let me tell you Microsoft
about the experience with the UI.
Go look at any other game.
Literally any other game
and just clone what they're doing,
cause it'll be better than this.
This is terrible.
Like this is embarrassing.
I can't say that I'm too confident
that they'll fix it though,
because the Master Chief Collection's UI is atrocious.
I just changed it to 1920 by 1080,
and I'm not convinced anything actually changed.
There's no fullscreen, like proper fullscreen,
there's only borderless fullscreen.
Oh, escape does go back.
That's just not documented. Okay.
We're at 60 FPS now.
My ally is shooting me
while he's being attacked by a bad guy.
- [David] Get the kill. No!
- Terrible.
Oh man. C'mon!
Finally.
Ah man, they move around so much.
Stop it!
- [David] They have really good bots.
- Yeah, the bots are pretty good.
Oh, this is hilarious.
The victory screen is scaled for 4k,
but I'm running at 1080.
Okay. Let's have a look at battle pass stuff.
Play any matches, capture an enemy flag.
And then what?
Challenges get you...
Complete all weekly challenges
to get a stone green armor coating.
That moment when you game-ify the game.
So then you can level up,
which will give you things like cool glasses.
What is this?
Different color schemes.
Remember in Halo 1,
how you could just change your color palette
like by default. - [Nick] Yep.
- I remember.
I've been gone for so long.
Hey, I got to be at the beginning of the match this time.
C'mon! - [David] Yes!
- No!
These really are good bots.
It feels good though. It feels good.
I like the sounds. Sound is good.
This is a little low sensitivity
for this size of mouse pad, but.
Got him.
Hey, come over here.
- [David] Nice.
- Plasma pistol's not bad.
Projectile speed definitely better than that carbine.
I really like the uncluttered look of the maps though.
Like finding enemies is not like, you know,
who knows better what all decals on the map look like,
it's just, oh yeah, there's bad guys.
Bang, bang.
That's definitely my preferred style.
I'm a little disappointed at performance with the 2060.
I'm on medium settings and I'm getting as low as 45 FPS.
That is not what I'd like to see, but...
Oops.
It's also very playable like this.
That's always a good sign
when I forgot that I'm supposed to be benchmarking a game
and I just started playing it.
It's fun.
Like there's a big difference between 45 steady
and 45 to 72 like dipping around
and going all over the place.
- [Announcer] Steaktacular.
- Steaktacular? What even is that?
All right.
I like it.
This performance blows.
- [Nick] 3070? - Yeah let's go to a 3070
and see if we can actually even run this thing at high
with a top of the line graphics card.
Well, top-ish.
We're at 65 FPS in the menu.
Um, let's see what we can do here.
I will settle for borderless.
Well, we should be able to run 4k.
35 FPS in menu on medium details.
These freaking poses man, look at this.
Are they self-aware?
Cause that's what I need to know to accept those poses.
Okay, we're at 4k medium,
and we're getting about 30 to 40 FPS.
And that's on a 3070.
At the best of times,
this is a $600 graphics card.
Right now it's worth well over a grand.
I mean, "worth."
Ooh, there's a rolling grenade.
Is that live?
- [Nick] Sometimes grenades de-sync.
- [Linus] Sometimes grenades de-sync, you say?
- [Nick] Yeah, it's a known issue.
- Ugh, I keep tabbing to change weapons!
I'm changing that.
I am not doing well this time.
And it crashed.
I swear I didn't rage quit.
That was... (laughing)
Oh God. It's so slow!
- [Nick] Oh, it tracks them like a Needler.
- Oh, that's interesting. Okay.
Oh, it does good damage.
Okay, so you don't even have to aim.
It really is Halo.
(Nick and David laughing)
Okay, you gotta kinda lean towards them a little bit.
- [David] Ooh! - [Nick] Heatwave, Heatwave!
- [David] What was that? - [Linus] What was what?
- [Nick] Heatwave gun.
- [David] Kill this guy and go back behind him.
- [Linus] I'm gonna try.
- [Nick] Get him! - [Linus] Where's the...
- [David] Yeah!
- [Linus] What's this? - There you go, Heatwave!
- [Linus] Oh. - Ooh.
- Hi there.
How you doing, buddy?
What the crap?
What even just happened?
(laughing)
Okay, why don't we crank it and just see what happens?
Ultra.
We're going to ultra, boys.
And the frame rate is the same.
It's a little worse.
I was really happy
with how decent the textures looked at low though.
- [Nick] Yeah, no, even at low it still looks really good.
- Yeah it looks good.
Is it gonna crash? Is this it?
Music's still going.
I want to try the Needler.
Nice fast reload on the Needler.
Pretty good projectile speed.
This looks pretty sick.
- [David] That's a good Needler.
- Yeah. This might be a little bit of an OP Needler
and they have to get some balance tweaks going here.
Practice against moving targets.
Okay. This is not a great...
Can I go out there?
Okay.
Based on what I've experienced so far
in terms of the range that combat is going to take place,
holy crap this thing is terrible.
Do you guys see that spread?
Like it is not even inside the circle sometimes.
Not my favorite in-game shotgun.
Hold on. We're going to do one more.
I wanna-
I wanna try the sniper rifle.
I'm one of those douchebags
that's not actually good at sniping,
but I go grab the sniper rifle
and then I just stand there being useless.
See that? Yeah, not very good.
Oh, hi how you doing?
Okay.
(Linus fake cries)
- [Nick] Nice. - All right. Got one last one.
New high score. Yes!
Okay.
Apparently I'm a master though.
And the game crashed.
Ugh, that's okay.
That's okay.
Really, a release like this
is not about the game play or balance,
or even really the guns.
A release like this
is about Microsoft collecting telemetry data
so they can get some idea of,
okay this weird edge case that we've seen
where the game crashes,
how common is that?
What kind of hardware are those people running?
What are they going to be doing when it causes that crash?
So that the final release should in theory be more polished.
So I've seen enough to know
that they've clearly got a lot of work to do,
but I've also seen enough to know
that I'm actually kinda jacked for this game.
So big thank you to Microsoft
for giving us an early look at the game,
along with anyone else who signed up for it,
we didn't get any kind of special treatment.
Thanks to you guys for watching. And...
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If you guys enjoyed this video
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why not check out our first look at Cyberpunk 2077?
The key difference is that
that one wasn't six months from release when we tried it.
(Linus humming)