 Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh 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. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5... 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? For this segue to today's sponsor, Seasonic. Never skimp on getting a quality power supply for your current or next computer build. Check out Seasonic to find award-winning power supplies, and try their wattage calculator to see which one is right for you. We're gonna have that linked down below. 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 Plouffe 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? Why? Why would it default to 200% resolution? Okay, 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 full screen again? Where's normal full screen support? 1920 by 1080? It's not asking the bottom on the taskbar. Apparently all we're getting is Slayer on live fire, so that's what we're gonna play. Okay, we're getting 51 FPS now though. Okay, my poor team. Oh, they got dead. Uh, wait, that's an enemy? Oh, we're both blue. What do you think the red bed light 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 gonna 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 CSGO bot. Like they zigzag walk and stuff. How you doing, buddy? Wow, it ducked. It freaking ducked. It 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 the kill. Wait, what? I did melee. Oh no, I pressed the wrong button. I pressed right click. 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 years old graphics card. I mean, I guess 1060 is like four years old now, isn't it? 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. Okay. 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 because 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 full screen, like proper full screen. There's only borderless full screen. Oh, Escape does go back. It'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. Terrible. Oh man. Oh man. Finally. Oh man, they move around so much. Stop it. 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 gamify 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 by default? Yeah. I remember. I've been gone for so long. Hey, I got to be at the beginning of the match this time. Come on. No. These really are good bots. It feels good though. It feels good. I like the sound. Sound is good. This is a little low sensitivity for the size of mouse pad, but. Got him. Hey, come over here. 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 the 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 on ground and going all over the place. Steak-tacular. Steak-tacular? What even is that? All right. I like it. This performance blows. 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, is that live? Sometimes grenades desync you say? I keep having 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. Oh God, it's so slow. Oh, it tracks him like an alien. Oh, that's interesting. Okay. Oh, it does good damage. Okay, so you don't even have to aim. It really is halo. Okay, you gotta kind of aim towards him a little bit. What was what? What was? I'm gonna try. Where's that? What's this? Oh. Hi there. How you doing buddy? What the crap? What even just happened? 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. 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 wanna try the needler. Nice fast reload on the needler. Pretty good projectile speed. This looks pretty sick. Yeah, this might be a little bit of an OP needler. We might have to get some balance tweaks going here. Practice against moving targets. Okay, this is not a great, can I go out there? Based on what I've experienced so far in terms of the range that combat is gonna 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 gonna do one more. 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. Ah! Ah! Three, two, one. All right, got one last one. New high score, yes. Okay, apparently I'm a master though. And the game crashed. That's okay, that's okay. Really a release like this is not about the gameplay 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 gonna 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 thanks Brilliant for sponsoring today's video. 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