I'll say this, the trailer for me was a big let down. Not just in aspects I hold in terms of quality engine development, but for the player as well. If your going to show a trailer for a new Halo game...don't you wan't to start off by showing a kind of "last time on..." thing, rather than jump straight into some scene that clearly has no correlation to the current timeline we know as of the end of Halo 5? The trailer is confusing timeline wise.
From what I know about Halo 5, it ended with Chief and the gang basically standing on an elite planet...not Chief floating around space stranded, and certaintly not near anything ressembling the first Halo ring they encounterd in CE. Now I cans ee this thing heading one of two ways...
1. You will need to read or watch some sort of pre launch content to fill in the gaps between Halo 5 and Infinite.
2. This is the beginning of the game, but cuts to a "24 hours earlier" type of gameplay to catch you up.
Either way it was a huge miss. I'm all for character development, but the whole scenario aside from the timeline makes zero sense. If your floating around with barely any power, no foreseeable food, direction on how to get home...how does waking up a Spartan on a flying deathtrap even begin to equate to a "We're going home" celebratory scene?!? If you can't get home on a failing bucket of bolts, what does having a Spartan do for you? Just made no sense at all.
And maybe it's just me, but from what i saw in the actual tech demo, this game looks nothing like anything on the level we saw in it. None of the lighting was "next gen" looking, there was literally ZERO reflections at all in any of the glass, surrounding shiny metallic objects...and even Chief's visor had a generic cubemap applied and nothing real time reflection...which is severly dissapointing given the numerous other games with much older hardware that do it. Original Halo CE for Mac anyone?
I get the wanting to return to the nostalgia and superior art style of the classic trilogy, but if your going to continue a failed story arc and try to return to the old style, it isn't going to work very well. They would have been better off telling Chief's story through a bunch of new missions and campaigns revolving around the journey that lead Chief to Halo 1. There is literally 10+ fantastic Halo games just in the novels, comics and stories told before CE.
I just don;t think 343 get's it. Well, not all of 343, but certainlty the likes of Frankie, Kiki, Bonnie and whoever the hell they hired to write these abysmal storyboards out. It seems quite clear that they think the art style alone and tug on the emotional nostalgia strings is enough to get a good Halo out. I get we don't help at all being as fractured and biased as we are. Halo is supposed to be for everyone and it has to evolve, but I just don't like being messed with. That's my opinion in a nut shell.
I don't think I'll be picking this one up on PC, and I will likely pick up and play MCC for the next 30 years instead...