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The last Halo Infinite stress test let players exclusively compete against bots, and 343 Industries has revealed some of the clever reasons behind that initial limitation.
The studio shared some of its early results from the first technical preview in a lengthy Development Update video (opens in new tab) – where it also confirmed that Halo Infinite will launch without campaign co-op or the Forge map editor mode, and that another tech preview is coming with both 4v4 and Big Team Battle PvP.
In discussing player feedback from the first preview, live operations producer Sam Hanshaw explained the twofold reasoning 343 had for starting off with bot battles only.
“The bots and the weapon drills are two key pieces of our new player onboarding,” Hanshaw said. “Having players experience that for the first time in our first public flight like this was really important, because we get that initial feedback of what it’s like to pick up this game and learn it through the weapon drills and through bot play.
“One other thing we get from flighting using the bot matches is we only have four people in each match, so we have to spin up a dedicated server for every 4 people who are on. So essentially by doing this, we doubled our server strain for this audience size. So this increases our confidence for shipping and releasing to larger and larger audiences. So we know with the hundreds of thousands of people who we invited for this tech preview, when we did it with bots, that we can handle twice that many people at least with PvP.”
So while you were definitely not getting teabagged by Halo Infinite bots, you were also putting the servers through their paces twice as hard as in a traditional test. Not bad!
