Xbox fans have already tasted a bit of Halo Infinite with the recent multiplayer technical test, but a leaker online has revealed just how big the other half of the game could end up being. Developer 343 Industries is releasing the latest Halo in two halves this fall, including a campaign that details the next adventure for Master Chief and a free-to-play multiplayer component that has a lot of players back on board.
While 343’s previous two games were financial successes, longtime fans saw them as too much of a deviation from what made Halo great. The team working on Infinite hopes to flip the single-player script with a new focus on open-world exploration and a new faction of brutish enemies from games past. While Cortana and her faction of rogue AI will almost certainly still be in the mix, most of the pre-release trailers have focused on The Banished. Led by Atriox, this Covenant splinter faction first appeared in Halo Wars 2 and now looks to stop the Chief in his tracks on the newly discovered Zeta Halo. Considering all the new aspects of Infinite‘s story, it’s no surprise that a recent leak has revealed a massive file size for the game.
An Xbox enthusiast going by the handle oskool_g shared a screenshot of the Xbox Store on Twitter that reveals a file size of just over 97 GB for Halo Infinite. This is a hefty upgrade over Halo 5: Guardians, which clocked in at 55 GB at launch. This size almost doubled over the course of the game’s life, and it’s fair to say that a game based on seasonal additions to multiplayer and even the prospect of additional Halo campaigns will expand at an even more rapid pace.
It’s also worth considering that owners of Microsoft’s current-gen consoles may have trouble fitting Halo Infinite on their internal hard drive. Because of the way that storage for newer games works, Infinite needs to be installed on the drive that comes with the Xbox Series X or Xbox Series S on a prohibitively expensive SSD expansion card. The game at launch will take up more than a fourth of the Series S’s available space, and Halo fans will likely also have another 100GB dedicated to Halo: The Master Chief Collection already. Players on either console may have to make tough choices when it comes to installing games in order to keep up to date with everything Master Chief throughout 2022 and beyond.
Beyond storage woes, the huge file size of Halo Infinite is a good sign. The team at 343 Industries clearly has huge ambitions for Infinite, touting at one point that the game would last for a decade. That’s the type of game that Halo needs to get back in the spotlight, and that will require a lot of pure data to accomplish. Time will tell if Infinite can live up to expectations, but fans who picked up the game in July can at least confirm that it feels like a mixture of the best of 343 and Bungie’s contributions to Halo‘s legacy.
Halo Infinite is currently scheduled to arrive on PC, Xbox One, Xbox Series S, and Xbox Series X during Holiday 2021.
