Gamescom 2021’s Opening Night Live show brought more Halo Infinite news, including a release date of December 8. The highly anticipated next entry in the famed Halo series has had a rocky development, but is gearing up to deliver its campaign and free-to-play multiplayer later this year. The free-to-play model is a first for the series, and appears to be coming with its own story, an approach being taken by many live service games recently. Although no new info was divulged at Gamescom, Halo Infinite received a cinematic multiplayer trailer for its first in-game season, setting up a character that will be integral to the ongoing narrative.
The Master Chief will reprise his role as protagonist in the campaign for Halo Infinite – which is attempting to bring unprecedented scale and exploration to the series – but the multiplayer will have a separate narrative tangentially related to that of the Chief. Many online games are adopting an ongoing narrative to fit the seasonal content model of live service. Battlefield 2042 has been weaving its near-future fiction through social media, a prequel short film titled Exodus, and its playable specialists. Halo Infinite is taking a similar approach, with other Spartans taking center stage.
Halo Infinite‘s Gamescom trailer introduced players to Spartan Commander Laurette Agryna, who is responsible for training “a new generation of Spartans,” according to the trailer’s YouTube description. Agryna is canonically a trainer at the Avery J. Johnson Academy of Military Science, which is the in-universe setting for Halo Infinite‘s Academy mode, which will let players hone their skills against AI opponents.
Halo Infinite’s Backstory For Commander Laurette Agryna
Commander Agryna joined the UNSC after she was saved by Spartans from the Covenant earlier in her life. The Gamescom trailer shows a young Agryna stranded in a besieged London, presumably in the year 2552, during the Covenant’s invasion of Earth. Halo 3: ODST centered on the invasion forces in New Mombasa, but the conflict was widespread across the human home world. Halo Infinite is chronologically last on the Halo series timeline, taking place sometime after Halo 5: Guardians, which was set in 2560. With this time frame, Agryna appears to have quickly risen through the ranks to a Spartan Commander in a minimum of eight years.
The trailer and its description imply that the narrative surrounding Halo Infinite‘s multiplayer will involve the training of Spartans in order to face the threat of “Cortana’s relentless martial law [and] the expanding power and ambition of Atriox and the Banished.” This may mean that the actual games played in the multiplayer are some sort of simulated war game, kind of like the in-universe explanation for Rainbow Six Siege‘s operators battling each other. With the Halo Infinite multiplayer going free-to-play, it seems that 343 Industries is attempting to graft the gameplay onto a narrative in order to connect it to the larger conflict, but just how this will be done remains to be seen.
