If youâve played a competitive online shooter, itâs happened to you. You shoot an enemy a bunch. You swear you saw your shots connect. But the next minute, itâs you whoâs sitting through a respawn timer. To take it from hardcore players, Halo Infinite can seem particularly egregious about such matters of desync, and itâs something its developer has now addressed in a blog post this afternoon.
Since its launch in November, Halo Infiniteâs free-to-play multiplayer mode has struggled with reports of connectivity troubles, much like most first-person shooters that rely on a steady internet connection. Players have lamented these desync issues, which manifest in various forms: rubber-banding, missed shots, bullets arcing unnaturally around corners, melee attacks seemingly clipping through targets. The sticking point isnât necessarily that connectivity woes are happening in the first placeâagain, this stuff is pretty common in modern gamingâbut rather that Halo Infiniteâs developer, 343 Industries, has gone months without publicly offering a thorough explanation (and potential solution).
Todayâs post is the first time 343 has publicly addressed Halo Infiniteâs desync in depth. Fair warning: It is dense, full of math and numbers and all sorts of highly technical terms. If thatâs your thing, hey, go have yourself a field day. But the more casual Halo Infinite players should be happy to know it details a handful of planned short-term and long-term fixes, alongside explanations for why all this is happening in the first place.
âIn Halo, we choose to favor the shooter,â 343 Industries lead sandbox engineer Richard Watson wrote. âPractically, this means that whatever happened on the shooterâs screen the server endeavors to honor. That means whenever a player sees themselves hitting a target, our system does its best to give them the hit on the server.â
Basically, if a playerâs ping rating isnât exactly fantastic, they can still get killed despite hiding behind cover, a phenomenon 343 detailed with a series of screenshots snapped on the Recharge map. You might be hiding behind the wall in the upper corridor ramparts, but if the person shooting you sees you in the open, then they get the kill. Itâs chalked up to a metric called round trip time, which is measured in part via milliseconds. No way the human eye can pick up on every detail at that speed. But you can still feel burned by the results, especially on the receiving end (and in viewing post-match play-by-plays in Halo Infiniteâs theater mode).
As for melee attacks missing their mark, thatâs a bit more complicated. Halo Infinite has long been plagued by a fan rumor that thereâs no player collisionâbasically, the ability for players to touch each other in-gameâin the multiplayer mode. In todayâs blog post, Watson stressed that thatâs absolutely not the case, and that player collision is supposed to be present between opponents in Halo Infinite. But sometimes, again a result of poor latency, the gameâs multiplayer servers register your successful melee attack but donât fully convey to you that your opponent has moved their position, which can look like youâve essentially just phase-punched through an enemy. Watson detailed in a series of screenshots that look like Super Bowl diagrams:
Watson further said that improvements to Infiniteâs latency problems should address such issues. And fixes are indeed already in the works.
For starters, 343 Industries will now prioritize low pings in matchmaking. Watson didnât detail what was prioritized before, but the fix âshould help you match with local players, and therefore have a better connection, more often.â Youâll also start matching with folks from your own geographical region on a more regular basis, hopefully providing more stable server connections. Down the line, Halo Infinite will feature indicators on the mid-match scoreboard thatâll tell you whether or not youâre playing with someone who has poor connection. Thatâs planned alongside a forthcoming indicator thatâll let you know when your own connection is poor. And if these solutions donât mitigate connectivity issues across the board, 343 says itâll look into the option of adding a server selection feature to Halo Infinite
These updates are the latest to join a number of other positively-received changes recently introduced to Halo Infinite over the past month or two. The once-lambasted prices of the microtransaction store have been lowered. The once-busted Big Team Battle mode has been fixed. Those are in addition to the revolving door of entertaining modes and events. When season two rolls around, itâll add more content, including a cooperative campaign, which precipitates the player-creation Forge mode later in the year. Now, the only thing missingâIâve said it before, Iâll say it againâis the return of King of the Hill.
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