The Halo Infinite multiplayer was unexpectedly released back on November 15, and since then, the game has taken fans on a bit of a bumpy ride. While many players have enjoyed the gunplay in the multiplayer, a number of technical problems have held the experience back for most. Among the issues that have plagued gamers from launch is desync.
In a competitive multiplayer shooter, precision plays a significant factor in whether a player wins or loses a gunfight. That is why the issues with desync in Halo Infinite are so frustrating for many fans. Essentially, desync causes a player’s connection with the online server to become desynchronized, meaning what one person sees on screen might look completely different from what is actually happening. This is obviously a problem as it means that chaotic events, such as teleporting players, missed melee attacks, and numerous shots not connecting, can ensue. Fortunately, it appears that the developers might have finally started to address the issue.
Recently, 343 Industries released a new update about desync in Halo Infinite. Via a Halo Waypoint blog post, the developers acknowledged that this was a problem and promised that they were working on resolving the issues. According to the blog post, the first step in that process had already taken place as the developers noted that a patch for desync recently went live for the game. However, they stated that more substantial updates would be coming down the line.
In the blog post, the Lead Engineer of the Sandbox team, Richard Watson, outlined some of the changes made with this recent update to address the desync problem. According to the developer, matchmaking had been altered to attempt to match players that lived closer together. The update also looked to prevent players from “geo-filtering,” which caused the game to be played on a server closer to one player at the expense of the rest of the lobby. In addition, some more possible changes coming in a future update could include a connection indicator for players and a server selection feature.
It will be interesting to see if these recent fixes ultimately improve the gameplay for players moving forward. However, it should be noted that 343 Industries previously shipped a patch meant to fix the Big Team Battle game mode, which turned out to be unsuccessful (it then released another update which did fix most of those issues). Hopefully, this patch addressing desync makes the game more enjoyable for fans as Halo Infinite has started to see a decline in its number of active players. It is uncertain whether fixing problems with desync will be enough to bring players back to the game, but if things fail to improve soon, even more gamers could leave.
Halo Infinite is available on PC, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X/S.
Source: Halo Waypoint
