'Halo Infinite' fans already want cross-play turned off to avoid cheaters

Halo Infinite isn't even officially out yet, but enthusiastic fans of its multiplayer beta are already calling for a pretty major change: the option to turn off cross-play. According to multiple popular posts on online forums like the Halo subreddit, hackers have become a relatively common sight on the game's servers, which has led to a lot of frustration with the game's PC user base.

One fan posted a clip of an obvious aimbotter scoring automatic headshots with Halo's famous battle rifle from across the map. Though this cheating occurred in a non-ranked game, poster KanoxHD pointed out that the game has only been available for around two weeks, yet hackers have already figured out a way to rob their fellow players of a fair and fun experience.

Cut the cord — As usual with these sorts of disruptions, the console community has blamed PC players for these tools, because it's generally much easier to run these sort of unauthorized programs on a PC rather than a closed console environment. (That said, console hacking or controller modifications aren't unheard of on those platforms, but they usually require "jailbreaking" the console in question, a concept which doesn't yet exist for the current-gen.)

Another clip shows an aimbotter emptying magazines into the ground; according to commenters in the thread, this is to reduce their accuracy stat, which helps them avoid detection from automatic anti-cheat measures. A popular post on the subreddit lists some of the cheats that hackers have access to, which include infinite ammo, wall-hacking, and — of course — aimbotting.

That post also alleges that hackers may have the ability to block theater replays, which is currently the most reliable way of identifying the cheater in order to report them to 343. Several other players have noted that the current report process is onerous and too lengthy, which means that many cheaters might go un-reported entirely.

Dead weight — While it's probably true that adding the ability to opt out of cross-play would help with these issues, it may also introduce some new problems to the game, such as long queue times for matches. As several observers have mentioned, the onus falls on 343 to develop better anti-cheat tools to detect these hackers before they can ruin too many matches for the unsuspecting player base. Perhaps they could learn a thing or too from Call of Duty: Warzone, which has recently rolled out quite a few changes in an attempt to stem its cheating woes.