Halo Infinite’s campaign audio logs tell a separate story of how Zeta Halo fell to the Banished

Leading up to the release of Halo Infinite’s highly-anticipated campaign, developer 343 Industries has outlined how audio logs will work in-game. Players will ultimately be able to collect datapads scattered across Zeta Halo that explain how the ring-world fell to the Banished.

In an interview with 343 over at IGN, Halo Infinite’s associate creative director Paul Crocker explains that each audio log “leads to another connecting kind of piece of the game, whether it’s the Marines you’re finding, the Spartans and what happened to some of them, [etc.].” That said, players will still find the occasional datapad that tells a one-off story.

The audio logs in Halo Infinite are primarily told from three different perspectives — UNSC, Banished, and Spartan. They serve as “really polished kind of radio plays,” according to Crocker. When put together, players will get the story of what happened on Zeta Halo before the Master Chief began his campaign to take it back.

As for how audio logs function in the game, players will be able to press X to pick up a Data Pad that they find, or they can hold X to immediately play the audio log. Doing the latter allows players to listen to an audio log as they go about their business without having to pause the game or wait beside the pad for the playback to finish, a scenario 343 consciously wanted to avoid. Referring to audio logs, Crocker notes that “apart from a cutscene, they will take priority. Everything else just gets kind of muted down.”