I was in two minds about whether to write this. The question of whether Halo Infinite is now a professional, finished game is moot. Of course, it's not; it's Halo Infinite. It's like asking whether the Sun comes out at night now. But that's not why I had misgivings about this blog; what held me back were the precise bumps and scratches that never buff off of Infinite. There's the danger that in regularly surveying a game that is stuck in its ways, I end up with a series of articles that is the same. Am I adding anything to the conversation by repeating that, in Infinite, dead bodies still hang in mid-air? That match wait times continue to be unacceptable? That the multiplayer still can't get the total MMR in the red column to reflect the MMR in the blue column? All these things remain true, but they were true six months ago and six months before that. I'd bet they'll be true six months in the future.

Evidently, though, I did write this article, and I did it because once you push through the familiar, you can see Halo has had another growth spurt since July. The new toys are slim comfort when you can't put them to good use. Wearing some fresh armour or wielding the latest rifle while getting demolished still feels like getting demolished. So, whenever you see me giving a thumbs up to a feature in the updates, remember that it only brightens the game, provided you can find a match where the skill levels are normalised, and I wouldn't hold your breath on that.

Census

In theory, Forge and the deluge of new cosmetics should have caused a population boom, giving the matchmaker more players to pull from and letting it recruit Spartans closer to your weight division. But whether Halo has seen more than a pimple on its population graph depends on where you start measuring. If we check Steam Charts, we can see a steady rise in enrollment numbers through Season 4, and then when Season 5 dawns in October, the player figures increase by 80%, with only a 17% contraction in the following months. This looks like a windfall until you compare the current numbers with the earliest for the game and realise that we have only gone from having about 2.6% of the original population count to about 5%. Even assuming relatively large discrepancies between the Steam and Xbox numbers, it's not enough to level out the seesaws of matches. Halo Infinite is the only game I've seen where the beta was more popular than the final product by orders of magnitude.

Extraction

Those limp player figures are not for a lack of new content. Just this October, 343 reintroduced Halo 4's Extraction. Insiders reported the gametype was almost complete as early as January, but weaknesses with the engine hindered its introduction.^[1] I wouldn't blame you if you don't remember this mode. It's not a million miles from other "capture the points" exercises like Strongholds or Land Grab, but with one crucial difference. In Extraction, you don't need to stand inside an area to claim it. All you need to do is to reach the point and freeze for a few seconds as you activate your team's transmitter. From there, the zone's meter will fill. If it fills to the top, that's a point for your team, but if someone from the other team can run through the same long animation, they "convert" it, undoing your progress and starting the bar over for them.

As you're not bolted to the spot through the whole capture, you and your opponents can play a lot with distance. The closer you are to the point, the easier it is for enemies to find you, but the faster you can respond to attempted conversions. The further you wander, the slower your response time, but the stealthier you can be. Enemies can't wipe your squad by shooting a rocket into a capture circle, and you may be able to hide around the corner near a point, waiting until an opponent tries to assimilate it, then running up and back-smacking them. The tension is in finding the right amount of space between you and the device. Because you only win the point if you fill the meter all the way, you get clutch moments where you defend it just long enough to prevent the enemy from extracting or cry out in exasperation as red manages to skirt over the line.

Weapons and Equipment

The Bandit Evo

Nuanced changes to mechanics are most deeply felt by those fully immersed in them. So, it makes sense that the other subtle addition in Season 5 was a weapon for ranked competition. When the Bandit was unwrapped earlier this year, I pushed back on the characterisation of it as a new DMR. The Bandit and DMR are both steadily paced single-shot rifles. However, the DMR was a mid-long-range scoped weapon, while the Bandit was a roughly mid-range non-scoped firearm. The Bandit also had a mean kickback, whereas the DMR didn't. But the new Bandit Evo told the recoil to take a hike, threw a scope over its shoulder, and ended up a stone's throw from the DMR. It had to both drop the kickback and adopt the scope or be a walking contradiction: the scope makes it a precision weapon, but if it slammed into your chin every time you pulled the trigger, precision would be impossible.

The Evo replaces the BR75 Battle Rifle as the default implement for ranked matches, so let's measure them against each other. You need a sharper aim to kill with the Evo than you did with the BR. The Battle Rifle used a three-shot burst, meaning that even if you missed the first shot, if you corrected your aim as you unloaded, some of your projectiles would connect. But the Evo expels one bullet per button press, so you either line up your shot correctly or you don't. And the window for alignment is thinner when the Battle Rifle has a 2.5x scope, but the Evo only has a 1.6x. Yet, the range on the Evo is longer, and assuming you shoot perfectly, it kills about 20% faster than the Battle Rifle.

So, the Evo is a smaller needle to thread but with potentially higher damage per second, meaning it's made for the esports crowd. The kind of people who have YouTube channels about the Halo multiplayer are giddy about this pseudo-sniper. They see it as sorting the pros from the pretenders, and I feel totally different. Ranked takes the thin slice of gamers that is the Infinite following and subdivides it further to leave you with only the most elite combatants. Give one of those players a boomstick that can kill in two seconds and leave me with a gun that demands refined targeting, and I can't compete. It's annoying getting descoped over and over by someone with faster fingers. And this is coming from a user who ranked well into the Platinum League when the game launched.

I know everyone is hyped about a faster Halo, but one of the things I love about this series is that it often doesn't let one player kill another just because they spotted them first. It gives you time to react to being targeted and the space to dodge or return fire. There's meat to every encounter and the opportunity to reverse your fortunes. When another player can murder you in a couple of seconds, that capacity for response is lost. Sometimes, you're dead as soon as you know you're under attack. With its unforgiving aim, the Bandit Evo also biases itself towards mouse and keyboard players. You have to keep in mind the auto-aim on the gamepad was watered down in this edition. If you know Infinite's UI, you'll be asking, "Why don't you just filter out PC users?" but the menu option to except them is greyed out. It hasn't done anything from the day it was implemented. For what it's worth, if another player quits a ranked game, you can now leave behind them without incurring any punishment, and I like that.

The Repair Field

To pair with our new weapon, we have a new piece of equipment: the Repair Field. This is effectively the Regenerator from Halo 3, and the Regenerator from Halo 3 is good. The bonus here is that it can also put vehicles back together and, like some other gadgets, can be attached to automobiles, so you can create a mobile repair truck. As with other equipment that creates a temporary object, your opponent can benefit from a Repair Field as well as you can, so you have to place it strategically within your territory or keep the enemy team at bay while you heal up.

If you want a vehicle to be fully rejuvenated by a Field on the ground, you need to park it, which leaves it a sitting duck for Skewers and Rockets. But the Field doesn't spawn in enough locations for me to feel well-acquainted with it, and I never end up using it on a vehicle because the chance of encountering a vehicle and holding a Repair Field at the same time, outside of Big Team Battle, are about as good as winning the lottery. I could play Big Team Battle, but then, I could stick my hand on my oven hob. There's a difference between "can do" and "want to do".

Firefight

Background

If epic battles against massing armies are your cup of tea, you'll be interested in the arrival of Firefight. I'd recommend not responding to that interest. Firefight doesn't get an exclusive submenu, so all three of its difficulties were thrown atop the matchmaking stack, pushing other gametypes out of immediate view. But it's the mode itself, more than the buttons to start it, that's the liability. To date, Firefight's most egregious fault was that it left players climbing over each other to crack the skulls of the same AI. You could fire a shot at the head of a Grunt only to find a teammate had done the same milliseconds earlier, letting them steal the kill. You could plug the better part of an AR clip into a Hunter, only to have another Spartan finish it off and, at best, be credited with an assist.

The scramble for points meant that squad members broke off from the pack to bag the tags before anyone else could and would get themselves massacred doing so, docking one of your precious shared lives. There was confusion about whether other players were your allies or your competition, your angles or your devils. And to have your team perform brilliantly was often to have one conqueror cleaning house while the rest of you could do little more than stand and watch. The oldest incarnations of Firefight also had you trying to outplay your team to get control of weapons, like kids fighting over a doll.

I could give Halo 5 a sloppy wet kiss for disgorging unlimited weapons and vehicles while still awarding them meritocratically. As you played 5, you earned perishable cards that could requisition guns and other fun treats in Firefight. So, if you wanted a full squad, all with Rocket Launchers, overkilling Prometheans on sight, you could have that. If you and your friends wanted to touch the heavens with Wasps, soaring over the heads of aliens and firing missiles into their midst, you could have that, too. Mwah! Infinite finds a way to undo the progress of 5 and only stoke the problems of the mode overall.

The New Objective

It's not that 343 hasn't been thinking about how to improve on the mistakes of the past. They picked up on players' anger over allies wasting lives and found a middle ground between retracting penalties for dying and letting your team burn through all its supplies in the first round. If you croak, you'll respawn after a lengthy time delay or when a fellow supersoldier revives you. If all members of your team are dead at the same time, it's game over.

Reviving a player wins both the revived and revivist an Overshield. The shield ensures you can't be picked up to be crushed again immediately and incentivises teammates to get you back in the game when you're knocked down. But as players can be resurrected in mere seconds, 343 has to find a lose condition not based on lives expended. Every lose condition is effectively a failure to fulfil some objective, so here, the studio borrows an objective from another game mode: King of the Hill. In the 2023 Firefight, if you capture three of five hills, you win. If the Banished does, they win.

In addition to solving the lose condition problem, this also allows for rousing comebacks that weren't possible before. In previous Firefights, there was no formal "succeeding" status for foes to occupy, and they weren't winning until they'd won. If your team went from 7 lives to 3 lives, it wasn't so much that the enemy was in the black; there was just less cushioning for you to fall back on. And foes would present a threat, but often not in the immediate, as you had a long fuse to burn through before it was "Game Over".

In Infinite, you can see your foes surge into a hill, and it flash red. You know then and there that if you can't evict them within about a minute, they'll have a point for their team. The design gives an explicit location you don't want the Banished to occupy and quantifiable notches on their collective belt. There is always the possibility of them being a short way from something that's useful to them. When your team respawns and comes galavanting across a road or hill to reclaim a capture point, it's a turning of the tides you didn't get in classic Firefight.

What sort of asshole would have a bone to pick with this more dynamic design? That would be me. See, players are still running ahead to try and snap necks before the next soldier, but this time, when they do, they leave the hill behind to be stolen. It's a time-honoured tradition to have Halo matches where the words "Capture the Flag" appear on the screen, the announcer tells you to "Capture the Flag", a marker appears on the HUD to represent the flag, and teammates proceed to do anything but capture the flag. They don't need any more encouragement to ignore objectives, and being a responsible Firefight player can sometimes consist of loitering in the capture territory alone while your allies go out and have all the fun.

Killing Trouble

When you are staring at the enemy down the barrel of a gun, you probably can't whip out a Pistol and pop a chain of Grunt heads in a row. The ability to do that in times of old was premised on a certain amount of auto-aim that is not present in Infinite. Sometimes, even the ammunition to kill one Grunt can be elusive. The gun racks you saw in ODST and Reach do not make a return, and while the UI does highlight available weapons between rounds, it highlights all of them. It's really difficult to sort through a bunch of outlines of dropped rifles, trying to recognise a power tool, and the game will blithely direct you to empty weapon pads. Your favoured tools might not be available anyway. Historically, this mode left a lot of firepower sitting on the dirt when the dust cleared. Yet, in Infinite, guns ceded by enemies despawn relatively promptly, presumably because the Slipspace Engine can't accommodate many objects in memory. I find myself passing on those exhilarating power weapons because they go light on rounds, and you need to hang onto magazines like they're life preservers.

Rewards

If you can keep chewing through the combos, you might feel short-changed on your reward because the HUD no longer displays your score, and you don't have a points curve to surf. Your revenue does not change based on the ranks of the enemies you defeat. So, if you kill one of the basic, relatively flimsy Elites, you get 25 points. If you despatch a boss Elite with Active Camo, an Energy Sword, and a titanium-strong shield, you also get 25 points.

And there are no score multipliers from skulls. Firefight used to be this pit brawl where, if you could survive the hardships of modifiers like Catch, Tough Luck, and Black Eye, you'd collect a fat stack for defeating even just a few enemies. The mode's principal attraction was that it went big in scale: lots of belligerents, lots of firepower, and lots of points. Those points are a thing of the past. And if you have fond memories of jumping into a Warthog with a pal and forming a deadly duo, you should know that driver assists are now worth 0 score and no medals. Not only do you want players to feel like their rewards are just, but it's Game Design 101 that if you keep giving players the same reward, they become numb to it. Infinite isn't up to Game Design 101 yet.

But okay, we don't just turn to Firefight for short-term rewards, but those that live on past any single match. Previous drops had Firefight challenges to complete and medals to pin on your combat log. Obviously, the ease of netting, say, a killtacular in Firefight compared to PvP, means that 343 can't throw those medals in with your matchmaking service record, but you could have a Firefight-specific medal cabinet. Not that Infinite does. At the end of a match, all your commendations are effectively deleted.

You'll also notice that in previous Halos, you needed more kills to receive a streak medal in Firefight than its equivalent in PvP. It's logical when five kills in Firefight without dying doesn't mean as much as five kills in the Arena. Infinite keeps the same medal requirements across the board, which means that after you've arrived at a forty-kill chain, there are no more streak pips to earn until you die. Your reward for survival is fewer accolades. You also won't find challenges designed for Firefight in Halo Infinite. There are some general challenges that you can progress through by playing Firefight, but others you can't, and the game refuses to clarify which are which.

Maps and Engine

The trailer for this mode advertised nine "Firefight maps" to not be rewarded on, but don't be fooled: these are not new maps. They are a combination of player creations, repurposed Arena grounds, the House of Reckoning from the Campaign, and Deadlock from Big Team Battle. There are generally more Forge settings in the game's hoppers than there were six months ago, and they're never the prettiest environments. You might have expected to see more of 343's original Big Team Battle landscapes in Firefight, especially because that's where you get behind the wheel of the most earth-shattering vehicles. The Scorpions and Banshees were a rush to unleash on invaders in Halo 5.

It's possible the big team battlegrounds are too big for players to journey across expediently, but I also suspect they represent a performance threshold that Infinite can't surpass. In purely competitive BTB, you have dirty textures and choppy vehicle animations, so I doubt that these sandboxes could host Phantoms full of enemies and remain stable. Even some maps designed for 4 vs. 4 matches, like Critical Dewpoint, have choking framerates, and while Firefight was nowhere near as rickety at launch as, say, Last Spartan Standing, it's subject to that perennial Infinite jank. You don't get points for killing the Phantom gunner, there's a gap between getting the final point and the match concluding that throws off the pacing, I've seen enemies slide out of a dropship without animating, etc.

Chances are the stuttering technicalities and long lead time to splice in features are consequences of an engine that wasn't engineered enough. This would be why 343 wants to adapt Infinite to Unreal, although there's no word on how that's going.^[1] Firefight's exceptional reputation in previous Halo games was well-deserved; it's a shame to see it in this ramshackle state. I can't give you a reason to play Infinite's Firefight when the Master Chief Collection's is sitting right there.

I think the community can be too quick to forward the MCC as an alternative to Infinite. They're not the same thing: the most recent Halo is faster, lighter, and looser, with a cut-back weapon cabinet. But they are both Halo, and there's less of a difference between the Firefights than there is between the Arenas. Your Spartan opponents in Infinite are flightier than those in the earlier entries and have different weapons and equipment than were available to them from 5 backwards. Your Banished opponents carry a few new armaments, but many are still rocking Plasma Pistols and Needlers, and a Grunt is still a Grunt, a Brute is still a Brute. So, why not just fight Grunts and Brutes in ODST or Reach, where challenges are tailored for it, and reward is proportional to effort?

Forge

Even Infinite's Forge is in partial competition with Firefight, as players can now architect pseudo-Campaign missions by placing enemies in maps. You can go as far as writing the AI's logic in node graphs. And there are hundreds more models to place in the environments. The Forge maps might not be the most lustrous gems in the window, but 343 is much better at giving players the tools to build battles than they are at making their own. This could be because new maps and modes require the studio to develop the base assets and then the structure around them. Whereas, Forge updates usually involve only shipping the player the assets or building a structure around those that already exist in the Campaign.

Cosmetics

Forge, Firefight, the Bandit Evo, and the Repair Field are all produce of either Season 5 or the annual Christmas update. The cosmetics from the fifth season are an extrapolation of those from the fourth season, and I appreciate the continuity. Where the armour from the "Infection" Battle Pass were hazmat suits that sealed out the Flood, the "Reckoning's" body horror items suggest you've lost the struggle. Cosmetics run from a patch of rotten flesh covering your knee to a swollen biomass that subsumes your entire form. They are refreshing because, unlike previous pieces, they are organic, not synthetic, and can redraw your Spartan's silhouette.

There are also changes to the Battle Pass as a value proposition, which get a little into the weeds, but the headline is that Battle Passes now compress the same unlocks that you would have gotten in 100 tiers into 50 tiers. It's only sensible when people aren't spending the amount of time in the game 343 expected them to be. You're also, for the first time, unlocking helmets that screw onto any "rig". But most armour pieces still aren't outfit agnostic, and it's still not like you can skin any of the non-UNSC guns.

Miscellanea

In the last few months, 343 has been further let down from the outside. The Xbox 360 Halos let you store screenshots on their native servers. The Halos on the One, Series S, and Series X don't, but what's the harm? You can save captures permanently on the Xbox servers. Or you could until Microsoft started deleting every screenshot or video older than 90 days. It's a stinging insult to all the fans who create and share media on the service.

It might just be me, but I've also run into more hate speech and high-latency matches recently. I saw a user with a slur written in their name in plaintext that the filter didn't catch. One had an explicitly racist gamertag, and when I reported them to Microsoft, I was told they didn't warrant moderation. There's also nowhere you can view your reports and their status. As for the ping, I want to reiterate that connections are lightyears ahead of where they were during the game's first year, but networking improvement is ongoing.

Conclusion

I hope you don't think I'm ragging on Halo Infinite for the sake of it. I've praised the game in previous blogs, and even in the last six months, there were bright spots. But where other studios started with nothing and had to graft for every fan they made, Infinite was a game that launched with a city worth of people ready to play just based on the Halo name. It then squandered every bit of that goodwill until only a tiny coterie within the fandom remained. So far, Season 4 has been the high point for the shooter, and that was a broken, unfinished warping of what Halo should be. Since then, it's all been downhill. Thanks for reading.

Notes

1. Microsoft Studio Behind Halo Faces a Reboot on Years of Turmoil by Jason Schreier (January 31, 2023), Bloomberg.

All other sources linked at relevant points in article.