This update is really long. I was going to try and copy paste more sections but better easier for people just to read for themselves.
Preview date: sep 23-26 (4v4 focus) and sep 30 - Oct 3 (12v12 BTB focus). More specifics to come on Wednesday.
<p>Welcome, one and all, to our latest edition of Inside Infinite! Every month we sit down with the teams hard at work on Halo Infinite to learn more about contributions to the next chapter of Halo, gain insight about their process, and understand their goals on the road to our December 8...
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When approaching Halo Infinite’s version of Big Team Battle, what were some of your most crucial design pillars?
Andrew Witts: The team created the pillars for Big Team Battle after a long meeting where we invited each MP team member to share their favorite moments from past BTB experiences. After doing that we bucketed all those experiences which ultimately became our design pillars:
•
Embrace the Spartan Battle Fantasy – We want players to really feel like they are within a Spartan unit pushing through the battlefield and capturing objectives as a team. That’s why we’ve invested in things like Pelican Drops, Commander mode VO, Weapon Pods falling from the sky to resupply the field and a few more dynamic elements – we wanted it to feel like an active battle inside the Halo universe. Additionally, we wanted maps to feel like they were a part of an iconic battle within the Halo universe.
• Empower Player Types to Thrive – There are many different types of players in the Halo ecosystem. Some players are pilots, others are slayers or objective hunters, but we wanted all of them to work together in this BTB experience. Fernando has a fantastic phrase that sums up this pillar well:
Make sure everyone can feel like a hero in any match.
• Unleash the Halo Infinite Sandbox – This pillar kind of speaks for itself. We felt like the “big” in BTB was not just the number of players in the match or the size of the maps but the number of options at players’ disposal. All the toys are available in this space for maximum fun.
When the team set out to design the new Big Team Battle experience for Halo Infinite, how did you approach drawing inspiration from the past vs. injecting something new? Were there specific elements you knew HAD to be there from the past?
Tom French: A lot of the discussion came from talking about our favorite past BTB experiences, targeting a set of modes that aligned with our goals, and figuring out any new twists that would partner with the gameplay to give us our own stamp on a fan favorite.
Andrew Witts: When starting to develop BTB, we started by having the Multiplayer Team share memorable stories that they have had in past Big Team experiences in Halo. We talked a lot about how those stories made us feel as players. What more did we want from those stories? What more would we want out of the BTB experience that would make those stories even better? These are all the questions we asked each other to come up with the feature list for BTB. So we didn’t key into specific features as much as we tried to key into
experiences that were possible in BTBs of the past.
As you set out to evolve Big Team Battle, what aspects did you specifically see as areas to improve upon and make ‘new’?
Fernando Reyes Medina: We are all really big fans of legacy BTB so we were careful not to mess with what isn’t broken. We wanted a BTB experience that feels classic and modern at the same time. An opportunity I saw to improve Classic BTB was to make sure that the mode rules and balance consider the increased player count and the amazing new maps that level designers made for
Halo Infinite. This allowed us to create an exciting pace throughout a BTB match, which, combined with the awesome new toys in our sandbox, makes the perfect stage so players can play out memorable moments with their friends.
Patrick Wren: We took a similar philosophy in how we approached BTB as we did with Arena, but turned it up to 11. There is the core experience of spawning at your base, jumping into vehicles, and going out into the world, but we looked at how we could spice it up. Tanks for example, especially the Scorpion, are extremely powerful vehicles that would tend to dominate matches in previous Halo games. We looked at how we could make them an amazing moment in a match that really punctuates their power.
Here are all the ways you’ll be able to acquire customization content in
Halo Infinite at launch:
- Weekly Ultimate Rewards
- Seasonal Battle Pass rewards (both free and premium tracks)
- Fracture Events - i.e. the “Yoroi” / Samurai armor
- Special or Seasonal Events - i.e. a special nameplate commemorating a real-world event, earning a Unicorn nameplate during a 343 Playdate, etc.
- Partnership and promotional items - i.e. Mega Construx codes or Rockstar Energy Drinks
- Skill Ranks – achieving a specific Skill ranking/tier for a season will award a unique cosmetic itemhttps://www.halowaypoint.com/en-us/news/inside-infinite-september-2021#_msocom_14
- Xbox Game Pass Ultimate Perks
- In- game store purchases
- Halo Infinite Campaign - some unique Multiplayer cosmetics are rewarded for various accomplishments within the Campaign
It feels like just yesterday we were battling against Bots during our first multiplayer tech preview.
Now, as launch approaches, it’s time to look forward to our second - and even bigger - tech preview. This weekend (September 23-26) and next weekend (September 30 - October 3), we’ll be taking things up a notch and testing out full-blown multiplayer. Yes, you read that correctly, we’re doing back-to-back weekends of Halo Infinite flights.
The first weekend will focus on the Arena (4v4) gameplay experience, and the second weekend is when Big Team Battle (12v12) will come online. We’ll dive into a lot of the specifics in a separate blog on Wednesday, but for now let’s touch on the high-level areas such as the goals, available content, and the schedule.