Halo Infinite Season Two Out May 3 On Xbox, PC
For a while now, the prevailing narrative around Halo Infinite is that interest in the game, once confidently perched at the summit of Mt. First-Person Shooter, has fallen off a precipice. But that stands poised to change when season two, “Lone Wolves,” rolls around on May 3. Folks, it sounds (and looks) dope AF.
Halo Infinite, first released last November for Xbox and PC, is the first game in the series to feature a free-to-play model. Like many games with a similar model, it’s built around a seasonal framework. Players have roundly praised Infinite’s fundamentals—the guns, the movement, the heavy dose of nostalgia—but criticized everything from pricey cosmetics to a general lack of new, updated content. (The game’s splashy special event, Fracture: Tenrai, repeated five times throughout Halo Infinite’s first season, with another occurrence planned for later this month.) For its part, developer 343 Industries instituted changes, like lower prices for cosmetics, throughout the first season.
Developer 343 Industries teased Infinite’s second season, “Lone Wolves,” in an exciting if vanishingly brief trailer, with a sizzle reel of new maps, cosmetics, and heavy-handed lines of dialogue (“We always have room for another wolf.”). That trailer is in addition to a series of blog posts from the past few weeks outlining the granular changes.
There’s a lot to like. Also, you can earn $10.
Okay, not technically, but you could, in theory, buy one premium battle pass and never have to buy another. In January, 343 announced that players could earn credits—in-game currency spent on Halo’s microtransactions that roughly maps out to $1 for 100—through the mere act of playing but didn’t get into the weeds. Now, we know how it works.
Those who buy the premium battle pass for season two (battle passes cost 1,000 credits) can earn 1,000 credits over the course of the pass. You could conceivably then bank those 1,000 credits, spend them on the premium battle pass for season three, earn 1,000 credits from that pass, bank them for season four, and so on. Of course, that assumption is entirely contingent on three factors. Premium battle passes of future seasons would need to cost 1,000 credits. You’d need to be able to earn 1,000 credits from those premium passes. (Representatives for 343 Industries did not respond to a request for comment in time for publication.) And you’d need to have the time, patience, and energy to stick through the entirety of said battle passes.
But “free money” isn’t the only thing worth writing home about, as Infinite is getting a slew of new additions next month, including two new maps.
A huge sticking point for players was how Halo Infinite launched with ten maps—a fine enough number on paper, unless you scrutinize the circumstances. One of the initial maps, Behemoth, was so loathed by the community that 343 Industries eventually removed it from ranked playlists. Another one, Launch Site, is what experts describe as “just the fuckin’ worst.” And three of those maps were relegated to the large-scale Big Team Battle playlist, which spent months languishing with minimal functionality. Effectively, this meant Halo Infinite players were relegated to five maps that were actually reliably fun.
Arena playlists will get Catalyst, a small-scale map that looks to be set on a Forerunner structure of sorts. Meanwhile, Big Team Battle—which is functional now!—is getting a new map called Breaker. The season two trailer shows some lava. In any case, if 343 continues to add two additional maps every season, that rate will put Halo Infinite on track to have the same total number of maps as prior Halo games. There’s a deep well to draw on, too; this is the first Halo under 343’s purview that hasn’t yet featured remade versions of popular maps from previous games. (My fingers are crossed for Halo 4’s Haven.)
Halo Infinite will see a bunch of new playlists, too. King of the Hill, the longtime mode in which players battle over control of a small space—and the one I personally haven’t shut up about wanting for the past six months—will be available from the start of the season in “multiple playlists.” As will Attrition, the tense, team-based deathmatch that was playable for a few weeks in January. (Called it.) When it comes back, you’ll no longer be frozen in place for a few seconds after you’re revived by a teammate.
More curious is the Last Spartan Standing mode, which is less of a known quantity than King of the Hill (been around for ages) or Attrition (has literally been playable in Infinite already). The official line is that it’s a “free-for-all elimination mode,” though details, like its release date or even a rundown of how it works, aren’t available. Data-miners believe it’ll be a twist on the…