Halo Infinite‘s progression through its Battle Pass is solely limited to daily and weekly challenges. Unlike other online multiplayer games, which typically complement these challenges with performance-based XP, in Halo Infinite players can only level up if they complete certain challenges. Currently, this is not only grinding in-game progression to a halt, but it’s also actively pushing players away from its objective-based gameplay. A major rethinking of this system is needed, and it’s needed fast.
Why Halo Infinite’s progression system needs fixing
Even if you don’t care about cosmetics, Halo Infinite’s bizarre progression system will negatively impact your experience. When players are given challenges that instruct them to kill enemies with certain weapons, you can bet that they’ll choose not to play the objective. Instead, they’ll be bouncing around the arena trying to get 15 kills with the pistol, or whatever other arbitrary objective they’ve been assigned.
This has its place in other multiplayer games. In Fortnite — the flag-bearer for live service games of this ilk — players earn XP for wins, losses, and general performance alongside their challenges. This ensures that while you may have one eye on your dailies and weeklies, you’re also incentivized to perform well in-game. But in Halo Infinite, if your active challenges don’t ask you to win the match type you’re currently playing, there’s no real reward for winning aside from a personal sense of satisfaction. For many, this isn’t enough.
343 Industries’ Community Manager John Junyszek has responded to criticisms of Halo Infinite’s progression system, saying that the developer will be adding “Play 1 Game” challenges, will speed up the weekly challenges, and will double the duration of double XP boosts:
We'll also be adjusting, fixing bugs with, and removing some Weekly Challenges based on your feedback. These tunings to challenge difficulty will help you progress through Weekly Challenges faster and thus directly speed up your progress through the Battle Pass.
— John Junyszek (@Unyshek) November 18, 2021
However, this still doesn’t address the core issue: challenge-based progression sucks. Even if these processes are sped up and players can work through their challenges faster, that still doesn’t solve the problem that players are only rewarded for completing them. Win, lose, play the objective — it doesn’t matter if such accomplishments don’t help you complete an active challenge.
That Halo Infinite doesn’t give you XP for winning, losing, playing the objective, or getting kills is baffling and comes across as a cynical way to convince players to fork out cash to progress. Currently, I have seven hours of playtime and, without purchasing a level up, I’m on level 5 of the Battle Pass. Of course, there’s a Battle Pass bundle that automatically unlocks a number of levels right off the bat, along with the ability to purchase individual level-ups, too.
Now, I’m all for victory being a reward in and of itself, but as someone who doesn’t care about completing inane challenges, it’s deflating to win a match and not have anything to show for it. It doesn’t help that Halo Infinite is also thrifty with the number of rewards it distributes, but this wouldn’t be an issue if every player — not just those completing challenges — could progress relatively quickly through them.
But for 343 Industries, launching Halo Infinite with challenge-only progression presents further issues. For one, the game’s first multiplayer season will last all the way until May 2022. That’s a huge length of time when you consider other live service games’ seasons typically last 9–10 weeks. While the Battle Pass has a whopping 100 levels, with over six months to go until the second season, it’s likely that many players will complete it ahead of schedule if the speed of progression is dramatically increased.
The reason for Infinite’s lengthy first season is understandable, with its Head of Creative Joseph Staten explaining in a blog post: “We made the decision to extend Season 1 to give ourselves more time to ensure Season 2 meets our high-quality bar and so we can finish development for Season 2 in a healthy and sustainable way for our team.”
However, the combination of its highly criticized Battle Pass, a playerbase that wants to be rewarded for more than just completing challenges, and an elongated first season is shaping up to be a headache for 343 Industries, and one that could have been avoided by not barreling so heavily into the live service model over a traditional multiplayer progression system. Hopefully, a future update will resolve these issues, as the only ‘Infinite’ thing about Halo’s multiplayer experience so far is the length of time it takes to get to level 6.
