For the past month, connectivity issues have plagued Halo Infinite’s Big Team Battle Mode, making it difficult to play at best and utterly impossible to enter at worst. 343i issued a fix on January 19th, but it seemed to do little if anything to solve the problem. The company will be putting out another hot fix on February 3 (tomorrow), which it hopes will allow players to finally enjoy the mode again.

According to the update on Halo Waypoint, the development team was able to run a successful internal playtest and has sent the new build for certification. If it passes, then their estimate was that the fix would ship publicly on the 3rd. Encouraging news to be sure, but we won’t know if it scales globally until the fix is actually released. As someone who wants to see Halo Infinite bring out the full potential seen in its moment-to-moment gameplay, all I can say is that I hope it works.

Beyond this though, it’s amazing to me that a mode that’s been standard to the series since at least Halo 3 (if not Halo 2) had this much difficulty being implemented in Halo Infinite. Heck, 343i has it running just fine in both Halo 5 and MCC, so what exactly did they do differently here? This all started when they started tweaking the challenge system, so my feeling is that those challenges were/are much more heavily interwoven into the game than any of us first suspected.

This leaves me thinking two things: 1 – Halo Infinite needed more time in the oven, and 2 – 343/Microsoft were more interested in making a digital goods platform than they were a functional game (notice that the only thing that’s worked fine throughout was the cash shop). I want this game to be better, I do. I just can’t see myself ever paying a dime for it. We can’t keep rewarding these sorts of practices.

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How do you feel about Halo Infinite? Will you continue playing? Do you see any issues with it?

Image fromimage from Halo Waypoint