Halo Infinite update with Slayer, SWAT playlists may be its biggest yet
When Halo Infinite's multiplayer launched last month, fans immediately took note of the small selection of playlists. Addressing complaints about the limited selection, 343 Industries quickly said that it was working on new playlists for the game, eventually giving us a release window for those playlists as well. Fast forward to today and we not only have confirmation of when new playlists are coming but also of what they'll include.
New playlists include Slayer, SWAT, and more
As it stands, playing a specific mode in Halo Infinite is not easy. Halo Infinite's multiplayer is currently split into four different playlists: Quick Play, Big Team Battle, Bot Bootcamp, and Ranked. Each of those playlists include a variety of modes. For instance, the Quick Play playlist offers Slayer, Capture the Flag, One-Flag CTF, Oddball, and Stronghold.
If you log into Halo Infinite looking to play a Slayer match – which is unquestionably Halo's most popular mode – you have to queue for one of those playlists and hope you get lucky. When you add to the fact that there are challenges for specific modes like Stronghold or Oddball, it can be even more frustrating to queue into a playlist that only has a chance of getting you in one of those games.
To fix this, 343 Industries said that it would be rolling out new playlists by the end of the year. In an update published to the Halo subreddit over the weekend, 343 shared some more concrete details, announcing that dedicated playlists for Slayer, Fiesta, Free-for-all (FFA), and Tactical Slayer (SWAT) are being added in this week's update. That update is slated to go live tomorrow, which is Tuesday, December 14th.
343 gives the people what they want
One of the most frequent requests we've seen for Halo Infinite's multiplayer is the addition of a Slayer-only playlist. For those who have never played Halo before, Slayer is the game's standard deathmatch mode. In Slayer, the first team to 50 kills (100 kills in Big Team Battle Slayer) wins, making it a straightforward game mode free of any auxiliary objectives.
To start, 343 Industries says that the Slayer playlist will only include a "basic Slayer offering," but more variants on the basic Slayer formula will be added in future updates. Unfortunately, for now, we have no clue what those updates are.
In that same Reddit post, 343 said that it's tweaking how challenges work in this update. Some "particularly frustrating mode-specific" challenges are being outright removed from the game with this update, while others will have their requirements reduced. Once these changes have been implemented, 343 says that it should be easier to complete weekly challenges and unlock those weekly rewards.
All in all, these seem like very good changes for Halo Infinite. There's no doubt that the dedicated Slayer playlist is something players have been waiting for since launch, and the fact that we're getting additional modes like SWAT, Fiesta, and FFA is just icing on the cake. Look for this update to land tomorrow, but while we wait for it to arrive, be sure to check out SlashGear's full review of Halo Infinite.