It hasn’t been easy for Halo to make the switch to a live service. Fans have complained about server reliability and map availability, but one issue—XP rewards and challenges—has persisted. The “Match XP Beta” is anticipated to debut with the game’s Winter Update on November 8, according to a recent blog post from 343 Industries.
Halo Infinite includes a combat pass that you advance through using XP, similar to many other live service games. However, unlike many live service games, Infinite doesn’t give out a lot of XP for finishing games, and there aren’t many challenges that appear to reward competent performance in a battle. Challenges, which are restricted to particular game-mode playlists, frequently seem arbitrary, unnecessarily demanding, and in some circumstances may even reward subpar play. At the moment, a game’s conclusion is unaffected by winning, accruing killing sprees, or keeping a high K/D ratio. The new system, however, will put more of an emphasis on winning matches than on individual player or team performance, with additional XP boosts coming through various weapon and mode-specific challenges.
The new system will remain in beta, as stated in the developer’s blog update, as the team plans to “watch the values for each award category, changing them as we move forward with this new model.”
In the new “Match XP” system, XP prizes are based on finishing matches as well as extra sums to represent exceptional performance, “such being on the winning team, your end-of-match placing, and more.” However, neither the screenshot offered by 343, nor the blog itself, show that medals for killing sprees, multikills, or even more recent ones like “Hold This” (rewarded for a kill after dropping your weapon), are taken into account.
Those who detested the former challenge system (I don’t blame you) should still have something to look forward to in the Winter Update next week, though it remains to be seen whether the new system will satisfy the larger Halo community. For the Ultimate Weekly challenge, 343 is decreasing the threshold from 20 challenges to only 10, and each challenge will be “playlist agnostic” (thank the Rings!). Players shouldn’t have to choose between advancement and having fun, the blog post reads. “Mode-specific Challenges were found to be detrimental to playing with friends.” Oh, I’m not kidding.
