Welcome back! This is a bonus post based on the battle pass series I did. If you haven’t read it yet, you can start it HERE. For this month’s post, I’m going to be taking a look at the event structure for Halo Infinite. They’ve done a few things which I think are particularly clever and interesting, then they’ve done some things which I find myself asking WHY? We’ll cover both today!
How do Live Events work in Halo Infinite?
Halo’s event system builds off the back of their battle pass system. Similar to the battle pass’s loop, the event loop looks like this:
Each event has thirty rewards available to earn, laid out similarly to how the battle pass lays out their rewards.
The primary differences between them are how you earn progress and that there is no paid track. In the normal battle pass, the player can earn progress via completing any daily or weekly challenges. For the event pass, the player must complete specific challenges designated by an event tag on the left of the weekly challenge.
When a player completes an event challenge, they get XP towards their normal battle pass and unlock a level (1:1 of event level to weekly challenge) in the event pass.
Where this gets interesting is from a balance perspective. You’ll notice in the image above that the event has three different weeks in which it runs. In most games, events only run for a week or a continuous month. They’re not broken up because this causes confusion in the player base. But Halo has decided to break the event up. Why do you think they did this?
My running theory is to extend content. We know that Halo was light on content when it was first released, so they needed something to help retain players. Something to look forward to that isn’t as intensive to polish as Co-Op. They already had the rewards for this event ready to go, but likely didn’t have enough to keep the pace up for future events. So, they instead split one up into three. To take it a step further, it is possible they only released a max of ten event weekly challenges per event. This would limit the player’s progression through the event. Thus players couldn't blast through all the content in one week. And, since the weeklies are “random” as to which new one the player gets, it’d be super easy to keep them out of rotation. While I don’t agree with this approach as a player, I understand the logic behind it as a developer. I’ve had to face similar problems in my time, and came up with similar solutions.
That’s it for this series! I hope you enjoyed it. I know I did. If you have any suggestions for what’s next, shoot me a message. I’ve been eyeballing Destiny and Elden Ring…. Maybe I’ll do something involving those.
Until next time,
Scott
That’s it for this post! If you like my work and want to support my caffeine addiction, please consider donating to my Ko-Fi.
Disclaimer: All thoughts/comments are my own and in no way represent the viewpoint of Skydance Interactive.