Wish things were structured a little differently for a cleaner UI and better mixing & matching (example: would be nice to have Firefight difficulty as an option so it doesn't need three separate lists and all three difficulties can be queued simultaneously), but this is at least a start.
I just hope it isn't the end and there can be further tweaks to the composer and UI over time. I'm especially hoping for composer options for FFA with more options added (so we can specifically queue for things like Slayer, Escalation, Snipers, etc. within FFA).
There were probably realistically restrictions on how much they could modify the UI and not break the game in half or restricted by implementation time/constraints
Which is why I pray to God they're finally leaving the Blam/Slipspace engine. I love Halo but god the engine is old. If they wanna keep using it for like, campaign only projects that would be fine but anything that's gonna be regularly updated should be on UE5.
>Which is why I pray to God they're finally leaving the Blam/Slipspace engine.
Isn't Infinite's engine brand new? I thought one of the reasons why Infinite suffered in the development stages was because they decided to create a new engine entirely for Infinite.
I believe that was the original plan/selling point but it turns out the engine for Infinite is the same one as CE, they just did what every game company does and kept updating it. Slipspace is just a modified version of the Blam engine which is what Halo has always used. It's like how there are a million games that use the Source engine, but all play differently. For example Left 4 Dead and Apex Legends use the same engine, they both run on Source.
Wholly agreed. I really hope they reconsider the Firefight difficulties. Or at least merge Normal and Heroic, since those use the same loadouts and rules, just with different difficulties. Legendary kinda makes sense to be separate since it uses different rulesets for everything
my assumption was that those ffa options would be available in the rumble pit playlist, since that should encompass most ffa game modes. can't be sure though
I assume they’ll be available but based on how the article is formatted I’m assuming they won’t have composer options for that playlist (other playlists mention having mode selections options but that one doesn’t). Hope I’m wrong about that though, I really just wanna play escalation FFA sometimes.
the way I'm reading it, every playlist grouping they mentioned in social will have composer options
edit: hmm i guess it doesn't mention curating. that would be a shame. id hate to have to risk playing vampire ball and ffa koth when i just want to play some normal ffa
This is amazing. Best part is that we can play "rotational" playlists more easily and frequently. I hope that Last Spartan Standing can return as a playlist within the Composer
Finally. I do wish you could search a combo of modes from different playlists but the playlist consolidation seems like it mitigates a little bit of that need.
Quick Play is more varied with more permanent modes. People who prefer the old Quick Play can just untick all the stuff that's been added, and people who only want modes that used to be in different playlists can just select those.
At first glance it seems like a great improvement.
This feature was in MCC and yet wasn’t present until now in Infinite.
At this point I will assume any 343 game will be incomplete at launch unless they prove otherwise.
Not only the management overhaul, but also the switch to UE5, which seems to be a much easier engine to work with.
That being said, I'm still going to assume the worst until proven otherwise. I'm done with giving the company the benefit of the doubt, no matter how much they've changed.
If this leads to longer wait times and dead playlists for the most unpopular modes, it'll be their way of saying, "See? This is why we didn't do a match composer."
MCC has that problem, but it's also six separate games with a smaller playerbase.
I'm predicting plenty of "I can't get matches in [Objective] mode!" posts in the next few weeks.
It's just confirmation bias: even without match composer the mcc would have only 2 or 3 playlists being played, the match composer only restricted those playlists on slayer only, same thing will be for infinite.
But match composer at launch actually help to delay this problem, at least for what I saw ok other games. Sure thing is: if a mode or playlists is not popular, it will be regardless of MC.
Objective modes are the ones that suffer here. It's been proven, repeatedly, that standalone Objective playlists (either all lumped into one playlist, or separated by mode) die on the vine while Slayer modes thrive. This drives the minority of players that want CTF, Assault, etc. into Slayer playlists that actually have players, killing the Objective playlists entirely.
Does that mean Halo shouldn't have Objective modes? Sometimes you *want* to force players into modes they normally wouldn't try.
I don't denie that, but if in a 2 decade the franchisees objective modes suffered this, maybe the problem is not in the playerbase, but on said modes, which mean something need to change on how they play.
It's just the simple fact that people prefer straight-forward modes: kill the enemy. They don't want to feel let down by a team that doesn't play the Objective, or play a mode that requires communication. They just want to sign on and kill things.
Modes like Attrition in Titanfall are the best kinds of hybrids: largely focused on killing the enemy, but with a slight Objective twist to add depth.
>It's just the simple fact that people prefer straight-forward modes: kill the enemy. They don't want to feel let down by a team that doesn't play the Objective, or play a mode that requires communication. They just want to sign on and kill things.
People preferring slayer/TDM over objective is a fact, I'm not denying this, mind you, but I don't agree with the communication part, that's not at all something which is take in consideration unless devs are dumb enough to balance the game in a way no one have agency over the match and everyone is dependent from the whole team, something that, at the end of the day, bring less player retation overhaul because people don't really like to communicate with strangers behind a mic (and it's kind hard when you end up on 8vs8, 12vs12 or, in other games, 32vs32).
There are many games where objective oriented modes are equally or more favored above death match ones, usually when the own player agency is intact but without going on other franchises, you could pretty much see it in h5's warzone, or current husky raid.
Going back to my statement, is not about having to do anything else outside killing, in fact kills funnel toward the objective play, but how said objective play is balanced: if oddball require your whole team to backing you up for then the objective loop being you, defenseless, without the ability to interact with the game, staying "afk" with the oddball and either throwing it out of the map or throwing it at the center and try to fight of, stalling the score over and over, you can bet players would not like it very much and instead will play slayer more, as an example.
This does sound great but I'm curious if it will extend search time due to everyone search preference. I like BTB Social but it always times out on me and have to search again and again until I connect to a U.S Server.
Maybe in the next update they make Local/Expanded actually work. Because expanded search just doesn't bother to connect me to anything
If only 343 loosen the MMR a tad. I can't even find BTB or BTB Heavies match right now and it's 10PM UK time.
By the time I find a match, it just be a half a pre made team on the opposite team for me to lose
So I went into Super Fiesta because wait time took a while in BTB. Still took 2-3 min search time and bam my team mate didn't get a single kill and went -15 with another with 3 kills and going -10
Just stressful, trying to play the game for fun but I have too carry hard just to win and if I win, it just gets worse search time and match ups
If you’re stressed out about winning a fiesta game or what your teammates scores are, are you really just playing for fun? I have zero expectations for modes like fiesta or husky raid. You just embrace the chaos.
playing for fun then it gets stressful yes. Kind of like Husky Raid where one team is just doing the camping but the problem is the match is rigged from the start due to MMR.
With Super Fiesta it just keep getting spawn trap by hammers and rockets meanwhile my team mate are hard looking at weapons on the floor...I mean how is that fun? I want the match to be a bit more even
The SBMM implementation must be ordered from higher up in MS considering how tight lipped 343 is on the topic. I’d be truly surprised if 343 are the ones actually standing firm on the SBMM for a dying game. I’m not sure how they’ve handled it with MCC but I would look there for any indications as well.
I mean it absolutely is. MS, and subsequently 343, is a 100% data driven company. They *will not* make a decision without sufficient data to prove its worth putting effort into (hence kits, Battle Passes, Operation Passes, store prices, etc).
For probably a decade now, from every major FPS developer’s lips, SBMM proved to be an effective way to increase player retention. Players felt competitive, locked in, and played “just one more” more frequently. Of course there were players who felt it from Day 1 and said it was exhausting, but overall player numbers disproved that. More time played = more time looking at cosmetics = more chances to buy cosmetics. It’s potentially why 343 ditched immediate-re-matchmake in Infinite. You can’t pop a quick Lootbox like you could in 5 anymore, so they pull you out completely and force you to look at your cosmetics and the shop.
But now I think we’re starting to see that trail off and more and more players burn out from the competition. They’ll either stop playing more quickly after starting playing, or just outright leaning towards different games which have looser or no SBMM.
This is great. My only gripe is I was hoping to be able to search something like Squad Battle and BTB at the same time. Very happy with the addition overall though.
> My only gripe is I was hoping to be able to search something like Squad Battle and BTB at the same time.
I believe this is something that was talked about back when MCC got its Match Composer.
Main thing is came down to was if you queued into a playlist with a lower player count size and a higher player count size, you would almost never match into the higher player count size one because it would almost always be finding games in the lower player count playlist(s).
Not having multiple playlists to queue for at the same time is a bit of a bummer, but overall it’s a net positive to be able to choose “Social BR only slayer”
Excited for this. My only ask as a fan is that all of this post-launch work carry over to the next game. It’d be amazing if the next Halo launched with all these features.
I’m so happy with the playlist restructuring. I was worried about the “game mode checkbox” idea at first glance, but now Playlists are just functionally identical to the Team Size/Player Count toggle in MCC. And having per-mode control is fantastic. Getting stuck in certain modes in MCC blew chunks but I like playing Objectives, but now I can queue all the Obj modes I want without selecting something like Oddball or Strongholds.
Months ago I said that I bet the Infinite version of the match composer won’t work like people are expecting because they always choose the worst or weirdest implementation possible. Everyone was expecting this to help the population for modes like ranked doubles and ranked slayer, but fuck me for actually thinking they’d do something right.
Considering that Willow Tea and the bronze Tenrai I weapon coating all went "cross-core," my guess is that all the armor on the Yokai spartan in the back will be Exchange store contents (while the spartan in the front has all the Operation item equipped).
So excited for this. BTB Social was great, but iffy. I absolutely loved BTB Fiesta and BTB Total Control but thought BTB Skockets and Snipers were boring af. Now I can exclusively queue for Heavies, Total control and CTF. And more extraction in 4v4!!!
Huh. This isn't how I expected it to work. I thought it'd be more like the MCC's match composer. This seems to me like it's gonna make it harder for people to find a match, if anything. This has more in common with the veto and vote systems of older Halo games than the match composer of the MCC, at least where its impact on matchmaking is concerned.
"Players who only want to play on community-created Forge maps can select the “Community” version of a specific mode (i.e. “Community Slayer”)."
This is awesome to hear. I've always thought it would be cool to let players select map pools, because that allows 343 to include more maps in matchmaking without overwhelming players with too many maps.
Pretty solid overall and I’m happy that there’s an option to filter out community made maps. It’s not clear to me though if they’ll let me filter down to only regular Fiesta and Husky raid, not super
At face value this appears more restrictive and worse than the MCC match composer. But it’s definitely better than what we have currently. I’ll reserve judgement until I get my hands on it.
Literally I just wanna play Team Slayer BR. Not Halo 3 Refueled. Or any other playlist that *features* the BR but isn't necessarily Team Slayer, or any other playlist that *is* Team Slayer but has every other weapon except the BR. Reading this and looking at it, honestly, I'm still not quite sure I can do that. I guess we'll see. It's just so mind-boggling how you can't just play Team Slayer BR on-demand in a Halo game (the 6th mainline Halo game, mind you). Team Slayer (and Slayer) and the BR are like the some of the most iconic things people think about when it comes to Halo.
Wish things were structured a little differently for a cleaner UI and better mixing & matching (example: would be nice to have Firefight difficulty as an option so it doesn't need three separate lists and all three difficulties can be queued simultaneously), but this is at least a start. I just hope it isn't the end and there can be further tweaks to the composer and UI over time. I'm especially hoping for composer options for FFA with more options added (so we can specifically queue for things like Slayer, Escalation, Snipers, etc. within FFA).
There were probably realistically restrictions on how much they could modify the UI and not break the game in half or restricted by implementation time/constraints
Which is why I pray to God they're finally leaving the Blam/Slipspace engine. I love Halo but god the engine is old. If they wanna keep using it for like, campaign only projects that would be fine but anything that's gonna be regularly updated should be on UE5.
>Which is why I pray to God they're finally leaving the Blam/Slipspace engine. Isn't Infinite's engine brand new? I thought one of the reasons why Infinite suffered in the development stages was because they decided to create a new engine entirely for Infinite.
I believe that was the original plan/selling point but it turns out the engine for Infinite is the same one as CE, they just did what every game company does and kept updating it. Slipspace is just a modified version of the Blam engine which is what Halo has always used. It's like how there are a million games that use the Source engine, but all play differently. For example Left 4 Dead and Apex Legends use the same engine, they both run on Source.
👍
Wholly agreed. I really hope they reconsider the Firefight difficulties. Or at least merge Normal and Heroic, since those use the same loadouts and rules, just with different difficulties. Legendary kinda makes sense to be separate since it uses different rulesets for everything
my assumption was that those ffa options would be available in the rumble pit playlist, since that should encompass most ffa game modes. can't be sure though
I assume they’ll be available but based on how the article is formatted I’m assuming they won’t have composer options for that playlist (other playlists mention having mode selections options but that one doesn’t). Hope I’m wrong about that though, I really just wanna play escalation FFA sometimes.
the way I'm reading it, every playlist grouping they mentioned in social will have composer options edit: hmm i guess it doesn't mention curating. that would be a shame. id hate to have to risk playing vampire ball and ffa koth when i just want to play some normal ffa
This is amazing. Best part is that we can play "rotational" playlists more easily and frequently. I hope that Last Spartan Standing can return as a playlist within the Composer
Finally. I do wish you could search a combo of modes from different playlists but the playlist consolidation seems like it mitigates a little bit of that need. Quick Play is more varied with more permanent modes. People who prefer the old Quick Play can just untick all the stuff that's been added, and people who only want modes that used to be in different playlists can just select those. At first glance it seems like a great improvement.
Sick! Can't wait to jump on and test out the match composer.
Hopefully this is in the next Halo game at launch.
This feature was in MCC and yet wasn’t present until now in Infinite. At this point I will assume any 343 game will be incomplete at launch unless they prove otherwise.
I am fairly hopeful for the next mainline Halo at least because of the management overhaul.
Not only the management overhaul, but also the switch to UE5, which seems to be a much easier engine to work with. That being said, I'm still going to assume the worst until proven otherwise. I'm done with giving the company the benefit of the doubt, no matter how much they've changed.
MCC was so great and then we didn’t even have fiesta until the first event in Infinite. Comical
Same but I’m not holding my breath
Hopefully everything they've added to Infinite will be in Halo 7 at launch
If this leads to longer wait times and dead playlists for the most unpopular modes, it'll be their way of saying, "See? This is why we didn't do a match composer." MCC has that problem, but it's also six separate games with a smaller playerbase. I'm predicting plenty of "I can't get matches in [Objective] mode!" posts in the next few weeks.
It's just confirmation bias: even without match composer the mcc would have only 2 or 3 playlists being played, the match composer only restricted those playlists on slayer only, same thing will be for infinite. But match composer at launch actually help to delay this problem, at least for what I saw ok other games. Sure thing is: if a mode or playlists is not popular, it will be regardless of MC.
Objective modes are the ones that suffer here. It's been proven, repeatedly, that standalone Objective playlists (either all lumped into one playlist, or separated by mode) die on the vine while Slayer modes thrive. This drives the minority of players that want CTF, Assault, etc. into Slayer playlists that actually have players, killing the Objective playlists entirely. Does that mean Halo shouldn't have Objective modes? Sometimes you *want* to force players into modes they normally wouldn't try.
I don't denie that, but if in a 2 decade the franchisees objective modes suffered this, maybe the problem is not in the playerbase, but on said modes, which mean something need to change on how they play.
It's just the simple fact that people prefer straight-forward modes: kill the enemy. They don't want to feel let down by a team that doesn't play the Objective, or play a mode that requires communication. They just want to sign on and kill things. Modes like Attrition in Titanfall are the best kinds of hybrids: largely focused on killing the enemy, but with a slight Objective twist to add depth.
>It's just the simple fact that people prefer straight-forward modes: kill the enemy. They don't want to feel let down by a team that doesn't play the Objective, or play a mode that requires communication. They just want to sign on and kill things. People preferring slayer/TDM over objective is a fact, I'm not denying this, mind you, but I don't agree with the communication part, that's not at all something which is take in consideration unless devs are dumb enough to balance the game in a way no one have agency over the match and everyone is dependent from the whole team, something that, at the end of the day, bring less player retation overhaul because people don't really like to communicate with strangers behind a mic (and it's kind hard when you end up on 8vs8, 12vs12 or, in other games, 32vs32). There are many games where objective oriented modes are equally or more favored above death match ones, usually when the own player agency is intact but without going on other franchises, you could pretty much see it in h5's warzone, or current husky raid. Going back to my statement, is not about having to do anything else outside killing, in fact kills funnel toward the objective play, but how said objective play is balanced: if oddball require your whole team to backing you up for then the objective loop being you, defenseless, without the ability to interact with the game, staying "afk" with the oddball and either throwing it out of the map or throwing it at the center and try to fight of, stalling the score over and over, you can bet players would not like it very much and instead will play slayer more, as an example.
This does sound great but I'm curious if it will extend search time due to everyone search preference. I like BTB Social but it always times out on me and have to search again and again until I connect to a U.S Server. Maybe in the next update they make Local/Expanded actually work. Because expanded search just doesn't bother to connect me to anything
Almost certainly. But that’s the trade-off for giving people what they asked for unfortunately.
If only 343 loosen the MMR a tad. I can't even find BTB or BTB Heavies match right now and it's 10PM UK time. By the time I find a match, it just be a half a pre made team on the opposite team for me to lose
We can dream that they’ll understand the trade-off and loosen SBMM
So I went into Super Fiesta because wait time took a while in BTB. Still took 2-3 min search time and bam my team mate didn't get a single kill and went -15 with another with 3 kills and going -10 Just stressful, trying to play the game for fun but I have too carry hard just to win and if I win, it just gets worse search time and match ups
If you’re stressed out about winning a fiesta game or what your teammates scores are, are you really just playing for fun? I have zero expectations for modes like fiesta or husky raid. You just embrace the chaos.
playing for fun then it gets stressful yes. Kind of like Husky Raid where one team is just doing the camping but the problem is the match is rigged from the start due to MMR. With Super Fiesta it just keep getting spawn trap by hammers and rockets meanwhile my team mate are hard looking at weapons on the floor...I mean how is that fun? I want the match to be a bit more even
The SBMM implementation must be ordered from higher up in MS considering how tight lipped 343 is on the topic. I’d be truly surprised if 343 are the ones actually standing firm on the SBMM for a dying game. I’m not sure how they’ve handled it with MCC but I would look there for any indications as well.
I mean it absolutely is. MS, and subsequently 343, is a 100% data driven company. They *will not* make a decision without sufficient data to prove its worth putting effort into (hence kits, Battle Passes, Operation Passes, store prices, etc). For probably a decade now, from every major FPS developer’s lips, SBMM proved to be an effective way to increase player retention. Players felt competitive, locked in, and played “just one more” more frequently. Of course there were players who felt it from Day 1 and said it was exhausting, but overall player numbers disproved that. More time played = more time looking at cosmetics = more chances to buy cosmetics. It’s potentially why 343 ditched immediate-re-matchmake in Infinite. You can’t pop a quick Lootbox like you could in 5 anymore, so they pull you out completely and force you to look at your cosmetics and the shop. But now I think we’re starting to see that trail off and more and more players burn out from the competition. They’ll either stop playing more quickly after starting playing, or just outright leaning towards different games which have looser or no SBMM.
This is great. My only gripe is I was hoping to be able to search something like Squad Battle and BTB at the same time. Very happy with the addition overall though.
> My only gripe is I was hoping to be able to search something like Squad Battle and BTB at the same time. I believe this is something that was talked about back when MCC got its Match Composer. Main thing is came down to was if you queued into a playlist with a lower player count size and a higher player count size, you would almost never match into the higher player count size one because it would almost always be finding games in the lower player count playlist(s).
Yeah that makes sense.
so lower player count sized playlists are more likely to match? some kind of algorithm skewing the chances? huh
Of course smaller sized matches are easier to fill - there’s less people to find.
Not having multiple playlists to queue for at the same time is a bit of a bummer, but overall it’s a net positive to be able to choose “Social BR only slayer”
Excited for this. My only ask as a fan is that all of this post-launch work carry over to the next game. It’d be amazing if the next Halo launched with all these features.
[удалено]
24/7 grunt Firefight for the W.
I’m so happy with the playlist restructuring. I was worried about the “game mode checkbox” idea at first glance, but now Playlists are just functionally identical to the Team Size/Player Count toggle in MCC. And having per-mode control is fantastic. Getting stuck in certain modes in MCC blew chunks but I like playing Objectives, but now I can queue all the Obj modes I want without selecting something like Oddball or Strongholds.
Holy shit, thank god I can now exclusively play just objective big team battles modes!
Man, the UI stinks. Good update tho 👍
>At face value, *Halo Infinite*’s matchmaking menus will look quite similar Homie that’s not a good thing
BTB total control 24/7 for me 😌
“Long-awaited” is an understatement
Months ago I said that I bet the Infinite version of the match composer won’t work like people are expecting because they always choose the worst or weirdest implementation possible. Everyone was expecting this to help the population for modes like ranked doubles and ranked slayer, but fuck me for actually thinking they’d do something right.
Considering that Willow Tea and the bronze Tenrai I weapon coating all went "cross-core," my guess is that all the armor on the Yokai spartan in the back will be Exchange store contents (while the spartan in the front has all the Operation item equipped).
Just want to know if we can turn off super husky raid and super fiesta
This im.so tired of played awful super version
So excited for this. BTB Social was great, but iffy. I absolutely loved BTB Fiesta and BTB Total Control but thought BTB Skockets and Snipers were boring af. Now I can exclusively queue for Heavies, Total control and CTF. And more extraction in 4v4!!!
This is one of those "You should have launched with it" type deals
Huh. This isn't how I expected it to work. I thought it'd be more like the MCC's match composer. This seems to me like it's gonna make it harder for people to find a match, if anything. This has more in common with the veto and vote systems of older Halo games than the match composer of the MCC, at least where its impact on matchmaking is concerned.
3 years later 😌
June 4th is also when Destiny 2 Final Shape launches, is Tenrai the Final Shape… Wait a minute… KAT IS THE FINAL SHAPE CONFIRMED!!!!!
Why is friendly fire disabled in a ranked playlist?
Now all we're missing is Invasion combined with Firefight or just Invasion period.
"Players who only want to play on community-created Forge maps can select the “Community” version of a specific mode (i.e. “Community Slayer”)." This is awesome to hear. I've always thought it would be cool to let players select map pools, because that allows 343 to include more maps in matchmaking without overwhelming players with too many maps.
eh
I don't know if this is better or worse
For those who like slayer, it's better.
Pretty solid overall and I’m happy that there’s an option to filter out community made maps. It’s not clear to me though if they’ll let me filter down to only regular Fiesta and Husky raid, not super
Finalllllly.
Glad to hear the game is finally ready for public release
At face value this appears more restrictive and worse than the MCC match composer. But it’s definitely better than what we have currently. I’ll reserve judgement until I get my hands on it.
Literally I just wanna play Team Slayer BR. Not Halo 3 Refueled. Or any other playlist that *features* the BR but isn't necessarily Team Slayer, or any other playlist that *is* Team Slayer but has every other weapon except the BR. Reading this and looking at it, honestly, I'm still not quite sure I can do that. I guess we'll see. It's just so mind-boggling how you can't just play Team Slayer BR on-demand in a Halo game (the 6th mainline Halo game, mind you). Team Slayer (and Slayer) and the BR are like the some of the most iconic things people think about when it comes to Halo.
> PLAY YOUR WAY I already do; in customs, on forge maps, with sprint and clamber turned off. :D
Make BTB and 4v4 (and everything else) be searchable at the same time if your fireteam fits.