12/14 UPDATE: The changes to the Challenge System are now live. A few examples include:
Personal Score – Accumulate personal score in the specified playlist to complete.
Kills – Earn the required # of kills in a specific playlist.
343 goes on to explain they are working on a more in-depth performance-based model, “but in the interim, the team will continue targeting meaningful services-side updates to hone and improve the overall experience.”
Original article continues.
In a Reddit post announcing a new set of playlists going live this week, 343’s Brian Jarrard also mentioned another set of changes coming to Halo Infinite’s challenge system.
Next week’s update will also include adjustments to challenges including removing some particularly frustrating mode-specific ones, reducing some requirements for others, making the weekly ultimate challenge less intensive (getting there is tough enough), and adding brand new challenges specific to the new playlists. Personally I’m eager to check out a new challenge category that’s based on accumulating player score (a small initial step towards ‘performance based XP’). We’ll have some more details to share on Halo Waypoint next week.
It’s good to see 343 is looking into a performance-based XP system as well as the challenges. It would be nice to get a few extra points for doing well in a match. And hell, who knows, maybe rewarding folks for actually playing the objective would get people to pick up the damn Oddball from time to time.
Adding Fiesta as a permanent playlist should make the weapon-specific challenges more manageable. I ended up using a challenge skip over the weekend when I got a challenge for 10 Rocket Launcher kills. Yep, that ain’t happening quick.
Another challenge I hope gets tossed is the fusion coil one. Right now, those only appear on two maps: Fragmentation (Big Team Battle) and Launch Site (Arena). And it’s like the game knows when I get this challenge because both maps won’t show up. 343 could add fusion coils to the rest of the Big Team Battle maps. No reason why they can’t have them.
We should be getting a blog post detailing the exact changes this week, according to Jarrard. And with the update slated for December 14 (tomorrow), that blog post could come as early as today.
To recap: Four new playlists are launching tomorrow (Slayer, Fiesta, FFA, Tactical Slayer aka SWAT) and changes to the more frustrating challenges.
I’ll update this article if we get any new info from the upcoming blog post.