August Drop Pod Preview | Halo

Arriving next Tuesday, August 9, our next Drop Pod will focus on improving the player experience on multiple fronts. This update is set to expand each player’s customization options, include QoL improvements, and will lay the groundwork for even more community-requested features.

Let’s take a look at what’s inside!

At present, there are a multitude of viewers in the game split across the 5 armor cores. If you’ve wanted to use the shiny gold Noble visor (which has hitherto been locked to the Mark V [B] armor core) to complete your look on any of your other cores, you’ll be able to make that happen when the August Drop Pod lands.

What this means is that all visors that are currently in the game, and all future visors to come, will work across all helmets from all armor cores.

Continuing with the theme of improving customization options, this Drop Pod will also allow for certain Mark VII helmet attachments to be worn across multiple Mark VII helmets.

This is a response to player feedback we’ve seen requesting an expansion of the compatibility of Mark VII helmet attachments. Naturally, this move came with some complexities because most helmet attachments for the Mark VII core are designed to fit a specific helmet, but some happen to also fit well on other Mark VII helmets.

The Live Team took some time with our Artists to find out which helmet attachments look best and fit without clipping awkwardly or having large holes. Since certain combinations could have clipping or large gaps, not every Mark VII helmet will be able to use every helmet attachment – ​​but the total number of options has been greatly increased.

If you’ve already unlocked these helmets and helmet attachments, they will automatically be usable. If you unlock them in the future, all the possible combinations will be unlocked for you. There will not be a need to unlock them on a per-use basis.

A full list of the helmet and helmet attachment combinations will be included in the Drop Pod patch notes when it goes live.

On the multiplayer experience front, this update will make it easier for us to implement more Ranked playlists moving forward. Kicking things off will be Ranked Doubles, which is set to land two weeks after the Drop Pod’s release – along with a CSR reset. Additionally, a social Team Doubles playlist will be accompanying Ranked Doubles on its launch day, meaning Halo Infinite will be getting twice the 2v2 fun.

We’ll monitor the health of Ranked Doubles and all our playlists after its addition to the matchmaking lineup. If all playlists continue to perform as expected, we’ll keep these additions and continue experimenting with adding more Ranked playlists in the future.

In the opening of this blog, we mentioned that we were laying some groundwork for the future as well. While there is no player-facing change here fair yet, this Drop Pod does contain a lot of the groundwork required to turn Region Select on in the future. This would allow players to select between all searching across all regions (faster search times) or their local region (better pings).

This feature is still some time away, but players may spot some of the backend work that has been done to start putting things in place. We’ll have more to share about Region Select as we get closer to its launch.

With this Drop Pod release, your active Challenges will be viewable while in a match on the pause menu. We know it’s helpful to be able to quickly glance at your active Challenges (as well as their descriptions) at any given time during a match, so we’re very happy to get this implemented.

Please note: this screen will not show the exact numbers (remaining or total) for your Challenges just yet. Since Challenges currently update at the end of a match, we chose not to display the numbers intentionally to avoid any confusion around not seeing them update in real-time. We are working to make it so Challenges do tick during a match, but we wanted to get this helpful first step out to all of you since it was ready.

As always, we’ll have the full patch notes available on the Halo Support site (aka.ms/HaloInfiniteUpdate) when the update is released.

Thank you for your continued feedback on our Waypoint Forums, Twitter, Reddit, and more as we keep pushing to make Halo Infinite the best experience it can be. We look forward to seeing you online when the Drop Pod lands next Tuesday, August 9!