Halo Infinite season 3 has launched and brought with it a slew of new additions to the game sandbox, customizations, gamemodes, UI, and customization, which has brought a breath of new life to the game… in theory looking at analytics for the game, it seems it’s given it a slight bump in players. Sadly however, it is still losing players on the daily which is truly unfortunate since the changes made are massive and have been features and functions players have been wanting since the launch of infinite over 2 years ago.

      Those features in question include full access forge mode, which people are already using to recreate just about anything, from paintball to duck hunt, even to older games such as the Kamino map from the original star wars battlefront 1 for the original Xbox. 

      In terms of sandbox changes, there have been 2 new additions, the new “Shroud Screen” equipment item which works as a smoke bomb that you can’t see in or out of, and the “Bandit rifle” which is a spiritual successor to the DMR from Halo Reach, 4 and 5, with the only major visual difference being the lack of a scope on the new DMR.  

In regards to customization changes, there are 2 all-new armor cores added to the game that is the “Chimera” which will fill the role of the event core of the season, and the “Mirage” armor core, being a reference/homage to some of the original concept art dating back to 2001, in addition to the new armor cores there are also a couple of freebies given to all players, those being all armors cores, current and future releases, will be free to all players, as well as 16 free armor coatings for all of the cores, including completely 3 new coatings those being “Steel Sage”, “Steel Blue”, and “Steel Red”. the freebies continue with multiple helmet attachments for the original armor core being free to all players.

      In terms of UI updates, there was an overall update in the smoothness and responsiveness of the main menu with fewer random frame rate drops and more interesting animations, most notably When you open the campaign screen now it shows the master chief in the back of a pelican as opposed to a still frame of master chief just standing there looking off into the distance.

   And lastly but most certainly not least, multiple new gamemodes have both been added and are on the way, with there being an entirely new playlist just for community-created modes and maps rotating weekly, and in terms of on the way, the fan-favorite Infection mode is on the way with multiple new character models for the infected being specially made just for that mode. And there was increased stability and less desync overall. 

      With all that said it still seems that halo infinite and its dev team is trying their hardest to bring the game back from its lackluster launch which seemingly, in terms of development, is all because they used their own specialized “Slipspace” engine slowing production and development time down substantially, there is hope however since it has been mentioned that they are working on porting the game over to the unreal engine which would make development overall much easier and allow for 343 to truly save halo infinite.