Halo 4 - Weekly Infinity Update #13

On Monday, Spartan Ops continues with episode 9, which will once again contain five new Spartan Ops missions, and as promised, Team Snipers will make its glorious return to Halo 4 Matchmaking. With no radar, grenades, ordnance or secondary weapons, you can be sure that the better marksmen will come away with victory.

For those of you who prefer a bit more variety (and chaos) in your sniping matches, we’re also proud to bring back Shotty Snipers. This variant will appear in the Team Snipers playlist voting options but not as often as the traditional snipers-only mode.

As you can see, the only differences in Shotty Snipers are the addition of the Shotgun and two Frag Grenades in your back pocket. We’ll be launching the playlist with several medium-sized maps – slightly modified versions of Haven, Abandon and some Forge favorites will be available. Also, we’re in the process of building additional new Snipers game types that we’ll introduce in upcoming weeks. For those of you wondering about the duration of the Team Snipers playlist fear not – we plan on keeping it around for a while.

As if Snipers wasn’t enough to get you excited for the upcoming week, we’re also proud to announce the addition of Team Objective, which will group together 4 vs. 4 Team Regicide, Oddball and King of the Hill (she’s back!). The biggest changes you’ll see to these game types are that Complex Oddball has been removed, and instant respawn has been disabled for both KoTH and Oddball.

Team Doubles went live on Monday morning and we’ve seen great feedback on all of the included game types. We have already made some updates to the playlist: Some of you may have noticed that Infinity Ordnance was not specifically tuned for 2 vs. 2 play, as we had announced. As soon as we noticed this problem, we deployed an update overnight. You should now see options that are more appropriate for Team Doubles – this means no Incineration Cannons, Rocket Launchers, Sniper Rifles, Overshields, etc. in personal ordnance. Keep in mind that some of these are still available as recurring weapon drops on some of the Team Doubles maps. In response to community feedback, we’ve also disabled instant respawn in Infinity Doubles to improve game flow, addressed some wacky spawn issues on Haven and fixed the Sticky Detonator spawn on Dispatch. It will now be on a 180 second resupply timer with 2 spare clips. These fixes will be live on Monday, along with next week’s update.

Your feedback, as always, is valuable in making these quick changes and fixes to playlists that are released. If you’d like to leave feedback on Team Doubles or any of the playlists that are available in Halo 4, check out our brand new War Games Feedback section of the forums, which features dedicated areas for players to leave feedback on specifics aspects of Halo 4 Matchmaking. We plan to use this section to fuel discussion that will influence changes and updates to the Matchmaking experience.

As of right now, we’re planning on releasing Team Throwdown, our premiere competitive playlist on February 18th. As we mentioned earlier, this playlist will be launching ahead of CSR so the Matchmaking team has time to tweak the playlist’s settings and options before everyone begins the race to level 50.