In June, 343 Industries confirmed that Halo Infinite will make use of battle passes along with seasonal multiplayer updates. Unlike similar passes in other games, though, Halo Infinite’s won’t expire, and players will be able to pick them up at any time, even if the season they’re associated with is over. Developers revealed more about how that system will work in an interview with IGN, and what players can expect.
Only one battle pass can be active at a time—sorry, no doubling up on rewards—but players with multiple passes will be able to swap them around at will. Legendary cosmetics will appear roughly quarterly in each pass, and event rewards will be separate from the battle pass. 343 also noted that the test flight battle pass is not representative of what will be in the full release.
“We wanted to be able to say, ‘Hey, look, when you put 10 bucks in, you keep that 10 bucks’,” Halo Infinite head of design Jerry Hook told the site.
The first season of Halo Infinite will be called Heroes of Reach, and the battle pass will be Reach-themed. All players in Halo Infinite multiplayer will get the Mk. VII “armor core,” essentially a base set of armor that can be customized with matching pieces, and can then earn various Mk. VII pieces, like shoulders, helmets, and visors, to kit it out. There will also be an opportunity to unlock the Mk. V armor core and its customization options.
“When we were looking at the Heroes of Reach and what [lead progression designer Chris Blohm] and the team pulled together is a really great model of how we’re trying to tell a visual story with the battle pass of earning characters, basically through all the Reach characters with the battle pass,” Hook said.
“Do you want Emile’s knives? You want Jorge’s grenades? Mix and match how you want to create your own, or if you’re just like, ‘No, I want to look exactly like Jun’ then you can do that. And for the first time, you can look exactly like Kat with the prosthetic arm.”
In fact, Blohm said that 343 worked with both in-house veterans and the Limbitless non-profit to ensure prostheses users were properly represented. “We want people to build Spartans that they either aspire to be or love to be or if they look cool or represent them.”
One thing players won’t see in Halo Infinite’s battle pass: funky emotes for Spartans. Hook said developers “struggled a lot with dance moves for Spartans,” but eventually decided against it: “We feel that more traditional players would reject Master Chief flossing.”
That doesn’t mean Halo Infinite will be completely devoid of smooth moves, though—they’ll just be limited to the personal AI assistants. “AI can go crazy. AI can do what it wants to do,” Hook said. “That way you can preserve the militaristic feel without having to break what you would consider canon.”
And it is canon, apparently, that the Chief don’t floss. Halo Infinite is set to come out on December 8.