August Drop Pod Preview | Alone

Coming next Tuesday, August 9th, 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 quality of life improvements, and will lay the foundation for even more community-requested functionality.

Let’s take a look at what’s inside!

At the moment, there are a multitude of visors in the game divided between the 5 cores of the armor. If you wanted to use the shiny gold Noble visor (which has so far been locked for the Mark V [B] armor core) to complete your look on any of your other cores, you will be able to make it happen when the August Drop Pod lands.

This means that all visors currently in play, and all future visors to come, will work on all helmets of all armors.

Continuing with the theme of improving customization options, this Drop Pod will also allow you to wear certain Mark VII helmet accessories on multiple Mark VII helmets.

This is a response to player feedback that we’ve seen requesting an expansion of the Mark VII Helmet Accessory Compatibility. Of course, this move came with some complexity because most of the helmet mounts for the Mark VII core are designed to fit a specific helmet, but some also fit well with other Mark VII helmets.

The Live Team took some time with our artists to find out which helmet accessories look the best and fit without awkwardly cutting or having large holes. Since some combinations may have cutout or large gaps, not all Mark VII helmets will be able to use all helmet accessories, but the total number of options has been significantly increased.

If you have already unlocked these helmets and helmet accessories, they will automatically be usable. If you unlock them in the future, all possible combinations will be unlocked for you. You won’t need to unlock them based on usage.

A full list of helmet and helmet mount combinations will be included in the Drop Pod patch notes when it becomes available.

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 double-ranked, which will arrive two weeks after the Drop Pod’s release, along with a CSR reset. Additionally, on launch day, a Team Doubles social playlist will accompany the Ranked Doubles, meaning Halo Infinite will have double the 2v2 fun.

We will monitor the health of the double ranked and all of our playlists after their addition to the matchmaking lineup. If all playlists continue to perform as expected, we will keep these additions and continue experimenting with adding more ranked playlists in the future.

At the opening of this blog, we mentioned that we were also laying the foundations for the future. Although there are no changes here for the players As soon as however, this Drop Pod contains many of the foundations needed to activate region selection in the future. This would allow players to select from all searches across all regions (faster search times) or their local region (better pings).

This feature is still a long way off, but gamers may be able to spot some of the backend work that’s been done to get things started. We will have more to share about Region Select as we get closer to its launch.

With this version of Drop Pod, your active challenges will be visible during a match in the pause menu. We know it’s useful to be able to quickly glance at your active challenges (as well as their descriptions) at any point during a match, so we’re very happy to implement this.

Note: This screen will not yet show the exact numbers (remaining or total) for your challenges. As challenges currently update at the end of a match, we have chosen not to display numbers intentionally to avoid confusion about not seeing them updated in real time. We are working to make it so Challenges Do tick during a game, but we wanted to show you all this useful first step as it was ready.

As always, the full patch notes will be 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 continue to push to make Halo Infinite the best experience possible. We can’t wait to see you online when the Drop Pod arrives next Tuesday, August 9th!