Halo Infinite Multiplayer Making Changes To Its Glacially Slow Progression

Halo Infinite Multiplayer is getting mostly good marks for its surprise launch earlier this week, but one point of contention among players is its progression system. In essence, it takes too long to advance along the battle pass, and you can often go several matches without any progress whatsoever, thanks to XP rewards being tied to missions that can sometimes take several matches to complete -- or be impossible, if you don't play the right kind of match or don't get specific weapons to show up.

The dev team acknowledged two days ago that they're hearing the feedback, and yesterday Community Manager John Junyszek laid out some of the changes that 343 Industries would be making to the game's progression system:

• A "Play one game" challenge that allows for consistent XP gain, no matter what mode you choose to play.
• Removal of some weekly challenges.
• Double duration on x2 XP boosts, from 30 minutes to one hour.

When the changes go live later this week, everyone's progress on challenges will need to be reset, so don't log out tonight with a "9/10 complete" challenge if you can avoid it.

These are nice changes to make, but it makes you wonder why the 343 Industries team opted for such a convoluted system to begin with, rather than the simple notion of XP gain from winning and losing matches -- and occasionally fulfilling side objectives -- that's used by, well, practically every other game out there. (Fun fact: Winning and losing matches is usually irrelevant, as most challenges just want you to play matches or do particular things within the match; there's rarely an actual benefit, progression-wise, for winning.) If I had to guess, I'd say that Halo Infinite Multiplayer will eventually adopt that kind of system, and that this is the best "quick fix" that the dev team could whip up in short order.

UPDATE, November 19: The patch is live, and it adds a "Play 1 Game" daily challenge that's worth 50 XP for every match you play. The pool of challenges has also been tweaked "to better serve players of all skill levels." In addition, you can log in at any time from November 23-30 to receive a Ultimate Sigil Mark VII Visor.