343 Industries has released a new update for Halo Infinite, once again trying to fix the matchmaking for Big Team Battle mode, as well as making a few other adjustments and improvements to the game’s multiplayer.
This is the second attempt to fix the BTB matchmaking system, which has been throwing endless streams of error messages at players since December. A first hotfix was pushed live in January to try and fix it, but showed no signs of improvement and sent 343 back to the drawing board. Here’s hoping this one sticks the landing.
The February 3 Update is now live across PC, Xbox One and Xbox Series X|S, and weighs in at under 1.1GB on all platforms.
Here’s the full patch notes:
Multiplayer
- Matchmaking service improvements for Big Team Battle (BTB). Players should find full matches quicker and more consistently.
- Scorpion Tanks and Wraiths will appear more frequently on BTB maps.
- Fireteam members in BTB matches will have the selected Fireteam Marker color, but may still start the match in different areas of the map.
- Join in progress rules updated to avoid matchmaking into games which are nearly complete.
- Changes to Oddball in both Ranked and Arena Multiplayer playlists:
- If the score is tied when a round’s timer runs out, one minute is added back to the timer. If the score is tied at the end of the additional minute, then the round will be declared a tie.
- The match will end if two separate rounds end in a tie and the victory will go to the team with more rounds won.
- Halo Championship Series (HCS) variant of Free-For-All Slayer added to the Custom Game modes list.
- In Custom Games, changes to Free-For-All Slayer, FFA Oddball, Neutral Flag and Tactical Slayer game options update correctly.
Fixing BTB is a step forward for the game, addressing a long-standing issue, but the community will happily tell you there’s plenty more to do. There’s significant desync issues that make hit registration unreliable, the game’s cosmetics store is still very expensive and the reward paths flawed, and there’s nowhere near the flexibility that players have come to expect from the Halo series.
A roadmap was expected in January detailing the future updates and roadmap of post-release content, and details of progress in getting campaign co-op and Forge mode ready to ship. Unfortunately, even the roadmap has been delayed for the time being. Hopefully this is good news in the long run, and not a prelude to disappointment.
Hey folks. In November, I said we’d have a #HaloInfinite update on our Seasonal roadmap, Co-Op, and Forge in January. We need more time to finalize our plans so what we share is something you can rely on. This work is my top priority, and we’ll have an update as soon as we can.
— Joseph Staten (@joestaten) February 1, 2022
Source: Halo Waypoint
