343 Industries
(Halo Studios)
Halo Infinite Multiplayer
Live Game Designer (March 2022 - July 2023)
In March 2022 I accepted a contract role at 343 Industries to work on Halo Infinite’s live service PvP product. At the time, it was distinctly separate from the single player campaign. My role was as a Live Designer, which had me handling a variety of tasks meant to maintain and improve the live service. I have outlined below some of the specific contributions I made during this time.
Player XP Overhaul
This halo waypoint article describes the extent of the XP changes quite thoroughly.
We received a lot of positive feedback from players after these changes. Before this update, the only way that players could earn XP for their battle pass was by completing daily and weekly challenges. With the addition of end-of-match XP and XP awarded based on match performance, players were guaranteed some XP every match even if they were not paying attention to what challenges they had.
Challenge System
Halo Infinite Multiplayer’s challenge system started off with very negative player sentiment. When I joined the project shortly after Infinite’s launch, one of my first tasks was redesigning the contents of the challenge system.
A lot of the frustration revolved around one core theme, being forced to play the game differently than how the player wanted.
In a different circumstance, this might be okay. Challenges with specific requirements can encourage players to try new things and to explore more of the game, or even as the name suggests challenge themselves with a restriction of some kind.
However, since the challenges were the only way to earn Battle Pass XP at the time, their restrictive nature caused them to feel very frustrating and made players feel like it was gatekeeping their Battle Pass progress.
In order to reduce frustration and make progression easier, challenges were made easier to complete both in how long they took and in the specificity of action they required. Eventually we were able to add challenges that could track multiple actions at once, for example “Get kills in PvP with the assault rifle or sidekick pistol”. This also opened up a lot of possibility for fun and rewarding challenges.
Battle Pass Switching Feature
While seemingly simple on the surface, this feature required very specific needs in order to comply with our legal obligations.
We also wanted to make sure that there was still an incentive to be working on the most recently released battle pass. Our solution to this was to make the “free” track on the pass be available for a limited time, encouraging even premium pass holders to work on their most recent passes in order to unlock the free track rewards.