Halo Infinite Season 3 has launched, bringing with it three new maps, a new weapon, a new gadget, new cosmetic armour and a new battle pass. There’s also the addition of ray traced sun shadows for PC gamers, but there’s significant frame rate stutter in menus and a drop in performance for 120 FPS modes on console.
Let’s start with the good stuff, though. Halo Infinite Season 3 adds three new maps – two for Arena and one for Big Team Battle – and from what we’ve played so far, they’re good and fun! Themed after the campaign’s opening level in the innards of the broken Zeta Halo, after a cliff-top ONI outpost, and a wider open desert theme, the maps are:
- Chasm (Arena)
- Cliffhanger (Arena)
- Oasis (BTB)
The two Arena maps are featured in the New Arena Unlimited playlist. There’s also a new game mode called Tactical Slayer, which is a Halo twist on Gun Game.
The new gun is the M392 Bandit, a semi-automatic rifle that’s somewhere between the Battle Rifle and the standard pistol, and the new gadget is the Shroud Screen, which creates a swirling blue bubble that obscures line of sight, but doesn’t block any damage. It’s an interesting new idea.
Two new armour cores are included, the Mirage IIC that is a standard Halo-verse armour style, and the Chimera armour that will be expanded upon through this season’s Fracture events. The Mirage is immediately featured in a week-long free 10-level battle pass, unlocking a bunch of customisation items for it alongside the new 100-level battle pass that runs for the length of this season.
This is all good stuff, alongside a bunch of tweaking, rebalancing and quality of life improvements. PC players can also enable ray traced sun shadows (not available in campaign) which will be added to Xbox Series X in future. However, this season 3 update comes with a noticeable downside.
There’s a significant amount of frame and loading stutter now evident when navigating menus which were perfectly smooth to navigate up until this point. Additionally, Xbox Series X and Series S users that enable the 120 FPS Target Framerate setting are now limited to 90 FPS. That’s a pretty significant performance issue to have introduced, though thankfully 60 FPS play has been perfectly smooth for us.
It’s a known issue, so we hope 343 can address it in short order.
