Forge Overview | Winter Update 2024 | Hello

The winter update 2024 for Halo infinite is fast approaching, and we wanted to give you a look at the updates and improvements coming to Forge, including third-party camera capabilities, improved Forger attribution for player-created maps and modes, and more.

Once upon a time, before it was an original Xbox launch title, Hello looked very different…

Before the series, the first-person shooter we’ve known and loved for nearly a quarter of a century became Hello previously experienced a period of exploration as a third-person action game.

Of course, there are elements of third person that have long been a part of Hello game experience, such as when the player gets into a vehicle. Adopting a third-person perspective has also been possible in theater mode, where players are able to watch, record and screenshot their previous matches, but – outside of the realms of modding – there has never been a proper third-person experience in Hello.

That changes with the 2024 Winter Update.

The ability to switch between first and third person perspectives will be available at a mode level in Custom Games settings and as a scripting node in Forge.

Players will be able to get hands-on with this in matchmaking when the Third-Person Firefight playlist launches, helping you get a handle on what Hello feels like this new way to play.

Since Forge launched as part of Halo infinitewe’ve continued to build on this feature with ongoing updates and improvements to the experience. We’ve also tried to improve how we highlight Forge creators, which is another element of the 2024 Winter Update.

To increase the visibility of the Forgers who created the maps and modes you enjoy, we’ve updated several areas of the game to highlight gamertags and more easily allow players to bookmark their creations.

Starting next week, you will be able to see these updates on the following screens:

Additionally, we’ve added the ability to bookmark maps and modes on several of these screens.

IN Halo infinitewe were introduced to Spartan Commander Laurette Agryna, head of the Avery J. Johnson Academy, where the multiplayer aspect of the game is centered.

Agryna also serves as one of the multiplayer announcers in the Halo infiniteand Forgers will be able to use her voiceover in the same way as when we added Jeff Steitzer’s voice lines to Forge.

And to allow maximum control with this new feature, you can also ensure that only the intended players or teams will hear each line set up in Forge’s nodegraph:

These nodes will have Agryna’s lines for the following categories:

You will be able to find these new lines along with the existing Steitzer lines in the “Play Announcer Voicer” nodes mentioned above. Be sure to use the “Announcer Voice” custom game option to better control the communication.

Lifepool (or respawn ticket) systems have been a staple of many heart-pounding gaming experiences. To help bring the intensity of this winning mode to all of our modes, we’ve now made it a global custom game option.

This means that players can now create modes with two different win conditions. If applied to Capture The Flag, conditions can now be “Capture the flag or wipe out enemy forces to win.”

In addition, we’ve paired this lifepool system with global revival systems that players will recognize from Firefight and Attrition.

The new custom game options will be:

Health and injuries > Lifepool

The new nodes added to help counterfeiters control these systems even more include:

The mod options with these settings are pretty exciting, and we can’t wait to see what players are able to do with them.

As more fashion features have come online with Forge, we’ve also turned our sights on improving how fashion information can be communicated to players during battle. In our Fleetcom update, we added a ton of improvements with Nav Markers, but we knew there was still more to do.

The next improvement we wanted to go for was the ‘docking’ of Nav Markers, which help someone who is actively working on an objective, like securing a stronghold. This will take a Nav marker that appears on a capture zone and move it to a ‘docked’ position in a player’s HUD when they enter it. An example of this can be seen during our Winter Update Community Livestream.

To support this functionality, we’ve added over a dozen new nodes to Forge’s scripting nodegraph.

We’ve also added four new nodes to help support Volume Visibility to strengthen modes that can benefit from the extra controls.

In addition to these new features, we’ve also made some additional improvements to Forge. These have come as a result of community feedback as people look to further expand their range of options for creating at an increasingly granular level in Forge.

Mode creators will now have the option to disable each mode’s default music in Custom Games to take full advantage of the Campaign Music functionality added earlier this year.

To accompany this addition, new music control nodes will also be added to the Forge nodegraph:

GET GENERIC ZONE PROGRESS NODE

The standard navigation markers provided by Generic Zones are valuable for getting basic functionality into the hands of players. The biggest limitation of creating your own markers for Generic Zones is that there is no way for players to progress Generic Zones themselves.

We have added a new node called Get Generic Zone Progress, the result of which is that it shows the capture progress of a particular zone and works in any Generic Zones game mode template.

When we previously released the minigame variants, we received some feedback from the community that these were missing specific mode labels. As a result of this feedback, we’ve added some new state labels:

When an object has the “Include” label, it should only appear in this mode variant. When an object has the “Exclude” label, it should be available in all states except the selected one.

That’s all that’s coming on the Forge front for the 2024 Winter Update Halo infinite. We’re always looking for additional feedback to expand the options available to players and can’t wait to see what you do!