Halo Infinite - Developing Flood Mode
4,346Developing Flood Mode For Halo 6 on the Xbox One X
Infection has almost always been apart of Halo. And even when it wasn’t - it was. Looking towards the future, there’s a lot of potential for Halo 6 on the Xbox One X to have a really great infection game mode. So, here’s some things that 343 could do to improve infection in Halo 6.
Flood Forms
Halo is in a unique position against other FPS games that have infection modes. Halo has something that they don’t have, the flood. In Halo 4, infection was rebranded as “Flood”. Putting aside the controversial gameplay aspects of the mode - 343 took a step in the right direction with game modes look. In previous versions of the game type, infected players looked largely the same as non-infected players. Normally their colour was set to a variant of green and they had an energy sword, that was it. What Halo 4 did, was replace the Spartan models with an infected flood model so you could easily tell who was infected. This same concept should be used in Halo 6, however it can be expanded upon. The Halo Universe has a large variety of flood forms at it’s disposal that could be utilized in the infection game mode. Instead of infected players being just green spartans, they could be a variety of flood forms. Alpha infected could be flood tanks, while regular infected are just infection forms. Or, when a infected player is killed they could respawn as a random flood form. The idea is that all of the flood forms are added into the game as player models - so players could be infection forms, combat forms or even carrier forms. Then, inside of the game options - you could chose the traits of each of those classes. You could enable weapon pick up or random weapon spawns for the combat forms. You could make the infection forms move quicker, but die easier. You could enable blast damage when a carrier form is killed or make it so other players can respawn on a carrier. The game type options should allow players to fully customize all of theses classes to their liking. And of course, if you wanted to play regular infection and not use these classes - When you chose your alpha infected, you could just set it to “Regular” and the same goes for normal infected.
One of the worst parts about being killed in infection is that it sucks to be a zombie. You mindlessly run around trying to infect other players, but die frequently in the process. What if, there was a variant of infection that when you were killed, you started out in infection form. Then, as you gained more kills or spent more time infected - you evolved into the other flood forms. This would keep things interesting for infected players and it wouldn’t feel so monotonous. Infected players would have an objective aside from just killing the human players. In the game mode options, under scoring there could be a “evolve at” option - so every 10 or 15 points the infected player evolves. This would also make things more difficult for the survivors as time went on.
While on the topic of flood forms, another way 343 could utilize the infection form is to just use it as AI on the map. Waves of them could spawn as time goes on, or players who are using the carrier form could spawn them. The point is, the various flood forms in the Halo universe have a ton of potential. This could really set Halo 6 and it’s infection game mode apart from other games.
As mentioned at the start of the video, the two most important things is that infection NEEDS to be there at launch and everything needs to be toggleable. Players need the option to play classic style infection, or play with flood forms. Many of the proposed game type ideas are just that, alternate game types much the same as save one bullet or ghost zombies is. Sustainable custom games come from the players, and players need to be able to manipulate as much as possible for that to work. Nothing should ever be forced on the player, we should be able to disable and enable freely so we can get the most out of the gametype. Infection has the potential to be huge for Halo. I honestly feel that if more time devoted to it, it could almost stand on it’s own. With survivors could be hunted by player controlled flood forms on terrifying developer created maps, Halo could have it’s own horror game inside of Halo 6 that everyone would want to play. The multiplayer horror genre is starting to grow, there is a market for it. Halo has the potential to capitalize on it with the might of a triple A studio behind it. I’d love to hear from you though, what do you want out of infection in Halo 6? Let me know in the comments. Or, if you have any other discussion topics for future videos, be sure to suggest them too! Follow me on twitter & don’t forget to subscribe. Until next time, thanks for watching!
► Twitter: https://twitter.com
► Discord: https://discord.gg/QQccbPG
► Twitch: https://www.twitch.tv/mustardsean
Other Videos By Forge Labs
Other Statistics
Halo Infinite Statistics For Forge Labs
There are 1,543,262 views in 10 videos for Halo Infinite. About an hours worth of Halo Infinite videos were uploaded to his channel, less than 0.65% of the total video content that Forge Labs has uploaded to YouTube.