When you start a custom game in Halo Infinite, there are 17 default multiplayer modes to choose from. Most of these show up in the online matchmaking: staples like team Oddball, 2-flag CTF and a Big Team Battle variant of Slayer. But if you boot up Halo Infinite with Steam set to offline, it turns out Infinite is hiding 14 more modes created by 343 Industries that aren't normally visible.
Redditor WickedSoldier991 discovered the modes are visible when you play Halo Infinite offline and pointed out that you can save them to your file share to then access them online. The really interesting thing here is that these aren't just variants of the same modes already available in matchmaking. There's one entirely new game format called Attrition, where each team has a limited pool of respawns (like Battlefield's ticketing system), and you win by draining them. There's Elimination, an Attrition variant with no respawning played across multiple rounds a la Counter-Strike. And there's Tactical Slayer, Infinite's version of SWAT (no shields, no radar). 343 hasn't talked about any of these modes or revealed them publicly, though their names have leaked.
These 14 hidden modes include several variants of the above, including the interesting Attrition Dodgeball, and a few Fiesta variants that haven't been in matchmaking yet, including the surely chaotic Fiesta CTF.
Attrition sounds like a variant of Slayer, but it's actually its own mode, including some cool options like kills granting your team additional respawns, and allowing you to revive allies. It also has a "Danger Zone" that encloses the map, Battle Royale-style.
You could roll your own Tactical Slayer configuration in custom games, but these presets created by 343 give us a pretty good hint at what to expect to show up in matchmaking over the coming months. And it's just nice to have these modes to choose from instead of having to build your own, because Halo Infinite's custom game setup is overwhelming.
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In theory I love that I can create a CTF match and customize every detail—whether the flag returns instantly on touch, how many grenades we can hold, even how fast we can strafe—but starting from scratch means spending a lot of time in a lot of menus. It's a lot easier to just run with one of the default modes created by the developers. And bizarrely, 343 doesn't let you just choose the base mode from a simple drop-down box—the only way to create a mode of your own is to use an existing one as a base. As far as I can tell, you can only access Attrition by going offline and copying 343's template (or grabbing it from someone else's file share once it spreads).
If you want to save these modes to use yourself, set Steam to offline mode, boot up Halo Infinite, and open the custom game menu. Choose one of the modes, click Mode Editor, and then press 'R' to save a copy.
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Here's a full list of the modes you can only see offline.
- Arena: Attrition
- Arena: Attrition Dodgeball
- Arena: Elimination
- Fiesta: Attrition
- Fiesta: CTF
- Fiesta: One Flag CTF
- Fiesta: Strongholds
- Ranked: Elimination
- Ranked: One Flag
- Tactical: Slayer
- Tactical: Slayer Commandos
- Tactical: Slayer Manglers
- Tactical: Slayer Sidekicks
- Tactical: Slayer Stalker Rifles
Wes Fenlon
Senior Editor
Wes has been covering games and hardware for more than 10 years, first at tech sites like The Wirecutter and Tested before joining the PC Gamer team in 2014. Wes plays a little bit of everything, but he'll always jump at the chance to cover emulation and Japanese games.
When he's not obsessively optimizing and re-optimizing a tangle of conveyor belts in Satisfactory (it's really becoming a problem), he's probably playing a 20-year-old Final Fantasy or some opaque ASCII roguelike. With a focus on writing and editing features, he seeks out personal stories and in-depth histories from the corners of PC gaming and its niche communities. 50% pizza by volume (deep dish, to be specific).
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