343 Industries has announced that the December mid-season update for Halo Infinite is now available, and with it comes Firefight: King of the Hill, a new version of the fan-favorite game mode that allows teams of up to four Spartans to face off against waves of Banished as they race to capture the hill in nine new maps.
Alex Wakeford, community writer for Halo Waypoint, detailed the mode yesterday in a blog post, explaining that multiple hills will need to be captured for a win, something made more difficult with the presence of Boss Waves:
When the game starts, a hill will spawn, and waves of progressively harder Banished enemies will try to capture that hill. Your job is to take the hill from them and hold it until you capture it. A Boss Wave, filled with tougher than usual enemies (and spearheaded by a named High Value Target or Boss), spawns once you’ve reached a certain amount of hill progress.
You score a point when you both finish capturing the hill AND defeat the Boss Wave. Then, just like in other Firefight iterations, you’ll get a brief respite to resupply your weapons and equipment, which only respawn in between hills. After that downtime, the hill will begin spawning in a new location, and the cycle repeats.
The Matchmaking modes will have exactly five hills for each match, and you’ll get a win if you capture at least three of them throughout the round.
As for why 343 Industries decided to evolve Firefight into this state, Wakeford explained that King of the Hill was the best mode to bring that “back-against-the-wall feeling,” something that a mere survival mode apparently couldn’t do:
The hill started out as a way to organize combat on big maps. It provided that “wall” your team put their back up against when the maps were particularly large. Plus, it brought the added bonus of letting us move that spot around the map so the experience was more varied within each game.
…Players who ran and hid when a tough wave of enemies appeared couldn’t stay hidden and pick shots at enemies until they had thinned their ranks—since they couldn’t progress the mode without having at least one player occupy the hill, the Spartans had to band together to retake the point and begin scoring again.
The full patch notes for Halo Infinite’s December mid-season update, which confirms nine maps, including three community-made ones, can be found here.
Twelve Skulls, including one that grants unlimited ammo and more, can also be added to Halo Infinite multiplayer maps via Forge’s Node Graph menu.