At launch, Halo Infinite only allowed you to acquire XP (which is used to unlock tiers and items on the Battle Pass via gameplay) through daily and weekly challenges. Because Infinite did not allow you to acquire Battle Pass XP by simply playing matches (as is the case in many other games with a Battle Pass), unlocking new tiers and items proved to be a painfully slow process. While the team admits that this isn’t the final version of the game’s Battle Pass (and that more improvements are on the way), these changes certainly make Infinite‘s Battle Pass much more “user friendly” than it was before. It’s still significantly “slower” than other Battle Passes, but it is a step in the right direction. There was a time when Battle Passes felt like the “great microtransaction compromise” in the age of loot boxes and predatory pay-to-win tactics. Not only did Battle Passes typically focus solely on cosmetic unlocks (which have long been preferable to unlockable in-game advantages so far as microtransactions go), but they allowed players to unlock those cosmetic items by simply playing the game and earning XP. The basic idea was that you had the option to spend either time or money on Battle Pass items and that the items you did unlock wouldn’t offer any competitive advantages and seriously affect the gameplay. However, the principle of the basic Battle Pass system has been compromised in recent years by two notable factors: the way Battle Passes are affecting the ways that games are designed and the way that they’re affecting how games are played. Not only is it annoying to grind through early levels of the Battle Pass slowly just to unlock largely unimpressive cosmetics, but those early unlocks show how Halo Infinite is one of those games that was seemingly designed with a Battle Pass in mind. There are some Battle Passes where the pass feels like an expedited way to work towards items that were always meant to be unlockable, but Infinite‘s Battle Pass feels like the result of the developers needing to decide which core customization elements they were going to lock behind a paywall and which they were going to make available to everyone. That brings us to the other problem with many modern Battle Passes. There are gamers who say they do not care about Battles Passes, and I know they’re being honest because I’m one of them. Cosmetics are nice, and I’ll certainly use them if they are there, but they’re not something I generally go out of my way for. The idea that Battle Passes allow you to unlock items through the natural course of play is undone by the fact that Battle Passes do not support “natural play” among those who really care about them. When people start measuring the value of a Halo match by the XP it rewards them with rather than the experience of the match itself, that means that they’re going to start valuing and analyzing pretty much every other aspect of the game differently. When that analysis is coming from people who have proven that they’re more open to caring about a game’s microtransactions and unlockables, it just makes sense that developers and publishers are going to take their feedback closer to heart and start making adjustments and decisions with that feedback in mind. What I do know is that Battle Passes are starting to loom so large over modern games that even those who genuinely don’t care about them are starting to be affected by their impact on game design and how we play games.
