Halo Infinite Entering Maintenance Mode With Last Major Update Next Week

By Elijah Gonzalez  |  November 10, 2025 | 10:40am
Video Games News Halo Infinite
Halo Infinite Entering Maintenance Mode With Last Major Update Next Week

Halo Infinite’s active support is coming to a close next week, only four years into its studio’s initially announced “10-year plan” for the game. It will receive one final major update, Operation Infinite, on November 18, which will add new skins in a final Operation Pass alongside permanent adjustments to Career Rank progression. Then it will go into permanent maintenance mode.

As for the changes coming in the last big update, Career Rank and Spartan Points will receive a 2X boost, letting players level up more quickly. There will be eight new armor sets added alongside new upgrades in The Exchange (which is where you spend Spartan Points earned from performing challenges). As for the final Operation Pass (this game’s equivalent of a Battle Pass), it will have 100 tiers with various cosmetics and rewards.

At least for the immediate future, Halo Infinite’s servers will remain online, and the game will continue to receive new Ranked Seasons. Challenges will continue to rotate as well. However, nothing new, whether that is maps, weapons, or cosmetics, will be added going forward.

In a blog post, Halo Studios (formerly 343 Industries) explained that the changes were coming because there are currently “multiple Halo titles in development” and that they’ll need their “whole team’s combined focus to deliver new experiences with the same passion and care that our community has given us.” Specifically, the studio is working on the Halo: Combat Evolved remake, which is set for 2026.

You may ask yourself, “Wait, didn’t 343 Industries relatively recently create a remaster of Halo: Combat Evolved in the Master Chief Collection?” They did! But now, as Microsoft continues to flail uncertainly, they’re doing what everyone else is doing by going back to the well in a nostalgia play, remaking a beloved classic rather than committing to anything new and “risky.”

As for Halo Infinite, the game got off to a very rough start that it never seemed to fully recover from. First, there were memes clowning on a still photo of a Brute (eventually nicknamed “Craig”) for the character model’s lack of graphical fidelity.

Then, when the game came out, there were criticisms around the exceedingly slow rate of its Battle Pass progression. While this was eventually addressed in some form with expedited progress, and many enjoyed the Infinite’s core gameplay, especially compared to 343’s other Halo titles, the relatively slow live-service release cadence, along with these initial problems, undermined the game’s support and ensured it never caught up to many of its peers.

Eventually, 343 Studios would go through leadership changes, presumably due to Infinite’s struggles. First, the team would be subject to Microsoft’s rampant layoffs in 2023. 343 Industries rebranded to Halo Studios in 2024, before falling victim to another wave of layoffs. Then there was another wave of layoffs in 2025 amidst “tensions” at the studio, which came as one of its Halo projects was reported to be in a state of “crisis.”

The news about Infinite comes amidst the active BDS boycott against Microsoft over its support of the Israeli military in its genocide against Palestinians in Gaza. While the company recently ended its Azure contract with Israel, which had enabled mass surveillance of Gazans, it continues to provide the country with technology used in its ongoing occupation.

 
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