You might have heard, but there's a new Halo game coming out soon. That doesn't happen very often! It's nice to be excited about Halo again, in no small part because I've missed running around its erratic physics sandboxes. In Halo, gravity is a tool to be harnessed, but never mastered. No matter your intentions, your warthog will inevitably flip, a grenade will bounce to impossible heights to kill you, and the occasional bug will cause something absolutely absurd to happen.
Magical bugs have already started rolling in from the latest Halo Infinite technical test running this weekend. Behold, the self-duplicating wet floor sign (as shared by natdog805 on Reddit):
so_many_floor_signs from r/halo
So many questions. Why does electrifying a wet floor sign produce more signs? Are they supposed to split but instead grow back like starfish? How many can you get to spawn in a single map? How many before the game crashes? Seems like a slippery slope, which explains the signs. Also where is this thing, because I wanna try.
I've posed these questions to 343 in the hopes for some answers (Halo's community manager seems to be aware of it), but in the meantime, I'm enjoying the low-stakes mystery. A few other redditors have clipped their wet floor disasters and they all involve tossing one of Infinite's new electric grenades at the sign, so maybe it's the culprit? It does behave differently than every other throwable I've used so far in that it stays active for several seconds, decaying the shields of any player standing near it. The constant damage tick could be prompting the wet floor sign to explosively replicate.
halo_caution_sign_evolved_xbox_series_x from r/halo
Look, 343, I know an infinitely replicating prop is something of a performance liability, but please think twice before patching this one out completely. Not only is it a classically Halo bug, but it's the first time I've understood why it's called Infinite.
One bug that will definitely get the boot, incredibly funny as it is, would be the recently-discovered exploit that lets players rapidly spam melee attacks.
some_fun_with_bxb_before_an_inevitable_patch from r/halo
This became way funnier when I noticed that CraftZ49 unleashed this flurry of blows on a bot that's inexplicably shaking its head left and right, as if it knew what was coming.
As it turns out, melee spam exploits aren't at all new to Halo. I've seen folks call this Infinite version "BXB" or "BXR", a reference to button combos required to do similar melee tricks in Halo 2 and Halo 3. Personally, I'm less invested in how melee spam breaks the game's balance and more interested in how funny it looks for a spartan to flail their arms around like a bloodthirsty baboon. At the current pace that 343 is iterating, I expect this exploit to be impossible by next weekend's Big Team Battle test.
To round out the day, here's a thing that's definitely not a bug, but so cool and expressive of what's possible with Halo Infinite's new tools (like this repulsor gauntlet) that I'm going to share it anyway.
my_new_favorite_mechanic from r/halo
Stuck.
