Halo Infinite Update Brings Back Something Missing For 15 Years

Halo Infinite is bringing back a vehicle that was last seen in a Halo game 15 years ago, along with a new weapon and playlist updates.

Detailed in a Halo Waypoint blog post, the Halo Infinite Fall Update 2025, which launches on August 5, will add the Falcon to Halo Infinite multiplayer, making it the first time the series has seen the vehicle since Halo: Reach in 2010. The Falcon will be featured in a limited-time mode, Famished Famished Falcons, a play on Hungry Hungry Hippos, where four teams of three compete to capture a single-neutral flag using the Falcon. The vehicle, which features a machine gun on one side and a grenade launcher on the other, will also appear on certain Big Team Battle maps as well in the standard BTB playlists.

The new weapon is the Vestige Carbine, a semi-automatic rifle that fires radioactive green bolts. This is a brand-new weapon, although it seems to share some visual similarities to the Needle Rifle from Halo: Reach. The blog post doesn’t mention if the Vestige Carbine will be added to normal playlist maps, but it will be featured in a Banished Slayer playlist, an asymmetrical slayer mode where one side wields UNSC weapons and the other uses Banished weapons, including the Vestige Carbine.

The Fall Update 2025 will also mark the start of Operation: Shadows, an ONI-themed event with cosmetics based on the intelligence and black-ops agency that has had a prominent role in the Halo series. There will be a 20-tier free event pass, which features the Whisper armor set and Spartan Points, and a 50-tier Premium Operation Pass, which contains three additional armor sets.

The Fall Update 2025 also includes updates to other playlists. The majority of Firefight modes are no longer split between first and third person, with the option to switch between POVs now available in most Firefight playlists. The Extraction game modes will see improved objective markers, making it easier to identify different sites, and Extraction sites will now temporarily lock after the team on offense captures an objective, to give the defense a moment to regroup. The Halo Infinite Fall Update 2025 launches on August 5.

The future of Halo is still a bit unclear, but Microsoft has confirmed that more Halo games are on the way. Last year 343 Industries rebranded to Halo Studios and confirmed that the series would be moving forward with new games built in Unreal Engine 5 instead of the studio’s proprietary engine, Slipspace, which Halo Studios said would allow it to develop games more quickly. At the end of the Xbox Games Showcase in June, Phil Spencer said that 2026, the 25th anniversary of Xbox, would see the “return of a classic that’s been with us since the beginning,” which seems to most likely point to Halo.