As always, here’s the weekly update to Halo 4’s Multiplayer. You can read the Halo Waypoint Bulletin in it’s entirety here, but here are the highlights.

February 11th, 2013

• Team Snipers Returns!
  • Team Snipers
  • Shotty Snipers
• Team Objective
  • Team Regicide
  • Oddball
  • King of the Hill
• Team Doubles Update/Fix
• Spartan Ops Episode 9 (5 New Missions)

February 18th, 2013

• Team Throwdown (Competitive Playlist)

February 25th, 2013 (Rumoured/Expected)

• Title Update
• Majestic Map Pack (3 small-med sized DLC maps)
  • Monolith
  • Skyline
  • Landfall

Here’s the information in more detail as provided by 343i,

The new and improved Team Snipers will utilize the following settings:

Mode	Team Snipers
Teams	4 vs. 4
Score to Win	600 [60 Kills]
Loadouts	UNSC Sniper Rifle Only
Instant Respawn	Disabled
Death Cam	Disabled
Motion Tracker	Disabled
Ammo	Unlimited
Time Limit	12 Minutes
Personal Ordnance	Disabled
Grenades	Disabled
Ordnance Drops	Disabled

Shotty Snipers. This variant will appear in the Team Snipers playlist voting options but not as often as the traditional snipers-only mode. Here are the settings for Shotty Snipers:

Mode	Shotty Snipers
Teams	4 vs. 4
Score to Win	600 [60 Kills]
Primary	UNSC Sniper Rifle
Secondary	Shotgun
Instant Respawn	Disabled
Death Cam	Disabled
Motion Tracker	Disabled
Ammo	Unlimited
Time Limit	12 Minutes
Personal Ordnance	Disabled
Grenades	Enabled
Ordnance Drops	Disabled

As you can see, the only differences in Shotty Snipers are the addition of the Shotgun and two Frag Grenades in your back pocket. We’ll be launching the playlist with several medium-sized maps – slightly modified versions of Haven, Abandon and some Forge favorites will be available. Also, we’re in the process of building additional new Snipers game types that we’ll introduce in upcoming weeks. For those of you wondering about the duration of the Team Snipers playlist fear not – we plan on keeping it around for a while.

As if Snipers wasn’t enough to get you excited for the upcoming week, we’re also proud to announce the addition of Team Objective, which will group together 4 vs. 4 Team Regicide, Oddball and King of the Hill (she’s back!). The biggest changes you’ll see to these game types are that Complex Oddball has been removed, and instant respawn has been disabled for both KoTH and Oddball.

Team Doubles went live on Monday morning and we’ve seen great feedback on all of the included game types. We have already made some updates to the playlist: Some of you may have noticed that Infinity Ordnance was not specifically tuned for 2 vs. 2 play, as we had announced. As soon as we noticed this problem, we deployed an update overnight. You should now see options that are more appropriate for Team Doubles – this means no Incineration Cannons, Rocket Launchers, Sniper Rifles, Overshields, etc. in personal ordnance. Keep in mind that some of these are still available as recurring weapon drops on some of the Team Doubles maps. In response to community feedback, we’ve also disabled instant respawn in Infinity Doubles to improve game flow, addressed some wacky spawn issues on Haven and fixed the Sticky Detonator spawn on Dispatch. It will now be on a 180 second resupply timer with 2 spare clips. These fixes will be live on Monday, along with next week’s update.

As of right now, we’re planning on releasing Team Throwdown, our premiere competitive playlist on February 18th. As we mentioned earlier, this playlist will be launching ahead of CSR so the Matchmaking team has time to tweak the playlist’s settings and options before everyone begins the race to level 50.

– Chief Landless

Geronimo!