In April of 2019, a rumor began to circulate about the possibility of a battle royale mode being included in the upcoming Halo Infinite. However, at the time, 343 Industries' Frank O'Conner responded to these battle royale rumors by saying it was not true. A year is a long time though, and if a new listing on Microsoft's official Japanese website is to be believed, the epic sci-fi shooter may now be getting one.
It was recently announced that Halo Infinite's multiplayer would be going free-to-play, a first for the historic shooter franchise. Xbox also made the announcement that the multiplayer mode will run at 120 FPS on Xbox Series X, although it did not specify the frame rate for the Xbox One version.
Not long after this announcement, a rumor started spreading about the possibility of a battle royale being in the game, based off of the official Japanese page for Halo: Infinite on Microsoft's website. In the genre section, the original text for the page can be transliterated as "Batoru Roiyaru Shu--teingu," or "battle royale shooting."
The responses have been surprisingly positive to this rumored mode with some saying that if it would help Halo get back on top of the world of first-person shooters, then it should do it. This is in stark contrast to players recently blaming free-to-play multiplayer as the reason for the game's poor graphics.
At the core of the Halo multiplayer experience is split-screen support. Recently 343 confirmed that the Halo Infinite campaign will support split-screen co-op for 2 players, and 4 players online. While this battle royale mode is still a rumor, it would be interesting to see if Halo Infinite could be the first to incorporate some kind of split-screen feature into the mode.
It's currently hard to tell whether or not to trust this rumor. Although the Japanese site may translate to "battle royale shooting," all of the pages in other countries state the game as just a shooter, and this could just be some kind of translation error. It seems like players will just have to go to sleep, dreaming of 100 Master Chiefs skydiving into Blood Gulch, until 343 Industries gives an official announcement.
Halo Infinite will be available this holiday on PC, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X.