Halo Infinite Is Capping Off 2024 With Its Winter Update, Starting With Operation: Great Journey

Halo Studios has revealed their big plans for Halo Infinite for the rest of 2024, with what they call the Winter Update.

In the latest news post on the Halo Waypoint website, they made these promises:

“The Winter Update will bring some really exciting additions to Halo Infinite, which is where players can expect to see notable Forge updates, quality of life improvements, and things like third-person Firefight—a new way to play Halo (which can also be configured for experiences created in Forge).

After the three Operations of the Winter Update are complete, what follows in early 2025 will be the “Spring Update,” and so on.”

The first Operation on the way is Operation: Great Journey, coming this November. They say that this Operation is intended to be a celebration of Halo 2, which was released on November 9, 2004.

Halo Studios falls short of promising Operation: Great Journey to launch on November 9 of this year, but it certainly sounds like that is the plan at the very least.

That’s all they have to share for now, but it’s a solid message to send weeks after revealing their big rebranding from 343 Industries to Halo Studios.

Their move to Unreal didn’t come with an announcement that they were abandoning Halo Infinite, and this news makes it look like they still have quite the roadmap laid out for this live service title.

We can’t predict how regular their updates will be, but it certainly looks like Halo Studios intends to keep working on Halo Infinite, until either the players drop out, or until they have prepared making their next game. And that may not be coming until the next console generation.

For those who don’t know, this may be connected to Halo’s lore, as The Great Journey was a major plot point in the franchise. And this is where we warn you about spoilers in the following two paragraphs.

In the fight between the UNSC and the Covenant, the Covenant’s leadership, the Prophets, used the theory of the Great Journey to motivate their followers to fight. In Halo 2, the Arbiter sought out and eliminated Covenant members who rejected the theory of the Great Journey. In Halo 3, some Covenant members would become disenchanted with the Prophets and the Great Journey, and actually side with the UNSC.

We don’t quite know what the Great Journey actually is, but it seems to be aiming towards an assumed ‘Promised Land.’ The Prophets originally used the Great Journey as a pretext to invade Reach, but later believed they would get there if they captured and activated all the Halos.

You can watch the Halo Infinite Operation: Great Journey trailer below.