14 DAY TRIAL // Microsoft and 343 Industries have detailed the special Flood multiplayer mode that’s present in their upcoming Halo 4 first-person shooter, which acts as a spiritual successor to the Infection one seen in Halo 3 and Halo Reach.
Halo games have delighted lots of people with their intense multiplayer modes that supported not just classic experiences, like Deathmatch or Capture the Flag, but also special modes, like Infestation.
The upcoming Halo 4 will respect this tradition and features, besides the standard modes, a special Flood experience. This pits eight players, who control regular marines, against two players who act as Flood-infected creatures that move faster and can only perform melee attacks.
“Flood is the spiritual successor to Infection, a fan-favorite game type from Halo 3 and Reach. Our goal was to recreate it and push the mode to be new and different from previous versions,” the studio revealed.
“As both War Games and Spartan Ops fit within the fiction of the UNSC Infinity, we wanted to use Halo fiction in this mode too, which led to us to create the Flood form in Multiplayer. Flood-converted humans are much faster and focus on melee attacks, so they were a natural fit for Infection’s successor.”
You can check out the whole description of the special multiplayer mode below.
Halo 4’s Flood mode is a round-based, ten-player game. It is a true asymmetric experience with the added twist of dynamic teams; this really changes things up as each game is different, especially in the incredibly intense and high-action final seconds.
At the beginning of each round, two players spawn as Flood forms and eight players spawn as Survivors. Survivors are standard Spartans equipped with shotguns and magnums, while Flood move very quickly and can only use a melee attack. When a Survivor gets killed by a Flood, the Survivor will convert and respawn as a Flood. The round ends if a Survivor makes it to 3:00 or if all players are converted to Flood.
In order to keep the experience balanced, the chances of a player being spawned directly as a Flood creature depend on their performance in previous rounds, according to the studio. The whole mode went through several iterations and lots of balancing, so 343 hopes that players will fall in love with it once Halo 4 is launched next month.
Until then, look forward to learning more about the multiplayer in Halo 4 in the near future.