Every year around this time I write some version of the same post: I did not go to any stores on Black Friday, and I'm fine with that. This year is no different except the reason I stayed home was a lot more fun than usual.
343 Industries dropped Halo Infinite's multiplayer for free, completely unannounced, on November 15th, almost a month before the actual campaign is supposed to come out on December 8th. I remember checking Twitter that Monday night expecting the usual nothing and instead everyone was posting clips of the new Battle Pass and the grappling hook. I downloaded it before I'd even finished reading the tweet. That was twelve days ago now and I have put an embarrassing number of hours into it since, including basically all of Thanksgiving weekend.
My cousin came over Thursday night after dinner (my aunt makes a turkey that's dry enough to sand furniture with, dont @ me, its a running family joke at this point) and we just sat there playing Big Team Battle until almost 1am. No shopping list. No app open tracking a doorbuster countdown. Just the two of us yelling about a guy who kept sniping us off spawn on Behemoth.
Friday morning, while half the internet was posting photos of parking lot lines and empty shelves, I was still in bed running Academy matches to unlock challenges. I did technically buy something Black Friday-adjacent: a cheap headset off a doorbuster email at like 6am because mine finally died mid-match Thursday night and I wasnt about to keep playing with tinny laptop speakers. Twenty-eight bucks, works fine, I'm not going to pretend it's some audiophile revelation. It does the job.
The free-to-play thing changes the whole equation for a Halo game and I don't think enough people are talking about how weird that is. This is a series that used to sell midnight-launch bundles with plastic helmets in them. Now the multiplayer is just sitting there, no purchase required, and the actual paid campaign is still three weeks out. It's a strange sequencing decision but as a player I'm not complaining, I got a genuinely good shooter for zero dollars almost a month early.
I will say the Battle Pass system needs work. The XP curve for the first week or two was rough enough that people were openly comparing challenge completion rates to a part time job, and 343 already had to publicly walk some of it back. I don't fault them for shipping something ambitious early and then adjusting, that's honestly better than sitting on it until December and finding out the same thing the hard way with way more players watching. But if you're coming to this fresh, don't be surprised if progression feels stingy the first few sessions.
Meanwhile the news the last couple days has been the WHO naming a new coronavirus variant, Omicron, right as everyone was heading into the holiday weekend, and markets took a real hit on Friday because of it. Feels like a strange split-screen kind of week, genuinely fun multiplayer launch on one channel and a pretty grim headline on the other, both landing in the same 48 hours. I don't have anything smart to say about the variant news yet since nobody does at this point, it's two days old. Just noting that both things happened at once and it made for a weird Friday scrolling between the two.
Also, briefly: if you're doing Black Friday game shopping and GTA Trilogy Definitive Edition shows up cheap somewhere, maybe hold off. I picked it up at launch two weeks ago out of nostalgia and the amount of rain that game renders as literal white bars across the screen is not a joke, its genuinely distracting. Rockstar's already patching it but I'd wait for a few more rounds of fixes before you spend money on it, sale price or not.
Anyway. Long weekend, no crowds, no lines, a new headset, and way too many hours in one match type. I'll take it over a parking lot any day.