What is Halo Infinite Attrition?

A war of attrition, as defined by Oxford Languages, is “a prolonged war or period of conflict during which each side seeks to gradually wear out the other by a series of small-scale actions.” Basically, rather than wiping out your foe in one fell swoop, the idea is to gradually chip away at them over a long period of time until their resources have been completely exhausted and they can no longer oppose you. It’s a pretty baseline form of warmaking, so it’s not especially surprising that a mode inspired by it found its way into Halo Infinite. On that note, what is Halo Infinite’s Attrition mode?

Attrition is a new gameplay mode added to Halo Infinite’s multiplayer rotation alongside the Cyber Showdown event. Many of the challenges in that event are tied to victories and feats in Attrition, so if you want to earn all the neat cosmetic junk that comes with those victories, you’d do well to promptly familiarize yourself with the mode’s various intricacies. 

What is Halo Infinite Attrition?

Here’s a quick summation of how Attrition works:

1. 4 on 4 Slayer-like setup, both teams have pools of 8 lives
2. Whichever team is wiped after losing their lives loses
3. When a player dies after the team runs out of lives, they leave behind a marker which a teammate can use to revive them

A game of Attrition starts out similarly to a basic game of Slayer; you’ve got two teams of 4 players, and both teams have a pool of 8 lives. If a player on your team is killed, the whole team loses a life. This encourages you to strategize with your team and not run off on your own, as it’s very possible for one knucklehead to blow through their team’s entire life pool by themselves. The ultimate goal of the game is to ax all eight of the opposing team’s lives, then finish all of them off one more time.

However, it’s when a team runs out of lives that things get interesting. If a teammate dies after your team has exhausted all of their lives, then instead of respawning, they’ll drop a holographic marker with their name on it. If you stand in front of the marker and hold the reload button for a few moments, your teammate will be revived, and they can resume fighting. It’s in this way that the fight keeps on going; even if every other player on a team is downed and only one remains, if they’re quick enough or the other team is in similarly dire straits, they can bring their entire team back.

Of course, nothing can last forever. Attrition has a built-in timer ticking down in the background. When the clock runs out, a red danger zone will appear on the outskirts of the map and begin slowly constricting inward, not unlike the Storm in Fortnite. As the battlefield shrinks and markers are stuck in the danger zone, things will eventually come to a conclusion. The last player standing will win the round for their team, and whoever takes best two out of three clinches the game.