For those of you who, like me, are missing Grifball — Halo’s in- and out-of-universe football-style combat sport — in Halo Infinite, you can at the very least pretend you’re playing Quidditch, the favourite wizard sport of transphobes everywhere, thanks to a new glitch in the possession-based Oddball gametype. The glitch causes the ball to fly around the map, much like the shitty wizard books’ famous “golden snitch.”
My oddball started doing this weird thing in a custom game??? Is this normal? #HaloInfinite I was trying out the oddball melee glitch and then it started flying around on its own pic.twitter.com/RkJbGTxNQD
— Coach Juckor | Halo ANZ (@Juckor_) December 27, 2021
This is just one of many glitches in Infinite’s version of Oddball, albeit the least practical. If you’ve ever played a bad game of Oddball on “Streets,” Infinite’s dense, urban map, then you’ll know that players frequently shove the ball into walls and ceilings where it can’t be reached in order to prevent the enemy team from scoring when the carrier is killed. This is not only a frustrating strategy, but one of the eponymous oddball’s more unique properties.
The oddball, like many of Halo Infinite’s objects, has a ton of physics interactions. You can knock it away with the gravity hammer or repulsor, you can drag it toward yourself with the grappling hook, and — most importantly for this glitch — you can melee it. If you’re holding the ball, drop it, and then quickly melee, you can send it flying. This fulfils a couple of purposes: you can use it to reset the ball when overwhelmed by the enemy team, you can pass to your teammates across the map, or you can quickly reposition the ball to focus on staying alive, before picking it back up when the dust settles. These techniques are powerful, and will doubtlessly improve your oddballing.
If you melee the ball out of the map while crouching on its spawn point, you can summon a phantom ball which flies around the map in a large circle, objective marker in tow, regardless of player interaction. This is the aforementioned Quidditch glitch, which can be extremely disorienting in-game. However, despite the way things look, the ball remains on its spawn point for players to pick up — so luckily you cannot use this glitch to completely stall a game of Oddball.
Strange glitches aside, it’s good to see players developing new techniques for ball handling in Halo Infinite. Halo 5’s version of Oddball allowed for players to pass the ball to their teammates, expanding the strategy involved in the game — a feature that was removed in Halo Infinite, much to my deep sorrow. Instead of relying on an explicit passing mechanic, Infinite has chosen to prioritise its physics system, allowing for significantly more difficult and dynamic play. While I continue to miss passing, I’m excited to see how Infinite’s physics-driven sandbox changes over the coming years.
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