Halo Infinite lets you drop weapons for the first time in series history

There's a little dance you have to do in any Halo game when you want to hand a sniper rifle or rocket launcher over to a teammate. You scramble around looking for another gun on the ground that you can swap for, trading what's in your hands for whatever junk is close by. And if there isn't anything close by, well, everyone's stuck with what they've got.

That ends in Halo Infinite. After 20 years, Halo has added a "drop weapon" button.

In a preview of Halo Infinite's upcoming technical preview, developer 343 Industries showed off a huge variety of options in Infinite's PC settings, including key bindings and graphics toggles galore. But this one really caught my eye: an option to bind "drop weapon" to whatever key you want.

"It's been quite fun to use, especially when you're playing with some less experienced players, you can secure rockets for them and hand it over to them and they get to play around with a power weapon they might not normally have gotten," says Sam Hanshaw, live operations producer.

"Dare we say this is maybe the end of betraying your teammates to take sniper? Possibly?" jokes community director Brian Jarrard.

It sounds like a small feature, but I can see weapon dropping making a significant difference in combat. It at least removes a limitation that players have been working around for a very long time. The tech preview stream didn't show what controller button dropping weapons is bound to by default for console players.

Halo Infinite looks deeply configurable, with an FOV slider, options for how centered your gun appears on the screen, even an option to disable the 'speed lines' that appear on the screen when you sprint. You can choose from a range of colors to set the outline that appears around teammates and enemy colors, which will be especially helpful for colorblind players.

Wes has been covering games and hardware for more than 10 years, first at tech sites like The Wirecutter and Tested before joining the PC Gamer team in 2014. Wes plays a little bit of everything, but he'll always jump at the chance to cover emulation and Japanese games.

When he's not obsessively optimizing and re-optimizing a tangle of conveyor belts in Satisfactory (it's really becoming a problem), he's probably playing a 20-year-old Final Fantasy or some opaque ASCII roguelike. With a focus on writing and editing features, he seeks out personal stories and in-depth histories from the corners of PC gaming and its niche communities. 50% pizza by volume (deep dish, to be specific).