Firefight is coming to Halo Infinite as part of the December Update on December 5 in the form of Firefight: King of the Hill. Firefight is a PvE survival mode where players must battle against waves of enemies, which has appeared in previous Halo games but wasn’t in Halo Infinite until now.

In a blog post on Halo Waypoint, technical designer Connor Kennelly detailed how the new Firefight: King of the Hill mode will work and how it differs from classic Firefight. The mode will have matchmaking and allow up to four players in co-op. As the name suggests, there is a Hill that you need to capture that the campaign enemies are also trying to capture. A round is won by capturing the hill and defeating the boss wave.

Matches accessed through matchmaking will consist of five rounds, and players will need to score three points to win, which means winning at least three rounds. A round is lost if the enemies capture the hill or if the entire team is wiped. When it comes to respawns, Firefight: King of the Hill does away with the shared pool of lives and instead has a lengthy respawn timer with the option to revive teammates at your own peril. The traditional life pool is available as an option in custom games.

In between rounds you will have the chance to refill ammo and acquire new weapons, before a new hill spawns in a new location. Kennelly said that matches will take somewhere between 15 to 20 minutes to complete, although the game mode does not have a timer.

Skulls also return, with a new, “semi-random” Skull being added at the end of round if players win the round and no one dies. This starts a streak, and new Skulls will be added with each round won with no deaths, but if someone does die, the most recent Skull will be disabled. The reason it’s “semi-random” is that the game will add easier Skulls, like Fog, which disables your radar, before adding the more intense ones later.

Firefight: King of the Hill launches with nine maps total, five maps already in Halo Infinite, three community-made maps, and the new map launching as part of the December update, House of Reckoning. The full list of Firefight: King of the Hill maps is as follows:

• House of Reckoning
• Behemoth
• Deadlock
• Launch Site
• Live Fire
• Oasis
• Exiled (by Epetr0, SandoChokUN)
• Kusini Bay (by Mr Kwatz)
• Vallaheim (by HaiseOz)

Firefight: King of the Hill arrives as part of the Halo Infinite December Update on December 5. The December Update also adds the new Repair Field equipment and tons of new features to Forge.