Halo Infinite won’t have campaign co-op at launch

The latest development update for Halo Infinite has sketched out 343 Industries’ plans for the game’s release and first year of additional content, but has also come with the disappointing news that Halo Infinite will not have campaign co-op or the creative Forge mode at launch. Halo Infinite is still expected for release across Xbox Series X|S, Xbox One and PC sometime in “Holiday 2021”.

This news will be bitterly disappointing for fans of playing through Halo games with a buddy by their side, however, 343 Industries does give an indication of when we might expect to see campaign co-op added to the game. Halo Infinite will launch with Season 1 of the multiplayer and post-launch content there on day one. Campaign co-op is then planned for Season 2, roughly three months later, and Forge creative mode for Season 3, coming around half a year after the initial release.

When is that release date actually going to be? Well, 343 Industries still aren’t saying, but do promise that an announcement will be made soon – to be fair, the middle of a dev diary video probably isn’t the splashiest announcement venue. However, given how reticent Microsoft and 343 Industries have been to pin a release date on the game, and now with content being delayed from launch, it’s perhaps an indication that things are getting tight and features just aren’t quite coming together.

Halo Infinite was originally announced for release alongside the Xbox Series X|S at the end of 2020, but after a disappointing showing at the Xbox Series X gameplay reveal showcase, Microsoft took a decision to give the studio more time to refine and polish their product, giving Halo Infinite a new 2021 release window. However, with the Covid-19 pandemic continuing to affect and slow work across the entire industry, it’s clearly remained a struggle.

That delayed development eventually led to a multiplayer tech preview last month, putting various difficulty levels of AI bots to the test and (very briefly) testing competitive Slayer. 343 say that the tech preview was a success on the whole, and gave them plenty of data to narrow down and stamp out issues that it revealed. That said, the tech preview codebase was roughly 2 months old at the time that it went live, so improvements are sure to have already come thick and fast.

All in all, this is a disappointing update from 343 Industries, but hopefully one where they have a solid roadmap for work to finish the game. The whole game is planned to be more modular than previous games, and so it’s not the end of the world if something gets temporarily pulled and is added in later. Better that than for 343 to ship broken features and for the campaign’s quality to suffer for solo players.

Source: YouTube