Halo Infinite Campaign Co-op Likely Won't Launch Until May 2022 - News
by William D'Angelo , posted on 19 November 2021 / 1,463 Views
Developer 343 Industries previously announced campaign co-op and Forge modes won't be available on launch day for Halo Infinite.
The plan was to release co-op in Season 2 and Forge in Season 3, which at the time were expected to be about three months each. The developer has since extended Season 1 until May 2022.
Head of Creative at 343 Industries Joseph Staten in an interview with Eurogamer said the goal remains the same, which means co-op won't release until May 2022 at the earliest.
"At the time that we talked about campaign co-op and Forge I said our goal is to ship campaign co-op in Season 2 and our goal is to ship Forge with Season 3," Staten said.
"Yes, we are extending Season 1. So our goal still remains what I said before, which is to ship campaign co-op with Season 2 and Forge with Season 3. But those remain goals. Those remain targets. And we can't commit to any hard dates right now, because as we're seeing with this multiplayer beta, other things might move up in the priority stack for us.
"If it turns out that our progression system just isn't working the way that we intended, if we need to move some of these bigger rocks sooner, then we as a team will make those decisions and will clearly communicate to our fans why we're why we're doing certain things."
Staten says the team remains committed to finishing campaign co-op and Forge and getting them released to the players.
"It's going to be a constant challenge to address some of those bigger rocks that I know players have completely legitimate feedback about," Staten said. "But we've got a couple big things that we still have to deliver to fans: campaign co-op and our Forge toolset are really big promises that we've made that we need to make good on."
A life-long and avid gamer, William D'Angelo was first introduced to VGChartz in 2007. After years of supporting the site, he was brought on in 2010 as a junior analyst, working his way up to lead analyst in 2012. He has expanded his involvement in the gaming community by producing content on his own YouTube channel and Twitch channel dedicated to gaming Let's Plays and tutorials. You can contact the author at wdangelo@vgchartz.com or on Twitter @TrunksWD.
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Multiplayer has been an absolute blast to play and a return to form for Halo. I've watched quite a few videos this morning of first impressions regarding the campaign, and it's been nothing but insanely positive reception! So this stings so much more than I would like, but with this being the first open world-esque Halo game, I'm sure there were many more technical hurdles to overcome when it comes to implementing co-op in such a large open environment like this since it's never been done before in a Halo game, plus working from home the past year and a half didn't help at all.
The most important thing is that they've stressed that they want it to be as polished of an experience as possible, and I'm all for that! Forge on the other hand, no idea why that's taking so long considering it's being outsourced, but if the leaked screenshots of the mode are accurate, we're in for the most customizable Forge mode ever by a mile!
I'm cutting them a little slack here.
Odds are MS wanted to hype XB Series consoles for launch and felt showing Infinite would help with that, even though it might lead to some backlash for the shortcomings and delay. I'd bet MS knew they'd probably have to delay. If that was the case, it was the right move for MS because they needed to do everything they could, within reason, to make for a strong hardware launch. MS had plenty of time to deal with any of the backlash after that.
What's the point in making the best new version of Halo possible if your hardware launch wasn't much better than XB1 due to hiding Infinite? Even worse if the hardware launch was poor and Infinite at launch was poor. It would kinda be a slimy move to show then delay, but it likely led to the best outcome overall for XB fans in this case. Infinite being fully complete and eye candy at launch would've been great, but that's not always possible in some cases, and XB has been fighting an uphill battle for quite some time.
It's a shame but I was very happy today to hear Digital Foundry talk about the open world formula and the main missions being in classic style.
I'd rather they put anyone useful from the Forge team into the co-op team to deliver co-op in double time. It should really be there at launch, and Forge is more of a community feature which is most important once the main game starts needing a refresh/curveball thrown at it.
Everyone complaining about the delay would be the first to jump on the bashing train for short comings. I just want Halo to be great again, there obviously issues and balancing that need to be fixed with the co-op mode. Everyone need to remember what happened to Cyberpunk.
Good article!
That's a bummer for halo fans. A big feature missing, why not just delay the game till it all makes it in.
At least there's MP co-op.
The game was insanely unpolished with a lot of optimization issues a year ago, so I imagine that's what would've taken up most of the work throughout the year delay. All the campaign first impressions are very positive regarding performance and graphics, so the delay was worth it since we're just so used to games releasing in unpolished states.
