Revealed during today’s August Development Update video, when Halo Infinite launches this holiday season, it won’t be with two key components to the franchise — a co-op campaign or Forge map-building. The news is already causing controversy about the title, with many calling the launch “doomed.”
Halo Infinite was meant to be a launch title for the Xbox Series X|S but was delayed after fan feedback citing the game looked far below the expectations of the consumer. “Unfortunately, as we focused the team for shutdown and really focused on a quality experience for launch, we made the really tough decision to delay shipping campaign co-op for launch,” 343 Industries’ Joseph Staten said. “And we also made the tough call to delay shipping Forge past launch as well.”
The game’s co-op campaign is coming post-launch as a free update, and the Forge level editor won’t be ready to go either. During this month’s development update, Staten iterated that the cooperative campaign should arrive during Season 2, or roughly three months after Halo Infinite launches. Forge would arrive three months after the co-op campaign launches, around Season 3.
“Our number one priority is making sure whatever we ship, whenever we ship it, it meets the right quality bar. Across all platforms, Xbox devices, PC, and all of its different configurations. And when we looked at these two experiences, campaign co-op and Forge, we made the determination they’re just not ready,” Staten said.
“As a studio, we don’t want to ship things if they’re not ready, so people can play them, have fun, have a nice stable, performant experience. So we’re gonna keep campaign co-op and Forge in the oven for a little bit longer and then when they’re ready we’re gonna release them as a part of our seasonal roadmap, next year.”
Last month 343 Industries held its first technical flight test for Halo Infinite. The hands-on gave a group of fans the chance to play a small sliver of the multiplayer and the developer promised more tests would happen in the future.
