According to a new development update video, Halo Infinite (which still doesn’t have a release date) won’t launch with a couple of big features like co-op for the story campaign as well as the Forge level editor, when it arrives later in 2021.
However, fans don’t have to wait for long as 343 is hoping to bring these features to the game via free updates – co-op will be added to the game three months after launch in a ‘Season 2’ update, while Forge is coming six months after launch with ‘Season 3.’
Here’s what Halo Infinite creative head Joseph Staten said about this,
“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. When we looked at these two experiences, campaign co-op and Forge, we made the determination, they’re just not ready.
And as a studio we don’t want to ship things if they’re not ready…So, we’re going to keep campaign co-op and Forge in the oven for a little bit longer and when they’re ready, we’re going to release them as part of our seasonal roadmap next year.”
Delaying the entire game was considered, but the team considers Halo Infinite to be a ‘Living Game,’ as Staten put it: because they’re going to keep adding more to the game, they decided temporarily sidelining co-op campaign and Forge until after launch to be a better solution.
Halo Infinite was originally set to be a launch title with the Xbox Series X in November 2020 but was delayed to 2021 to continue development and give players the ‘Game you deserve,’ as one developer put it at the time. While the release window was announced to be during ‘Holiday 2021,’ it hasn’t been narrowed down further – at least to the public, as Microsoft has trimmed the launch date to within ‘a few weeks’ internally.
However, the latest update video didn’t include any new video of the game just devs chatting on the couch but they promised campaign gameplay footage would be released before launch. We’ll just have to wait patiently as we hope the release date sticks to this year.
2 Comments
I could care less about Force but not having the coop campaign at launch is a real bummer, me and my buddy have played every Halo campaign coop for our first run through, with the open-worldish nature of this one we were really looking forward to it.
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