Update: Halo Infinite's co-op mode has been delayed again.
Over the years, one of the great pleasures of the Halo series has been being able to play through the games’ campaign modes with up to three friends. But that won’t be a feature of Halo Infinite when it launches next month, and apparently it’s something that is at least six months away yet.
That’s according to Halo Infinite’s head of creative, Joseph Staten, who told Eurogamer that the feature is set for Season 2 of the game. And, as previously announced, Season 2 has been delayed by three months to May 2022.
The user-creation tool Forge is planned for even later in Season 3 — something which currently doesn’t have an ETA.
“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 told Eurogamer. “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.”
That makes six months a conservative estimate, as it may be something that appears during Season 2, rather than at the very start. And notably these plans are subject to change.
“Those remain targets,” he continued. “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.”
But you shouldn’t worry about these things slipping into vaporware territory, with Staten describing both features as something that “we have to deliver to fans” of the game. “Campaign co-op and our Forge toolset are really big promises that we've made that we need to make good on,” he added.
So while Halo Infinite will launch on December 8 with no co-op mode, it's likely to be well polished when it arrives. And Halo Infinite isn't likely to be short on content over the next six months or so. We'd much rather wait for a co-op mode than have one rushed out and not be much fun to play, so this delay isn't too much of a bitter pill to swallow.
Halo Infinite’s free-to-play multiplayer mode arrived during Microsoft's stream to celebrate 20 years of Xbox, alongside the final batch of backwards compatible games. Early impressions are extremely good, with our phones editor Jordan Palmer heaping praise on it after a few days’ play. “Halo Infinite multiplayer is not only a ton of fun, but it's also the best multiplayer mode the series has ever had,” he wrote.
Hopefully the campaign mode will match the experience when it launches on December 8 — even if it’ll have to be a solo experience until next year.
