Halo Infinite represents a lot of firsts for the series. It's the first game on Xbox Series X; it's the first game with an open-world; and now, unfortunately, it will be the first game without split-screen co-op for the campaign.
One of Halo Infinite's most highly anticipated features is officially dead in the water, but developer 343 Industries has promised a whole host of other features instead.
Information comes from the Halo Infinite Update - September 2022 edition, which you can watch in its entirety on YouTube. Here, 343 Industries hosts a half-hour panel where the developers discuss what's currently available for Halo Infinite, and what's coming in the next few months. Just before the 12-minute mark, Joseph Staten, head of creative at 343, delivers the bad news:
"We have had to make the difficult decision not to ship campaign split-screen co-op, and take the resources that we would use on that and go after this list [of new features]," he says.
If you're curious exactly what that list entails, you can check the official Halo Twitter account, which released a roadmap for the next few months.
If you want a full breakdown of the features coming to Halo between now and March 7, 2023, you can check out the update video, or road map image, which we've posted below. It's pretty standard stuff for an online first-person shooter: new game modes, new weapons, new events and so forth.
The two points of particular interest are campaign network co-op and Halo Forge. The former is almost, but not quite, what split-screen co-op fans were hoping to get. Instead of sitting down and blasting through the Halo Infinite campaign with your friends on the couch, you'll be able to team up with them online, each of you at your own TV, presumably in your own living room.
It's not quite as seamless as split-screen co-op, but any kind of campaign co-op in Halo Infinite is long overdue.
Halo Forge is perhaps the bigger of the two features, since it will allow users to create and share their own content for the game. Perhaps some especially enterprising fan could create a split-screen co-op mode in Forge, although that depends on the kind of tools that Microsoft chooses to make available.
In any case, both campaign co-op and Forge will be available on Nov. 8. If you purchased Halo Infinite with the hopes of eventually getting a split-screen co-op mode, your hopes are now officially dashed. But maybe you can funnel your disappointment into creating something in Forge, instead.
Next: I am excited to play Halo Infinite thanks to a tie in novel. But Tony Polanco feels that 343 Industries can no longer be trusted with Halo — it needs to go.
