Halo Infinite campaign co-op and Forge mode suffer further delays
The features have been pushed back again
343 Industries has further delayed Halo Infinite’s campaign co-op and Forge mode.
In August, the studio said the two features wouldn’t be available when the game released, but that they’d arrive during Halo Infinite’s post-launch seasons.
The plan was to release Halo Infinite campaign co-op with Season 2 and to launch Forge during Season 3.
While that’s still technically the case, as of this week, Season 2 and Season 3 will arrive later than previously planned.
On Monday, 343 extended Halo Infinite Season 1, which was originally expected to conclude early next year, until May 2022.
Head of creative Joseph Staten said the decision was made “to give ourselves more time to ensure Season 2 meets our high quality bar and so we can finish development for Season 2 in a healthy and sustainable way for our team”.
And in a new interview with Eurogamer, Staten confirmed that the delayed release of Season 2 and Season 3 mean campaign co-op and Forge have been pushed back too.
“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,” he 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 added: “It’s going to be a constant challenge to address some of those bigger rocks that I know players have completely legitimate feedback about. 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.”
Halo Infinite’s free-to-play multiplayer component was launched on November 15 to celebrate the 20th anniversary of Xbox, rather than on its previously planned release date of December 8, which is when its campaign will arrive.
Following the launch, 343 said it’s planning to update Halo Infinite‘s Battle Pass structure to make it easier to earn XP based on player feedback.
Halo Infinite‘s campaign has been designed with Normal difficulty in mind for the first time in the series, its designers told VGC in an interview published on Friday.