Halo Infinite co-op won't launch in May as planned
"The reality is that it's going to take more time to land a high-quality, full-featured 4-player network co-op experience".
Halo Infinite developer 343 Industries says it needs "more time" to work on the cooperative campaign and Forge, and cooperative missions will not be available in May as hoped.
The team was keen to stress that while it's making "great progress on Campaign network co-op" and that work on that and Forge has been "occurring in parallel to Season 2 work", "the reality is that it's going to take more time to land a high-quality, full-featured 4-player network co-op experience in the massive, wide-open world of Halo Infinite".
"We're also committed to a great 2-player split-screen co-op experience on all Xbox consoles, from the original Xbox One through Xbox One Series X - and the non-linear, wide-open sections of the Campaign present some big challenges for split-screen that have taken us more time to solve," a post on the Halo Waypoint explains.
"All this means that we will not be able to ship Campaign network co-op on May 3rd, at the start of Season 2. But we are still aiming to deliver Campaign network co-op later in Season 2, and we will share a release date for that and for split-screen co-op as soon as we can."
That said, 343i still "has the goal" of shipping Forge with Season 3".
343 Industries has also outlined three key focuses of the team going ahead. In priority order, they are: address issues negatively impacting the player experience; complete Season 2 and deliver it as promised on 3rd May, and finally continue working on campaign co-op, Forge, and Season 3.
There's also a "Priority Zero", too.
"That undergirds everything we do, namely: team health, with an emphasis on getting ourselves into a sustainable development rhythm so that we can deliver great experiences to all of you while keeping a healthy work/life balance," the team added.
"Priority Zero means that we sometimes need to move slower so that we can move faster later," it adds. "Frankly, these last few months have been slower than we expected, and we sincerely thank you for your patience as we stay true to the priorities, above."
In other Halo news, Microsoft recently confirmed that Halo Infinite has enjoyed the biggest launch in the series' history with over 20 million players and rumour has it, support studio Certain Affinity may be working on a new game mode for Halo Infinite.
343 Industries is still working to improve the shooter, and last month addressed "topics of concern", desync and "the overall online experience".
