Playing with friends defines the Halo experience. Whether you’re engaging in a heated match of Slayer or finishing the fight in the campaign with a fellow Spartan by your side, teamwork and cooperation are core tenets of the legendary shooter series. Earlier this week, 343 Industries confirmed that Halo Infinite will be launching without campaign co-op, reassuring us that it will be arriving as part of a post-launch seasonal update alongside forge mode and a handful of other features. We will have it eventually, but the game’s long-awaited release won’t be the same when Master Chief’s latest adventure is an initially solitary one.
When Halo 3 came out I had just started secondary school, having grown up playing endless amounts of the first two games with my brother as we sat beside one another blasting away slimy Elites and hairy Brutes while a soaring score bellowed out of our CRT television speakers. Even today, there’s nothing else quite like local multiplayer in Halo, something that became a legendary sticking point of LAN parties and after school gaming sessions in the early ‘00s. The medium has moved on since then, adopting online multiplayer and leaving behind traditional and arguably archaic methods of play, with couch co-op sadly falling into this camp. It still has a place in the world of games, but major titles like Halo, Call of Duty, and so many others seem happy to leave it behind.
Halo 5: Guardians was the first to abandon couch co-op, a criticism that surfaced immediately after release as 343 Industries promised it would make a return in future installments. The studio kept its promise, but in a way that feels fractured and inconsistent. Like so much of Halo Infinite, the delay of couch co-op feels like one single component of a project in greater turmoil, representative of a new chapter for a blockbuster that is trying to find its place in the world of live service shooters and a constantly changing ecosystem that just doesn’t have a place for traditional games anymore. I really, really want Halo Infinite to succeed since this property means so much to me, but I wish so many things weren’t surfacing that actively fight against this expectation. Maybe it will be amazing, but aside from traditional multiplayer, I won’t be able to enjoy it with my friends later this year - and that’s a big oversight.
Given the game was originally set to launch last year before it was hit with an unprecedented delay, I don’t even want to think about what sort of state Halo Infinite was in back then, and this is coming from someone who thought the campaign demo - visuals notwithstanding - looked genuinely fantastic. This is a sink or swim moment for 343 Industries, and the reception to Infinite will define the series’ trajectory for years to come, and with the last game arriving almost six years ago, it cannot afford to mess this up.
I’m not giving up hope, and remain confident that Halo Infinite will eventually stick the landing, although I’m preparing for a rough launch and some teething pains as the studio adjusts to a seasonal model that a mainline game in the series has never tackled before. Halo doesn’t have the outlandish world or potential for crossovers as Apex Legends or Fortnite, so will need to borrow lore, characters, and aesthetic ideas from past games while continuing to build upon the Halo mythos with new campaigns and seasonal events. It can be done, although part of me is heartbroken that this will likely be the last traditional Halo game we see in quite some time. 343 Industries is eager to push forward into the future, yet with an experience that wants to echo the success of Combat Evolved in every conceivable way. You can’t have it both ways, especially when something as integral as campaign co-op is missing from the package on day one.
Gamers are mean, and many of them don’t understand the struggles that come with game development, even more so amidst a global pandemic. Halo Infinite has been hit hard by these circumstances, forced to delay a game whose development cycle is already overlong and truncated. This year has been great for games, you just haven’t been playing the right ones, and Halo Infinite will likely join the ranks of worthwhile experiences when it arrives in a few short months. But I don’t want it to underwhelm, or arrive in a form that doesn’t do the work of countless developers justice after years in the trenches working away on a property with expectations that are impossible to meet. All I can do is cross my fingers for now, and hope the reality of things isn’t as dire as the discourse makes them out to be.