343 Industries have announced campaign co-op and Forge mode for Halo Infinite have been delayed to May and Summer 2022 at the earliest.
As previously reported, the game would not have campaign co-op at launch, nor its Forge map-making mode. It was originally announced campaign co-op would be added post-launch alongside multiplayer Season 2 (three months after launch), while Forge would be added with Season 3 (six months after launch).
In an interview with Eurogamer however, Head of Creative at 343 Industries Joseph Staten confirmed that campaign co-op and Forge would be delayed; as the multiplayer beta launch extended the length of Season 1. While each Season was intended to last three months, Season 1 will last until May 2022.
As such, Season 2 and the campaign co-op will no go live until May 2022 “at the earliest” (in Eurogamer’s words), while Season 3 and Forge will launch in Summer 2022 at best. Even then, Staten notes unexpected issues could push this back further.
“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.
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.”
“It’s going to be a constant challenge to address some of those bigger rocks that I know players have completely legitimate feedback about,” Staten confessed, “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.”
The multiplayer beta for Halo Infinite is available now, and the game fully launches Holiday 2021 on Windows PC (via the Microsoft Store, Steam), Xbox One, and Xbox Series X|S. The game will also be available on Xbox Game Pass.
