Halo Infinite Update Confirms More Bad News by Canceling Longtime Feature

Halo Infinite players learned the latest on the state of the game and its future content this week, and while there was some good news to be shared in 343 Industries' updates, there were some disappointing announcements as well. One such letdown was that split-screen campaign co-op, a feature synonymous with the Halo experience for years, is no longer happening. The developers confirmed the feature had been scrapped as of this week and said the resources spent working on that will be allocated elsewhere.

The gist of 343 Industries' updates on Halo Infinite were summarized in the revised roadmap for the upcoming Winter Update as well as Season 3, but the news of the scrapped co-op split-screen experience was only mentioned in the dev video accompanying the post. Joseph Staten, the head of creative working on Halo Infinite, talked in the video below about things in the works, things to come, and things like split-screen co-op which were no longer coming at all.

"Yeah, that's right," Staten said in response to community director Brian Jerrard who was talking about the priorities of the studio in relation to Halo Infinite. "I mean, not only to go after this list of things that you talked about which we're fired up to do, but to work on experiences that we're not quite ready to talk about yet. 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 and all these other things that we're going to talk about in just a sec."

Given the briskness of that comment and the fact that split-screen campaign co-op was never mentioned again in the video, it's evident that there wasn't really a good way to break that news. The rest of the video discussed plans for future updates and futures among other topics.

Halo Infinite was at one time confirmed to support two-player split-screen gameplay for the campaign mode, but one of several controversies surrounding the game was that the core feature would not ship with Halo Infinite and would instead be added later. It was confirmed earlier this year that matchmaking would not be available in campaign co-op either, so it seems the only way to play through the campaign with a friend will be to party up with someone already on your friends list. That may not be a big deal to many who were already planning on doing so anyway, but it's a severely watered-down version of what players were expecting.

343 Industries did at least share more narrowed release windows or dates for things like the Forge beta as well as campaign network co-op and mission replay. Those things will come sooner rather than later based on what's shown in the roadmap, but Season 3 features will take a while longer given that Season 3 isn't scheduled to begin until March 2023.