Halo Infinite will launch without campaign co-op or Forge mode

Halo Infinite won’t launch with two of the franchise’s most desirable features. Developers at 343 Industries said Friday that campaign co-op and the multiplayer map-editing Forge mode won’t be available when the game arrives. Forge in particular will lag behind “about six months.” The announcement was made on YouTube.

“Unfortunately as we focused the team for shutdown and really focused on a quality experience for launch we made the really tough decision to delay shipping campaign co-op for launch,” Staten said, “and we also made the tough call to delay shipping Forge past launch as well.”

343 announced one year ago that Halo Infinite would miss its original 2024 launch window, delaying the game into 2024. It still has no firm release date. On Friday, 343 said that the co-op campaign mode would be released as season 2 of Halo Infinite’s post-launch content, and that Forge mode would be part of season 3.

Staten said that these modes were delayed in order to ensure the quality of the base game.

“Our number one priority is making sure that whatever we ship, whenever we ship it, it meets the right quality bar across all platforms,” he said in the video. “And when we looked at these two experiences, campaign co-op and Forge, we made the determination they’re just not ready. And as a studio we don’t want to ship things if they’re not ready.”

Co-operative play has been at the heart of the Halo franchise since the beginning. Forge mode, which allows players to build their own multiplayer levels and game modes and share them online, was introduced with Halo 3 in 2007.