Halo Infinite's Lost Local Co-Op Campaign Was Nearly Complete

Upon its release, "Halo Infinite" received mostly positive reviews for its gameplay and main campaign. Unfortunately, not every bit of feedback towards "Halo Infinite" has been positive. In fact, many "Halo" fans feel that developer 343 Industries sold them short due to a striking lack of content in the game. This comes down to multiplayer game modes, weapons, and the co-op campaign mode that was supposed to be added to "Halo Infinite" at some point after its release.

While its multiplayer component and the single-player campaign have always been the backbone of the "Halo" series, the franchise is also popular for featuring a co-op campaign in which two players can take on the main story together. The developers always planned to roll out a "Halo Infinite" co-op campaign at some point. However, the traditional couch/local co-op campaign was cancelled in September (via GameSpot) despite users discovering a mostly finished version of it through a glitch. Now, 343 Industries has come out to explain why it was never finished.

In an interview with IGN Live, "Halo Infinite" live service head Sean Baron addressed why 343 Industries cancelled the local co-op campaign mode despite it being near completion. The reason? Time constraints. "We of course were working on [local campaign co-op] for many, many months ... years," Baron told IGN (per Pure Xbox). "There are a lot of challenges there from a technical perspective, and what people were able to glitch into is probably 80% [complete]. But, the amount of work for us to get from an 80% quality to a 100% quality is significant. And the amount of effort that would take right now is not something that we can commit to, and I'm not even sure how long it would take to be honest."

Baron also said that the number of platforms "Halo Infinite" is available on factored into the decision. "There are things where, even if we have just a few crashes — I'm not sure what platform those players were playing on, because we would have to support all platforms — that's not maybe even something we can even get through our certification passes." Though two players can't enjoy the "Halo Infinite" campaign co-op split screen at home on a single system, the online version, Campaign Network Co-Op, went live on November 8 as part of the Winter Update.