Why You Can't Replay Halo Infinite Campaign Missions

The "Halo Infinite" full release is finally here, and fans are excited to dig into its massive campaign. For the first time in the "Halo" series, the campaign will feature sections of open world exploration, letting completionists spend 30 to 40 hours on Zeta Halo. The downside to this is that for the first time in the series, players won't be able to select missions and replay them after finishing the campaign. This was confirmed by multiple reviewers and by Microsoft itself. Since the initial criticism, 343 Industries has spoken out, revealing the exact reason this happened.

Of course, fans should still be happy that "Halo Infinite" was delayed a year to avoid the release of an unfinished product — especially after the first campaign demo in 2020, which received nearly universal criticism for not looking like the "next-gen" experience people were hoping for. Here's why the campaign doesn't have a mission select option.

343 Industries associate creative director Paul Crocker told The Verge that mission selection is missing because it was difficult to implement. "We want to have replay that works well, and when you have a more open game, it gets a lot trickier," he said. "So we made a decision to improve the quality of the single-player campaign to ensure that, as a foundation, that it's as strong as it possibly could be so that we could then add the other features back in."

Crocker's comment about the game being a more open world does make some sense. While being able to select any mission at will and replay it is a staple feature for most linear, mission-based, first-person shooters (think "Call of Duty" and "Doom Eternal") "Halo Infinite" isn't quite that type of game. Open-world games typically don't let you replay story missions (games like "Far Cry 6" and "The Witcher 3") unless you make an entirely new save file. "Halo Infinite" does have four save slots for the campaign, so players can enjoy the campaign again, just without all of their earned upgrades.