The cancellation of Halo Infinite’s split-screen co-op changes my review

In 2017, the Microsoft-owned development team behind all things Halo began playing catch-up to the series' worst reviews and reactions in years. Halo 5: Guardians landed with a thud, and high on its list of issues was a complete lack of split-screen multiplayer modes—especially for a linear campaign that revolved around four-player fireteams. If you couldn't play that mode online, you were stuck with three dull, computer-controlled squadmates. The critical and consumer backlash was bad enough to lead to a notable moment of damage control for the series' devs at 343 Industries. At the annual DICE gaming summit, an event centered around developers, 343 chief Bonnie Ross made a pledge: Halo first-person games "will always have split-screen support going forward," she told the crowd. Today, after months of delays and optimistic suggestions, Microsoft and 343 Industries have walked back that pledge. The game's campaign is no longer slated to ever receive a split-screen mode for friends to share on the same couch.

“Taking the resources” elsewhere

The news came as part of a 30-minute Thursday presentation about upcoming Halo Infinite updates, which additionally confirmed that online campaign co-op is now scheduled to debut on November 8 alongside the highly requested "Forge" editing suite (used by fans to create and share new maps, custom gameplay modes, and other community content). The news about split-screen does not appear as text in any 343 Industries communications this week. Instead, creative lead Joseph Staten confirms the news at the 11:50 mark in today's video:

"We have had to make the difficult decision to not ship split-screen campaign co-op," Staten says, then confirms this is a deliberate decision to "take the resources we would use on that" to instead tackle other development priorities. Worse, the studio has additionally delayed its "season three" of multiplayer content, choosing instead to push that content to March 2023 to make room for Forge and online co-op launches. When the oft-delayed sequel Halo Infinite finally materialized in 2021, it arrived without any form of campaign co-op functionality. Staten warned fans about the bad news months in advance, promising that online and split-screen versions of the mode would arrive in a 2022 "season two" update. Staten returned with more bad news in a March 2022 update, saying that all co-op was delayed further while assuring fans that his team was working hard on both possible modes. At the time, he suggested that local co-op would be limited to two players, compared to a four-player maximum in the online version. "The non-linear, wide-open sections of the campaign present some big challenges for split-screen that have taken us more time to solve," Staten said at the time. Today's quote about resource allocation brings to mind at least one outstanding issue with Halo Infinite's free-to-play online versus modes: "melee desync," which causes players to see and experience different collisions and impacts than what registers on a live game's servers. After players clearly documented the issue, a 343 Industries staffer responded to a Reddit thread in June to say the issue would persist because "devs that would work on these fixes have been allocated to other Infinite work."

An adjustment to my December 2021 review—and my Xbox thinking going forward

When I reviewed Halo Infinite in December 2021, I did not go to particular lengths to clarify why offline, split-screen co-op matters. 343 Industries had made its pledge, and I believed it. "Co-op" would arrive, and it would work either via online matchmaking or sharing a screen with a friend or family member. Cool either way by me. I now soundly regret this, so I will take today's announcement as an opportunity to clarify my feelings on the matter. At the time, I offered the following:

On a gameplay level, I couldn't stop thinking about co-op while playing Infinite alone. The game's best missions and combat include more reasons to invite squadmates and issue battlefield commands than any Halo game in the past, and 343 acknowledges this by giving you AI squadmates as an unlockable perk through the campaign. If the absence of co-op is a deal-breaker for you—a likelihood reinforced by the past seven campaigns shipping with the feature—you should wait. Don't install the campaign.

I still look forward to enjoying Halo Infinite's campaign with multiple squadmates. Should its netcode smoothly support four-player squads, I imagine that'll be fun. But I no longer have default faith in any part of the Halo Infinite team delivering on promises, and I will reserve my judgment about how the studio tackles the networking challenge of four players in one campaign instance—especially in a campaign that Staten has repeatedly described as "challenging" to bolt co-op onto. So far, at least, two-player tests of the online co-op beta suggest a reasonable experience in terms of latency and other online-specific concerns. Yet Ross' pledge was about a specific expectation for consumers: one copy of the game, one living room box, one account. Now, should you wish to share Halo Infinite with a friend or a loved one, you'll need to go through the hoops of lugging out additional hardware, getting an additional copy or license for the game, and attaching that to a wholly different online account. That may be business-as-usual for many online games, but Ross and Staten alike sold Halo Infinite on an expectation that fans wouldn't have to deal with all of that stuff—which can become all the more prohibitive if fans are adding younger players to the mix. I know I'm not alone in enjoying the accessibility and rainbow-colored combat of Halo as a shared gaming experience with kids (in my case, nephews). Anyone who has been a gaming role model knows that Halo games are a better compromise to share with excited younger players than the brutality of Call of Duty. That kind of co-op gaming is also better in the same room. Presence matters with younger players and their developing minds. When a game gets intense or frustrating, it's easier to pause and be present for a kid who might erupt in anger, sadness, or worse. This scenario may not resemble your typical Halo gaming expectation, but Ars Technica readers have frequently suggested in comments that they, too, invest in the games with expectations of shared play in the same room. I, for one, will no longer do so. I am glad to own Halo Master Chief Collection, which Microsoft admittedly pumped time and money into to deliver sorely needed fixes, and I still return to it to share classic, Bungie-developed, split-screen firefights with my nephews. And I do feel bad for 343 Industries' devs, who have apparently tried to make split-screen co-op work in this game, amid all the other issues plaguing an apparently infinite development period of bolting content onto the unfinished December 2021 product. But my thinking about the series going forward will have to preclude an expectation of specific fun—and in kind, the journalist in me will have to second-guess some of the trust I had for the Xbox division's pre-release pledges. The headline has been updated since this article's publication to more accurately reflect the story's details.