The campaign for Halo Infinite will become available to everyone on December 8. We think it’s worth checking out, especially since it’s on Game Pass, but it’s worth noting that a lot of the game feels missing. We already know about certain features that are going to be patched in later, such as Forge and co-op, but it turns out that even more is going to not make it to final release.
After players finish the final mission of the campaign and watch the credits roll, they are given free rein to explore the world as they see fit. This is a great opportunity to clean up any missing collectibles and generally explore. Unfortunately, what the player can’t do is replay already completed campaign missions. So all those missions where the game breaks from the open-world environment and goes back to a traditional Halo experience are gone for good.
While that might be normal in most games, it is not normal at all in the history of Halo. Part of the fun of Halo has always been going back and re-experiencing those old missions after the game is finished. Replaying them is an essential part of the Halo experience. Thankfully, it is currently being worked on and will eventually be patched in. So it’s not gone forever, just temporarily. Via The Verge:
“We haven’t announced a date but that is being worked on,” 343 Industries associate creative director Paul Crocker said in an interview.
“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.”
While this is a bit of a disappointment, this is fairly standard for how Halo Infinite has gone through finishing development. The game was originally slated to release in 2020, likely alongside the release of the Xbox Series X/S, but it was delayed. The delay ended up paying off well, because the game that is there is great, but a lot has been left to be patched in at a later point. Sometimes a difficult decision has to be made in development to ensure that a game releases in a good state and the team at 343 Industries clearly had to make a lot of tough choices to make sure Infinite was as good as it needed to be.