One of the biggest announcements of Gamescom this week was the news that Halo Infinite was confirmed for a release this December, which was great – but fans were disappointed at the absence once again of any Halo Infinite campaign gameplay. Developer 343 has now addressed the reasons for this, saying it is focusing “maximum effort” on making the game great – but it needs to “avoid distractions”.
In the latest Halo Insider blog post for Infinite, head of creative Joseph Staten goes into detail on where 343 Industries and Halo Infinite is right now. The team is in “shutdown mode”, which means Infinite is essentially complete but the team is “focused on crushing high-priority bugs” and is doing all it can “to ensure Campaign (and Multiplayer!) plays great on all platforms”.
Staten describes this as a “critical phase” and that it’s “important [for the team] to avoid distractions and stay focused on mission-critical tasks only” – and that includes creating stuff for Gamescom. “Gameplay demos and trailers not only take a huge amount of effort to do well,” Staten explains, “they also take cycles away from bugs and other shutdown tasks.”
So, in order to make Halo Infinite as “great as it can possibly be” 343 decided against showing off the campaign at Gamescom. However, Staten does confirm that the campaign is complete and he himself has played it “multiple times” and that it’s “fundamentally super fun to play”. The team will show off more gameplay from the campaign “once we get this plane safely on the ground”.
This reasoning doesn’t quite excuse the fact that 343 Industries and Microsoft hasn’t shown off Halo Infinite’s campaign since July 2020 and will not be including either co-op or Forge mode at launch. Nevertheless, it sounds like Infinite is generally on-track for its December release and there may even be another public Flight test before release.