Campaign Network Co-Op for Halo Infinite is on its way and you'll soon be able to take the fight to the Banished with your friends and family in the upcoming flight, which is targeted to run from the week of July 15.
Mulkey: One of the greatest creative challenges has been in how we support this new, more open experience and the many new questions that raised. How do we set up a shared world state? How do we keep the Fireteam together? How do we determine intent and mission focus? How do we prevent sequence breaking the narrative?
Isaac: One of our core principles is that we don't want to require you to have an isolated Co-Op save. Of course, you can use a separate save slot for Co-Op if you want to, but we wanted to give players the option to have Co-Op progress count toward your "main" playthrough, if that's how you want to play.
We also wanted everyone's progress to count toward their own saves, regardless of who the Fireteam leader is. I've played a number of co-op games where "Player 2's" progress essentially doesn't count, and I've always found that disappointing.
I could be playing Solo campaign, jump into a Co-Op session for a few hours, then launch back into Solo play and all the mission progress, acquired collectibles, equipment found, achievements earned, and upgrades made in either session would be intact. Gone are the days of playing someone else's game while earning no progress.
The way we are handling this is through something we internally refer to as "No Spartan Left Behind". When players join the Fireteam and choose their save slots to play on, the game aggregates the states of all missions across those saves and sets up a world state in which any missions completed by all Fireteam members are marked as complete while any missions not completed by all are marked as incomplete.
Network Co-Op is coming to the Xbox One, Xbox Series X|S, and PC—are there any differences in the overall experience that players should expect depending on which platform they're on?
Mulkey: The gameplay experience you will have will be the same regardless of platform. This is an imperative requirement in supporting Co-Op crossplay.
Isaac: Crossplay is fully supported. There are differences in graphics quality and framerate, but this applies equally to single-player.
What are the different configurations of players/platforms that are supported with Infinite's network co-op?
Isaac: Any combination of PCs and Xboxes up to 4 players are supported, as is playing over Xbox Cloud Gaming. All Co-Op games are hosted on dedicated servers.
