Seven months after launch, Halo Infinite continues to evolve: 343 Industries has launched an extended beta testing phase for the co-op campaign. This is a crucial feature for a Halo title that was sorely missed from the game’s debut. And it’s clearly a challenge for the developer. Finally, Halo has transformed from a linear shooter into an open-world experience with a high level of player freedom. The idea of up to four players being able to travel the map and do whatever they want wouldn’t really make sense. 343’s solutions are limiting, but they work. The overall impression is positive.
First impressions point to a co-op experience similar to its predecessors, but only because of the nature of the first two campaign chapters. These are entirely linear, and 343’s strategy for keeping players together is simple: there are certain “points of no return,” like passing through a door that permanently closes behind you, or starting a new cutscene that fixes the position for all players resets. In that sense, I never felt like the game artificially kept us closer together, it felt like a classic Halo co-op experience.
Of course, that changes in the open world because it just has to be, because 343 has set up what they call an Area of Operation (AOO). This is roughly defined as a maximum distance of 300 meters between players, with warnings starting at around 250 meters. Once the distance is too far, the player furthest from the closest target will be automatically killed and will spawn closer to their teammate. The end result is that freedom is restricted but the team stays together and needs to focus on the next goal.
It’s immensely satisfying to stay close together while achieving goals together. Banding together against enemies, working together, or just traversing the terrain together feels just as natural and fun as it has in any Halo title before it. Perhaps even more so, as traversing the larger sections of terrain in this game feels a little lonely in single player, but is really fun in a co-op scenario where one person can, for example, be in the gunner’s seat of a Warthog and the other can be at the controls.
As for actual network stability, we put the system through its paces by playing a two-player campaign co-op game with me in Berlin and my colleague Oliver Mackenzie in British Columbia, Canada. That corresponds to a distance of 8,000 kilometers between us. We also tested it on very different PC systems, pitting me against Oliver on the Steam Deck (running Halo Infinite on Windows) on a mainstream Ryzen 5 3600/RTX 2060 machine. Of course, although the tests are limited to PCs of different configurations, console owners are also invited to join the party as cross-play between the systems is fully supported, just like the standard multiplayer modes.
As for the actual gameplay, everything worked fine, especially in the first linear chapters of the campaign. Despite the long distance between us, disconnects, latency, and other glitches during gameplay were surprisingly rare. Most importantly, there was no noticeable input latency for non-host players like we see in Master Chief Collection titles. Even though my device is running at almost 120 frames per second and the Steam Deck is set to 30 frames per second, the in-game latency from firing a gun to the bullet hitting the ground was the same on both systems at 166ms. The only area where the latency was visually noticeable was when throwing objects in the first-person view, which has a synchronized network rendering. For example, when throwing explosive power cores, there is a visual delay as they leave hands, which looks odd. However, it doesn’t affect the gameplay as they still land where you throw them, the process just looks a bit strange.
There are issues when venturing into the open world, but that seems largely due to Halo’s bizarrely high PC system requirements. I had to dial the performance down to 60 fps on my Ryzen 5 3600-based system to achieve a consistent level of performance, while the Steam Deck was plagued by severe stuttering even on medium settings and capped at 30 fps. This occurs regardless of whether you are playing online or offline. Of course, local performance issues have a severe impact on the individual player, but since Halo Infinite runs on dedicated servers, it doesn’t seem to affect other people in the same game instance.
However, I did notice some differences in latency between us as we upgraded to more powerful hardware. This appears to be related to how close the user is to the dedicated server, with Oliver having lower latency in North America than I did in Europe. So does the co-op option for the campaign look good? Yes. Is it ready for all users yet? I would say not yet, because there are still a number of bugs in the game. While latency is acceptable, we experienced two game crashes in four hours of gameplay, always during loading. In all cases, we had to manually quit the game from Windows and restart our co-op session.
In the end, though, I had a lot of fun playing the game again. Despite the limitations that co-op play brings in an open world, the overall experience is excellent. And it’s definitely the way I want to end my Halo Infinite campaign run. I’ve done every Halo campaign in co-op so far, which is what makes the lack of that mode at Halo Infinite’s release so disappointing, but even if you’ve already completed the game, the added co-op campaign is definitely a huge step forward and I looking forward to the official release of the upgrade.
Originally written by Alex Battaglia, Video Producer, Digital Foundry
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