Halo has always been a game of two halves, and the relative quality of both has aligned perfectly just twice in its 20-year history. But never has that been more true than in the case of Halo Infinite, with the campaign and multiplayer games existing within the same executable but being sold separately, the former your usual paid-for (or, more likely, accessed-through- Game-Pass) experience, the latter making the leap into free-to-play, with a few hooks – notably the cosmetics that are only accessible by exploring Zeta’s nooks and crannies – to draw players from one to the other.
Perhaps even more strikingly, they released on different dates. Not a year apart –a plan that 343’s Joseph Staten recently told us was considered when the game was delayed last year – but separated by a few weeks, multiplayer arriving in time for Combat Evolved’s birthday. It’s fairly clear that singleplayer is coming in hot, with a faint whiff of minimal viable product about its campaign and room clearly being left for expansions. But the multiplayer – “a smaller nut to crack,” in Staten’s words – has had many months to cool, and it arrives in almost perfect shape. Almost.