The news of the cancellation of Halo Infinite’s campaign co-op split-screen option has been frustrating – not least because I was looking forward to playing it with my son, just as I have with all prior Halo titles supporting the feature. The fact that 343 Industries isn’t supporting it is all the more confusing because right now at least, it’s possible to glitch your way into split-screen campaign co-op for up to four players. It’s true that the feature is not without its bugs, but in my experience, these are relatively minor and it’s possible to play through the entire campaign in split-screen mode. Adding to the sense of disappointment is how close 343 has got to finalising this feature – and it plays brilliantly.
To fully understand the story, we need to go back to 2017 when then-343 Industries head Bonnie Ross addressed the lack of split-screen campaign co-op in Halo 5, making this comment during the 2017 DICE summit: “When we didn’t put split-screen in with Halo 5, I think it’s incredibly painful for the community – and for us. It erodes trust with the community, as the community is part of our world building… I would say for any FPS going forward, we will always have split-screen.”
The situation changed a couple of weeks ago when 343’s head of creative, Joseph Staten announced the cancellation of the feature, suggesting that – to put it bluntly – finite resources were better deployed elsewhere: “We had to make the difficult decision not to ship campaign split-screen co-op and take the resources we would use on that and go after this list and all these other things.”
The feature may never receive official support but there is a workaround that allows campaign co-op split-screen to work on any Xbox console – even the vintage 2013 Xbox One ‘VCR’. You’ll see how I got this to work in the video above, but essentially it’s all about creating an online fireteam, leaving the fireteam, selecting offline in the lobby, then adding other local profiles. It’s a convoluted and occasionally frustrating way to get campaign working in split-screen but it is effective, with gameplay that operates in much the same way as the online campaign co-op mode test-flighted last month. If one player triggers a cutscene, the game switches back to a single view, before moving back to split-screen directly afterwards, resetting player positions. If players do drift too far apart, a warning countdown appears that encourages players to get back together. If they do not, one of them is killed and respawned near to the other.