Halo’s Split-Screen Flip-Flop is Another Major Blow

How do you so incredibly screw up your flagship game? That’s a question everybody in the upper echelons of Xbox should be asking about Halo – and not for the first time.

With the news that Halo Infinite will now nto be getting a split-screen co-op mode, we realise that the bottom of the barrel is apparently even deeper than we thought.

Xbox has a lot going for it. It’s the superior console, with superior services and, yes, it is now cheaper in most of the world. It has a balloon set to burst with games of every genre, that all but the most diehard of console warriors should be interested in. Double down on that once the Activision purchase is complete.

Yet it just doesn’t happen for the house that Bill built. Somehow they always seem on the edge of something happening. And then the negativity comes in.

Even with a year’s delay, Halo ended up underwhelming. And to a degree, that is fine. We could fill a book with the stories of Games as a Service that have launched in an underwhelming way. Those same games are all loved and enjoyed today. Halo is too big not to go the same way. In three years, we’ll look back on articles like these and laugh.

But when you’re removing promised features like split-screen in order to prop up your dreadful release schedule, you know something is going wrong.

Halo 5 was rightfully criticized for, among other things, not offering split-screen in the story. It was promised this would not happen again. At the first sign of time pressures, it has gone.

Xbox cannot be run this way.

Halo – A Sign of Changing Times

It would be unfair to presume something is wrong at Microsoft. In fact, Halo isn’t the best example of modern Xbox at all. Infinite is a hangover from the Xbox One days, and we all know what that implies. Going forward, Halo will inevitably stop being as important, as a generation of negative reactions overwhelm it. No amount of Paramount TV shows will  help that.

But it’s hard to actually say it isn’t a sign of things at the wider Xbox studios, because they are still suspiciously quiet. We’re in the middle of their covid delays – Sony suffered through the same thing earlier in the generation. Game Pass and Obsidian will save the day over the coming months, with 2023 looking much brighter.

But the mismanagement of 343 is hanging over every release from now on. Xbox has to prove they can manage content, especially long-term content. And that means answering questions about titles such as Perfect Dark and Everwild – big titles that from the outside seem plagued with issues. That means proving the negativity wrong.

The Xbox Series X and Game Pass has shown gamers are willing to buy back into the Microsoft ecosystem. Efforts to put their games on PC have scored them all sorts of good will there, as well.

But for the last two years we have been waiting for the penny to drop, and for all this positivity to pay off with what really matters: games. Here we still are, waiting. And reading bad news about Halo.