Can You Replay Campaign Missions In Halo Infinite On Xbox, PC?

Screenshot: 343 industries

One of the joys of Halo is its replayability. Ask any enthusiast and you’ll get a story about the never-ending replay of “The Library” in Halo: Combat Evolved, or replaying “Delta Halo” from Halo 2 to step out of bounds and explore this mountain range. strangely Canadian. Unfortunately, at least at launch, you can’t do all of this in Infinite halo.

Halo Infinite, released Wednesday for Xbox and PC, is the seventh main Halo game and the first in six years since Halo 5: Guardians in 2015. It’s also the first that goes against a linear design, the big one. of the game taking place in a wide open area that you can explore at your leisure. There is no mission selection screen, another departure from the tradition of the series, and no apparent way to replay any of the campaign missions (which are for the most part thrilling, I the grade).

A representative of Microsoft, the publisher of the game, confirmed in a statement to Polygon that you actually can’t replay campaign missions in Halo Infinite:

The post-match gives you the option to continue exploring the larger environment, but for missions like the first two, where you are not yet in the ring, you cannot replay from the same file. backup. You would be able to get all FOBs, targets, [and] audio logs, but the main story missions would not repeat.

Initially, when I was playing the campaign last week, I thought it was a quirk of the version made available to critics, which was totally different from the multiplayer part currently available and free. When I asked about this at the time, a Microsoft representative only told me that he was studying the issue.

The Halo Infinite campaign is full of awesome stages and sets and, yes, twists and turns. But the reason so many key moments from the original Halo games – the Flood reveal, the scene in which Chief leaves Cortana behind, the moment Gravemind betrays Chief and the Arbiter – stick like glue, at least in part, because you can easily retread them over and over again. Reinforced memories, and all that. Without an option to quickly replay Halo Infinite missions, they might not achieve the same stamina as the bigger hits.

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There’s also the matter of skulls, gameplay modifiers usually make situations more difficult but sometimes just add hijinks for the heck of it. (The one that doubles the size of explosions is always a perennial favorite of mine.) Skulls are definitely in Halo Infinite. But, despite playing through the whole campaign and exploring a decent chunk of the open area, I didn’t find a single one. You can juggle four save files per account in Halo Infinite; a representative said they’re “fairly certain” skulls unlock on an account-wide level, and can be applied to any of the four save files associated with your account.

Like most open-world and open-ish games, Halo Infinite is flush with collectibles. After you finish campaign missions, you can freely explore most of the map to mop up any audio logs, Spartan cores, or whatnot you’ve missed. But the first two missions in the game are wholly inaccessible from the main game world. Once you’ve completed those missions, you won’t be able to return to the areas in which they’re set to search for items you may have missed therein.

It’s unclear why Halo Infinite is designed as such, or whether or not 343 Industries will add the ability to replay missions in the future, either by way of a level-selection menu or an option directly on the world map. Microsoft did not respond to requests for comment from Kotaku.