Halo Infinite’s first previews are looking awesome, but unfortunately, the co-op campaign and Forge mode won’t be in the game when it arrives on December 8th as previously expected.  343 Industries revealed that players will have to wait until at least May 2022 to jump into the co-op campaign with a friend.

Joseph Staten, the studio’s head of creative, confirmed that means campaign co-op won’t arrive until May at the earliest, and Forge is still set to launch with season 3 but will arrive even later.

“So our goal still remains what I said before, which is to ship campaign co-op with Season 2 and Forge with Season 3. But those remain goals. Those remain targets. And we can’t commit to any hard dates right now, because as we’re seeing with this multiplayer beta, other things might move up in the priority stack for us. If it turns out that our progression system just isn’t working the way that we intended, if we need to move some of these bigger rocks that I talked about sooner then we as a team will make those decisions and will clearly communicate to our fans why we’re doing certain things.” said Staten.

The development team wants to take the extra time to make sure it’s stable and works well, so 343 Industries’ decision to focus on the campaign and multiplayer might have been the right one even if this news possibly comes as a little disappointment to fans.

But 343 Industries surprise launched the free-to-play multiplayer component three weeks early on Monday, and it is already a hit as, even before you include players playing on console, through the PC Xbox app and on cloud gaming, the mode quickly hit an amazing 272,000 concurrent players on Steam.