At last, it looks like Halo Infinite is nearing its long-promised campaign co-op. 343 Industries has announced that a two-week-long beta preview of the feature is happening at last, running from July 11 through July 22.
The beta will include the entire campaign, and is available to anyone who either owns Halo Infinite or has Xbox Game Pass. Console players who are interested in trying it out will need to join the Xbox Insider Program, and the beta on Steam will only be available to Halo Insiders who are signed up for the program by July 5.
Players will need to download the campaign build and start a new playthrough, and won't be able to carry any existing progress over. Beta progress will also not transfer back to the retail version of the game. However, this is only for the beta, and when the full feature releases players will not need an isolated co-op save, and co-op progress will count toward a regular playthrough for all players involved if so desired.
According to lead world designer John Mulkey, this is how it will work in the full release:
"The way we are handling this is through something we internally refer to as 'No Spartan Left Behind'. When players join the Fireteam and choose their save slots to play on, the game aggregates the states of all missions across those saves and sets up a world state in which any missions completed by all Fireteam members are marked as complete while any missions not completed by all are marked as incomplete."
Additionally, cross-platform play will be fully supported including with xCloud, and co-op experience should be the same regardless of platform.
For the beta, 343 says the goal is to catch any lingering performance or technical issues ahead of the full release of the feature, and encourages people who experience issues to report them on the Halo Support site.
Per Halo Infinite's roadmap shared in May, the plan is for a full rollout of both campaign co-op and the option to replay missions in August. Revisiting the campaign with friends should hopefully be a good experience given how we felt about the single-player campaign in our review last year, calling it "exactly what this series needed."
Rebekah Valentine is a news reporter for IGN. You can find her on Twitter @duckvalentine.
This article was amended after publication to better clarify the start date of July 11.