Halo Infinite Campaign Preload Unavailable, But Download Size Will Be Smaller If You Have Multiplayer Installed

Halo Infinite Campaign Preload Unavailable, But Download Size Will Be Smaller If You Have Multiplayer Installed

9
Richard Walker

Developer 343 Industries has confirmed that Halo Infinite's campaign, which is due to go live later today, doesn't come with an option to preload, so you can be ready to play immediately. Instead, you'll have to install it as soon as the start time lifts, around 10am PT/1pm ET/6pm GMT/7pm CET - the same applies even if you have the game on disc.

“Hey, I can provide a little bit of context here. The short answer is that Game Pass is encouraging players to pre-install a placeholder build that tells Xbox services that you have an entitlement to the game as an active subscriber,” a 343 employee explained in a post on Reddit. “That way, when the bits do become available for download, you can get the update right away without having to go into Game Pass and select 'get'.”

The post adds: “To be clear everyone who owns campaign will get the update at the same time, 10am PT tomorrow, Game Pass subscriber or not.” Inevitably, news of no pre-install/preload option has had a lot of fans up in arms, especially those with slow download speeds who will have to wait for hours before they can play.

“I understand the confusion and in an ideal world, we would have enabled pre-load,” the same 343 developer writes. “However, there are technical limitations. Since ‘Halo Infinite’ is the base-game executable and is already available for download, there's no simple way for us to 'time gate' some parts of the build (campaign) and not others.”

Halo Infinite's Marketing Lead noted on Twitter that since the game's campaign is being launched as an add-on to the existing free-to-play multiplayer portion, there's no way to offer pre-install. However, if you do have Halo Infinite multiplayer already downloaded, it will mean that the campaign file size will be smaller and therefore quicker to download.

Halo Support has offered a breakdown of Halo Infinite's file sizes in the tweet below.

Halo Infinite Campaign launches later today for Xbox Series X|S, Xbox One, and PC. You can check out our review here.

Comments
9
  • Heh... 343 on Twitter says preload is available, Halo Support says it isn't. So glad I didn't bother taking tomorrow off work now!
  • Can’t even release it properly either.

    Geez.
  • Yourburntstar - predownload not being available is a minor inconvenience. It's hardly the equivalent of not being launched properly.
  • When you take into account it’s still missing 80% of what makes Halo the franchise everyone fell in love with decades ago, I’d have to completely disagree.
  • @Renegade Well co-op wont be available until May, so I'll go ahead and say it's not being launched properly.
  • So what happens for the people who try to play the game offline? Does the disc not even contain the actual game?
  • I assume Infinite's release is why achievements aren't unlocking..
  • I played the first two missions (after a 4gb update, and then the 26gb campaign install... Doh!) and achievements unlocked ok for me?
  • It was a thing. Microsoft had a service announcement for it.
  • You need to register before being able to post comments

Game navigation