Heroic difficulty has traditionally been the standard for Halo campaigns, at least on the development side. In other words, that difficulty level is designed first, and others are scaled down or up from there. That’s changed for Halo Infinite.
343 Industries character director Stephen Dyck explained the reason for this in an interview with VGC. “Usually we look at Heroic,” Dyck said. “We’re tuning everything here; everything is scaled down a little bit for Normal and Easy and then scaled up a little bit for Legendary. This time, we spent much more time on the Normal difficulty, expecting new players to come in.” Considering the free-to-play nature of Infinite’s multiplayer component, building around newcomers certainly makes sense. That multiplayer is already very popular — over 150,000 players on Steam jumped in within just two hours of launch.
Longtime Halo players don’t need to worry about losing out with higher difficulties. “That doesn’t mean that Heroic isn’t hard and that Legendary isn’t very punishing,” Dyck said in response to changes. “Those things are still part of Halo.” So even though 343 intends to “tutorialize” new players with Normal difficulty, veterans can still play on the level they desire.
If you’re looking to play the campaign with a friend, you’ll have to wait a bit longer. Campaign co-op is coming in May 2022 at the earliest — and Forge is coming even later than that. As for the regular campaign, that’s coming at Halo Infinite’s release date on December 8, when it lands on PC, Xbox Series X/S, and Xbox One.
