Halo Infinite release date delayed, won’t launch with Xbox Series X

343 Industries have announced that their prized upcoming title, Halo Infinite, won’t be releasing on schedule as planned and instead will debut in 2021.

343 revealed the news on August 11, citing the current global health issues as one of the main reasons why the sixth main entry of the Halo series has been delayed into 2021.

“The decision to shift our release is the result of multiple factors that have contributed to development challenges, including the ongoing COVID-related impacts affecting us all year,” they wrote.

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As of now, no official release date has been announced, so it’s unclear how long into the new year fans will have to wait before getting their hands on Infinite.

Incidentally, this news came on the same day that Microsoft announced the November release of the Xbox Series X; previously, they had only mentioned that the next-gen console would be arriving “holiday 2020,” but now we have a specific month.

Unfortunately, it’ll be launching without Microsoft’s flagship exclusive title, which a lot of fans were probably looking forward to when Halo Infinite was initially announced to be releasing around the same time.

Just as with Infinite, however, we still don’t have an exact release date for the Xbox Series X will be making its highly-anticipated debut, so expect that announcement to come in the near future.

There is a lot to look forward to for when Halo Infinite does finally hit shelves, such as the fact that 343 recently confirmed that the game’s multiplayer would be free-to-play as well as have 120 FPS support on the Series X.

The campaign, which a lot of die-hard fans will undoubtedly be excited for, will be behind a paywall, although exactly what the game will cost at launch remains to be seen.

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There is, of course, also the matter of a potential battle royale. While 343 have adamantly denied it, there’s been growing speculation that Infinite will include a BR mode, flames which were further stoked by the Japanese Xbox site referred to the game as a “battle royale shooter.”

There’s no denying that the BR genre has been a force in the gaming industry for a while now, and seeing how big of a success Call of Duty’s Warzone has been despite being launched out of the blue, 343 could be having visions of similar grandeur.

That said, we won’t know for sure until the game comes out, which won’t be until 2020. For now, it’s just wait-and-see-mode when it comes to what more Halo will bring to the table than what’s already been announced.