Halo Infinite players will face 30GB+ download today due to lack of campaign pre-load

After plenty of delays and a lengthy development cycle, we have finally arrived at Halo Infinite launch day. The multiplayer will leave beta in a few hours time and the campaign will finally debut worldwide. Unfortunately, your chances of playing exactly when the campaign unlocks are pretty low, as there will be a fairly sizeable, mandatory download. 

Halo Infinite does not have a full pre-load in place and also has a ‘global launch' set up, meaning the game will be available to players around the world at the same time. With that in mind, you won't be able to jump in early by using a VPN or changing your console region to a different time zone. On top of this, the physical disc copies of the game do not include the campaign files, so anyone with a physical copy will also have to go through a period of downloading files before playing.

Halo Infinite officially unlocks at 6PM GMT today, at which point, you will have to download a minimum 30GB patch to begin playing. You can download the multiplayer files early, as multiplayer has already been available for several weeks now, but anyone looking forward to the campaign could be waiting a few hours this evening before they can jump in.

Brian Jarrard, Halo Community director, touched on this issue over on Twitter, apologising for the lack of campaign pre-load. If you already have the Halo Infinite multiplayer beta installed, then your download this evening won't be quite as large, coming in at 3.97GB for the multiplayer update, and an extra 25.86GB download for the campaign. Those without the multiplayer installation will have a 48.42GB download later today for both campaign and multiplayer.

KitGuru Says: This is far from an ideal situation and it is unfortunately another notch against this launch. As much as I'm looking forward to Halo Infinite, there are some clear issues, from lack of campaign co-op, a lack of popular multiplayer playlists, no campaign mission replay function and now, no pre-loading. It just all adds up to paint the picture of a rough and rushed launch. Perhaps Halo Infinite should have been a 2022 game after all. 

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