You can't play Halo Infinite's campaign off the disk

Downloading patches is a must even for disk owners.

Halo Infinite’s  campaign isn’t playable directly off the disk, meaning updates must be downloaded before you’re able to play it.

Typically, if someone buys a physical disk of a video game, they can play it before downloading any patches. That’s not the case with  Halo Infinite. Anyone that picks up a retail copy of the game will have to download updates before playing. John Linneman, a video producer at Digital Foundry, isn’t keen on this practice.

“My biggest complaint regarding Halo Infinite  really is that the disc doesn’t contain a playable game,” Linneman said  on Twitter. “This’ll be the first Halo  game you can’t really own as a standalone copy. This is not a good trend and I hope reconsiders things like this.”

It might not sound like a big issue, though when you consider that many households still don’t have access to high-speed connections, the downsides become all the more apparent. Loads of Halo  fans are expressing similar disappointment over 343 Industries and Microsoft’s decision to ship Halo Infinite  like this. 

“I think more games have done this but it is a trend,” DrVagax said  on Reddit. “My internet connection is slow so if I could at least get like 80% of the game on disc it would save me tons of time.”

Even though we’re on the cusp of 2022, tons of people still don’t have solid network connections. So hopefully game publishers take that sort of thing into consideration going forward.

Written by Kyle Campbell on behalf of GLHF.