343 Industries Answer Whether Halo and Halo 2 Can Get 4-Player Co-Op or Not

Halo developers have added to their “Community Mailbag” by replying to a fan’s tweet recently. The update can be seen on Halo Waypoint, which is Halo’s very own portal for all relevant content.

The Twitter user named “Moot” asked whether there is a possibility for a 4-player co-op campaign or not. They advised that this could “bring new life to it.”

Tyler “Postums” Davis – the Engagement Coordinator of the company replied to this in a reasonable tone and said, “I absolutely love this idea, but in the grand scope of the body of work in the teams backlog of need to do and want to do, this one is further down the list. Cracking open the old games to make this an official feature is about as big of a 10 as possible on the complexity scale. Now, that’s not saying it can’t be done, but in terms of effort to impact ratio, I think it’s not as far up there as updating the old co-op netcode, or bringing long lost content to the games, or even making other global upgrades with collection wide updates.”

This means that although the thought is indeed something that one can work with, it does, however, measure up to be perplexing. Tyler also says that it’d be no surprise if players take to mods and customization for enabling a 4-player co-op system on PC for Halo. When the time comes to pull the plug on Master Chief’s Collection key development, “the modding community will be where MCC lives on,” says Postums, indicating a bright prospect.

In the midst of all this, Sean “Scoops” Cooper – 343 Industries’ senior software engineer also dropped his two cents on the matter and said that Halo 1 Remastered’s code is mostly built around two players. Therefore, adding two more to the game would mean debugging and rewriting the original programming first. Furthermore, there will be distinct content changes to attend to as well.

Substantial game elements such as the increase or decrease in difficulty when two more players are added and resource availability for characters will all have to be addressed when making this changed. This includes additional spawning areas and changes in the script etc. In conclusion, the game(s) would have to be rewired altogether, and this won’t be no child’s play.

Sean’s descriptive answer means that there are a plethora of technical complexities involved here. Halo 2 appears more optimistic, however, to this occasion if compared to Halo 1, according to him. Some content issues remain constant and will have to be fixed despite anything.

Would you also like to see a 4-player co-op system introduced in the Halo classics? Let us know what you think of this in the comments below.