What is the Halo Infinite Campaign Difficulty Glitch?
Short and simple: During campaign, the game changes the difficulty by itself.
To be more precise, in my case, I started a solo playthrough on the ‘Legendary’ difficulty, when at some point, somewhere around the mission ‘Spire’ the game lowered the difficulty to ‘Heroic’ without any notice or warning.
I only found out during the mission ‘The Sequence’, when I saw by chance the pause screen, which showed the difficulty as ‘Heroic’. Then I also realized that the game seemed to be much easier than during the previous missions on my solo ‘Legendary’ playthrough.
I looked in the menu and on the Tacmap and sure enough, neither the mission ‘Spire’ nor any of the Banished high value targets I had neutralized since this mission where marked as being completed on ‘Legendary’. My planned continuous playthrough on the ‘Legendary’ difficulty was ruined at this point.
Just to be clear: I started a completely new campaign on ‘Legendary’ difficulty. I always ended a game session by using the ‘End Game’ option in the menu and when I started a new game session, I always used ‘Continue’. I never loaded any other save game or played co-op campaign during my attempted solo ‘Legendary’ playthrough. I have no idea what could have triggered a sudden lowering of the difficulty to ‘Heroic’.
Why is the Halo Infinite Campaign Difficulty Glitch outrageous?
First of all, it is game breaking. If you do not know about this glitch, then you do not check every mission whether the difficulty has suddenly lowered itself. How would you suspect that this could even happen? If you start a solo playthrough on the ‘Legendary’ difficulty then you expect the difficulty to stay on ‘Legendary’.
Now, I am fully aware, that I can replay missions and use this to complete all missions that now are only completed on ‘Heroic’ on ‘Legendary’ as well. But what I wanted was a continuous solo playthrough on the ‘Legendary’ difficulty. Not a partial playthrough on ‘Legendary’ difficulty, followed by the rest of the game on the ‘Heroic’ difficulty, followed by a replay of the missions that still are not completed on ‘Legendary’ difficulty.
But the reason that makes this really outrageous is that I now found out that this glitch was already reported here in the Halo Waypoint forums in June 2022. And it has not been fixed since.
I now play Halo for over 20 years, having started with the original Halo on Xbox. I have completed all FPS games of the Halo franchise during continuous solo playthroughs on the ‘Legendary’ difficulty. Halo Infinite now is the first game in the series in over 20 years that I could not complete during such a continuous solo playthrough on the ‘Legendary’ difficulty. Not because I am not good enough, but rather because 343 Industries was not able to make a game where the difficulty you chose at the beginning stays the same during your playthrough. And 343 Industries also thought that it was not necessary to fix this glitch.
I must say that I am extremely disappointed. I can only hope that this post at least results in the fixing of this game breaking glitch.