Halo 3's final Warthog Run is one of the iconic FPS series' most memorable finale set-pieces ever, a thrilling and theatrical conclusion paying homage to Master Chief and Cortana's desperate escape from the exploding ringworld in the original Halo, Combat Evolved. It might surprise you to hear then that lead developers on Halo 3 once strongly disagreed on the direction of the game's finale, with some arguing for the Combat Evolved-inspired Warthog Run it ended up being, and others pushing for a flying mission and homage to Star Wars, of all things.

Don't get me wrong, being the ultimate space opera, Star Wars totally makes sense as an inspiration for Halo, and I wouldn't be at all surprised to hear other battles were inspired by George Lucas's magnum opus, but Halo 3's final mission is such a perfect conclusion and full-circle moment for Master Chief that it feels untouchable. But that wasn't always the case, with Halo 3 campaign design lead Robert Stokes telling FRVR, "one thing we did differently as compared to Halo 2 was to approach the design of the missions with an eye toward the 'fuck yeah!' moments and the 'oh shit…' moments."

That philosophy inspired many of Halo 3's most memorable missions purportedly without much friction, but when it came to the final Warthog Run, Stokes says "there was a bit of a battle over the finale," which is where the aforementioned disagreement needed to be solved.

Specifically, an unnamed lead developer was "really pushing for it to be a flying mission in a banshee," Stokes says, describing an alternate mission where instead of taking the wheel of a Warthog and racing your way through a collapsing Forerunner megastructure, you'd be escaping by flight in an homage to "the escape from the innards of the second Death Star in [Star Wars: Return of the Jedi]."

Coincidentally, or maybe not, the final mission in Halo 4 begins with a flying mission in which you captain the F-41 Broadsword inside a massive Forerunner warship, and that definitely seems like it could've been inspired by Star Wars. Although, I think it's safe to say Halo 3's final mission made more of a splash in the long run, suggesting paying homage to series past is always more reliable than branching off into other IP.

Halo Campaign Evolved's PS5 port has strict split-screen co-op requirements: both players need PSN memberships and Xbox accounts

Update: Halo Studios says it made a mistake and accidentally posted incorrect information about playing Halo: Campaign Evolved's PS5 version in split-screen co-op. You don't need two active PlayStation Plus memberships, just two PlayStation accounts and linked Microsoft accounts.

"We incorrectly stated that PlayStation Plus is required for local co-op splitscreen play. Local splitscreen co-op requires a PlayStation account for each player but does not require a PlayStation Plus account," the studio tweets. PSN memberships are required for online co-op, as is the norm.

Original Story: Halo: Campaign Evolved is shipping Master Chief off into the gravitational pull of the chonky PS5, but PlayStation folks looking to play the remake via split-screen or online co-op should expect some stricter requirements, at least compared to the Xbox Series X|S version.

Halo Studios' shiny remake looks to faithfully recreate the 2001 classic's campaign with a new coat of paint, some series' favorite weapons retrospectively added in, three-new prequel missions, a bunch of skull modifiers, and many more changes. But it wouldn't be classic Halo without co-op, so Campaign Evolved supports two-player split-screen co-op and four-player online co-op as well.

PS5 players won't have a totally smooth ride when trying to get two Master Chiefs on the same couch, though. In the lead up to the game's launch next month, the developer shared some of the game's co-op requirements.

"Just as you do today for Halo: The Master Chief Collection and Halo Infinite to ensure smooth cross-platform progression, to play Halo: Campaign Evolved you will need a Microsoft account and XBOX Gamertag, regardless of the platform(s) you play on," community manager John Junyszek writes in a new blog post. "This enables both cross-platform play and cross-platform progression."

On PS5 specifically, both split-screen players will need to have an active PlayStation Plus membership and a linked Microsoft account. Steam players will only need to link to a Microsoft account, while Xbox Series X|S players will only need an active Game Pass subscription if they want to play online, as expected.

The PS5 requirements are somewhat surprising because couch co-op normally isn't paywalled behind a PSN subscription - online and multiplayer is - and local co-op is such an integral part of how Halo travels between friends and family and generations. I imagine needing two paid PSN memberships will make casually sharing the game on a sofa more of a hassle than it should be.

On the subject of co-op, Halo Studios also detailed how mission difficulty will scale "appropriately depending on how many people you have in your lobby." Having more Master Chiefs running about could impact the number of enemies in encounters, the rank of those enemies, and their intelligence which can affects their aim or how often they flank. Though these factors are also dependent on the difficulty you choose, too.

Halo: Campaign Evolved releases in full on PC, Xbox Series X|S, PS5, and Game Pass on July 28.

While you're here, check out our interview with the developers to learn how Halo: Campaign Evolved reignites Halo's longest-running argument

Depending on how much you have played the first Halo, one of Halo: Campaign Evolved's biggest changes may fly – or run – under the radar. I'm talking about sprinting: while Master Chief only had one pace in 2001's Halo: Combat Evolved, its upcoming remake will take cues from later Halo games and let the Spartan sprint.

It may not seem like it, but being able to run is a foundational change. Having played two levels from Halo: Campaign Evolved on Heroic difficulty, there were plenty of times where being able to sprint saved my life, from outrunning grenade blasts to reaching cover with a scrap of health left.

Silent running

Speaking to GamesRadar+ at Summer Game Fest 2026, creative director Max Szlagor says the team at Halo Studios has done "a lot of work" to ensure being able to sprint doesn't change the game in unintended ways. "There are some encounters that are quite dangerous if you try to get past them," he adds. I can vouch for that: I tried to sprint past the Covenant's in The Silent Cartographer's climactic escape sequence, with multiple attempts ending with me being hounded out of position and killed.

"Every encounter's hand-crafted, and we've thought about that space for all of the sandbox, the co-op experience, things like that," says Szlagor. "It's really just about making sure we dial in the mood, the intent, the feel – we really want to make sure it's there."

Szlagor also points to vehicles now being destructible. "You could lose your Warthog, or your tank, at various points in time. And some of these spaces are quite large, so you want to be able to traverse [quickly]," he explains. "It's very natural to want to get in and play as you might have played a modern Halo title, so that's really the inspiration."

Sprinting seems to have been implemented with newer fans in mind, but executive producer Damon Conn stresses that recapturing the original tone of Halo: Combat Evolved has been a guiding light to the team. "You will have the same feeling of dread when you meet the Flood at certain parts of the game, and sprint isn't going to give you any flexibility – other than having maybe a few more moves you can make," he warns. "But you are absolutely going to come to terms with the enemy that is there, and it will be spooky, but if you want to enable [challenge modifier] Skulls, you can go back to the way it was originally."

Paired with Halo: Campaign Evolved's other retroactively-added features – including weapons from later games and the ability to hijack vehicles – it feels like the remake is taking a cautious approach to revisiting the 2001 original. That scope speaks to Halo Studios' broader ambition – to get back in touch with Halo as it looks towards its next entry – but Conn says the team also wanted to be "truthful" to its source. "We're not trying to necessarily replace what Bungie did," he says. "We're just trying to build something that sits beside it."

"We didn't set out with this game to modernize for modernization's sake. We did a lot of intentional gameplay adjustments, or tuning, or development that actually sets us up with a great foundation for features [going forward]," he adds. "It's a bridge from the past to the future."

We've rated the best Halo games. Where does your favorite land?

As the debate around generative AI in game development surges in the wake of controversies in games like Kingdom Hearts 4, Crazy Taxi: World Tour, and 1666: Amsterdam, a veteran Halo artist is warning developers against relying on the tech for creative direction.

Eddie Smith, a former Bungie employee and freelance artist who contributed to the original Halo trilogy, tells FRVR he saw AI's mask slip while working on the Las Vegas Sphere production of The Wizard of Oz. In order to wrap the original 4:3 frame film around the venue's massive 16K spherical screen, the production team reportedly used generative AI to create some of the art that would fill the gaps, but quickly found the process more cumbersome than it was worth.

"When they started it, of course, they thought the AI would do a lot of it," Smith says. "And they realized, no, the AI is really, it just does what you teach it to do. I look at AI almost like a toddler, an extremely advanced toddler, who's just learned how to talk and obey standard instructions. But they're still a really small child and they constantly have to be reinforced and read."

Ultimately, Smith says, human-made art was used in every frame of the production, as even with AI tools, extensive manual touch-ups were required just as they would've been had humans been doing the art from the beginning.

"I got to see what the monster looked like up close and then it, ironically, pun intended, it was like The Wizard with the curtained pulled back," Smith says. "It's like, 'Oh, okay. AI is not really that smart.'"

Of course, anyone who's looked at an image of AI-generated art for more than a short glance knows exactly what Smith is talking about. There's an uncanny quality to AI-generated imagery that's unmistakable, not to mention a conspicuously common problem getting right the amount of fingers and toes people tend to have on their hands and feet.

On the games side, a major controversy is the use of generative AI for concept art. Baldur's Gate 3 studio Larian found itself in hot water last year for embracing that very idea for its new Divinity RPG, but after facing severe backlash, reversed its stance entirely. After Crimson Desert became the latest example of AI-generated concept art allegedly slipping into the final game, Mewgenics co-creator Tyler Glaiel slammed the practice and said "that's where you want to be the most creative."

Smith would seem to agree, arguing that concept art creation is part of the foundational creative vision for a game, and that only humans are capable of forming that vision.

"They're gonna get a rude awakening because I was already part of that process," he says, adding, "I saw them go through that arc. I saw them realize, 'Oh, we're going to need to hire artists to do this.'"

It sounds like Smith is willing to accept the use of AI in some capacities, and some would argue that its presence is unavoidable, but he advises game developers to have a very strong, human-made vision for their projects – at most, something for AI to support rather than formulate.

"Unless you know what you're doing, AI is not going to help you," he says. "All the problems that people have had in games and the reasons why they don't finish games, AI is not going to solve that. AI is going to help you not finish games even more. If you're the type of art director who doesn't know what they want, you still won't know what you want."

"There is a limit to progress based on price": In today's AI hardware disaster, Stellar Blade Blood Rain devs prioritize "making the game playable" for as many people as possible

Returning to Halo's first campaign via its upcoming remake, Halo: Campaign Evolved, I'm struck by how quickly the now 25-year-old sci-fi shooter series found its footing. Everyone has their preferred entry – mine is Halo 3: ODST, though Halo: Reach won when we ranked the best Halo games – but no matter your favorite, it's likely you can trace its best bits back to the first Halo with surprising clarity.

Halo: Combat Evolved dared to be bigger and bolder than many of its contemporaries at the time, realizing vast sci-fi setpieces while developer Bungie honed in on the moment-to-moment action that strung its levels together. Campaign Evolved takes a light touch to the original, developer Halo Studios opting for a glossy Unreal Engine 5 makeover with little in the way of mechanical tweaks. The result lets that original vision shine – often to resounding success, but on occasion leaving me to wonder whether this $50 do-over goes far enough in putting Halo's best foot forward.

Old Spartan, new tricks

Beginning four missions in, with Master Chief leading a beach assault upon the titular Halo superweapon's surface, Campaign Evolved's updated graphics make an instant impression. The beachhead is lush and tropical, with ray-traced sunbeams adding liveliness to turquoise waters and Pelican gunships alike, but the original game's sharp lines still poke through. I like that Halo Studios hasn't crammed window-dressing into every nook: space has been left for the more emergent details, from grenade scorchmarks to ragdolled bodies and discarded weapons. It's a small touch, but helps to preserve the game's arcade-y side.

Other parts of Campaign Evolved feel exactly as they did. Some shootouts felt like puzzles, in the sense that they were so overwhelmingly challenging on Heroic difficulty that I felt like there could only be a 'magic' solution to surviving. The answer, always, was to fight smarter and harder – working within the thin margins of Master Chief's limited shield to dish out damage, finishing targets before their shields could regenerate and knowing when to duck for cover. Letting your shield regenerate is a rare luxury, as the Covenant's alien forces are oppressive. Even later in the preview, when I'd traded open beaches for narrow Forerunner corridors, Elites still found smart ways to flank and press my cover while Grunts and shielded Jackals kept the Chief pinned.

Aggression begets aggression, and in true Halo spirit I was encouraged to lean into the chaos. Grenades are powerful but scarce enough to keep handy for Brutes and Arbiters, and limited ammo meant I often had to ricochet between corpses in firefights, scooping up a plasma rifle and emptying its rounds until darting for the nearest replacement. The magnum has been kept as powerful as it was in the original, and if you're wondering whether it's still as much fun to pop Grunts with it… Do you really need to ask?

Having handled our Marathon review earlier in the year, I'm surprised by how much Bungie's latest shooter has primed me to play Halo: Campaign Evolved. The latter's mysterious ringworld sparks the same curiosity as Tau Ceti IV, both of which feel like ancient history and the distant future at once. It's refreshing to come back to the beginning – partly to see the likes of the Covenant and Flood as fresh threats again, and partly because the first game enjoyed a more endearingly hammy tone than its successors.

But with Bungie long-gone from Halo, it's strange to see Microsoft lead the series' 25th anniversary celebrations with a stripped-back remake. Given Halo Studios ditched head-to-head multiplayer to focus wholly on Halo's campaign, I would have liked to see the developer show more confidence in its stewardship of the series by pushing the remake further. The original's issues with backtracking and repetitive corridors were visible in the first mission I played (The Silent Cartographer), and given those problems get worse from there in the 2001 game's campaign, it seems strange to offer such a lavish visual touch-up but leave the same hang-ups for newcomers to stumble into.

Make no mistake, I still had a lot of fun blasting through the Halo remake. The decision to add weapons from later games made for an excellent twist in The Silent Cartographer, as I was able to cut through Elites with an Energy Sword rather than play coyly from cover. Similarly, Assault on the Control Room benefits from the Chief being able to hijack vehicles – I spent more time than I'd care to admit trying to squeeze a stolen Banshee indoors to get my money's worth. Campaign Evolved excels when it uses new tricks like these to build upon the old, and while the remake's scope remains on the timid side based on what I've seen so far, there's still enough here to sell me on a co-op playthrough when it launches next month.

Besides Campaign Evolved, here are all the upcoming Xbox Series X games still to come

It's an odd moment for the industry right now, as we prepare for Halo: Campaign Evolved to launch on not just the Xbox Series X/S, but the PlayStation 5 as well. Master Chief's struggle against the Covenant is not exclusive to the green brand any more, to the point publicity is actively using Sony's hardware.

Summer Game Fest 2026 gave us more footage of the remake of the iconic and genre-defining first-person shooter. Amid all the bullets and explosions, a small boiler-plater sticks out: "Captured on PS5 Pro."

Yes, the latest compendium of the most famous Spartan taking on alien masses to prevent mass genocide wasn't even made using an Xbox system. Instead, the gameplay comes from the latest iteration of Sony's platform.

There are likely two central reasons for this: the first is to play into the game coming out on a Sony system and show how good it looks, and the second is probably because it runs really nicely on the PS5 Pro, providing sharp, smooth clips of the FPS. Either way, it's definitely odd, and onlookers are a bit taken aback.

"Seeing that and Halo together kind of makes my brain fry a little bit. If you showed me this 15 years ago I would have called this an impossibility," says one fan on Bluesky. "On the official Halo channel is insane," another adds.

"Microsoft can't even console war correctly smh," a third player adds. One person makes a bold prediction: "A year. I give E-Day a year."

Funnily enough, Gears of War: E-Day very nearly joined Fable and Halo: Campaign Evolved on PS5, and a port is reportedly almost finished. One year may be right on the money. We'll see how Master Chief does against the Flood, first.

3 years after releasing one of the best indie JRPGs, Sea of Stars devs roll out the "final update" and tease a new game

Halo: Campaign Evolved has a release date thanks to yesterday's Xbox Games Showcase, and we've also now been shown what we can expect from the game's various different editions, including one slightly baffling choice to make a digital game manual a Premium item.

Depending on how much money you want to spend on Halo: Campaign Evolved, Halo Studios has a number of different options for you when the game launches next month. As well as the Standard Edition, which just includes the game, there's the Premium Edition – which comes with five days of early access as well as some cosmetics, a digital short story, art book, and game manual. The $200 Collector's Edition includes all of those things, too, alongside some physical goodies – "a 12-inch Dark Horse Master Chief statue, light-up LED Cortana chip, Steelbook, three original concept art prints, physical version of the reimagined game manual," and the physical game (if you're on Xbox Series X or PS5, anyway).

As Prima Games points out, it's the digital game manual that's sticking out like a sore thumb here when it comes to the bonus content on offer for the more expensive editions. To give it a bit of room here, Xbox describes it as "a lovingly crafted modern homage to the original Halo: Combat Evolved game manual" that "blends classic presentation with contemporary detail." It adds: "Featuring updated gameplay information, controls, and background lore, the Halo: Campaign Evolved digital game manual is a nostalgic companion for longtime fans and a helpful introductory guide for newcomers stepping onto Alpha Halo for the first time."

So, you'd hope that it has a cool design that makes it feel a bit more like a digital collector's item like the art collections that Deluxe Editions of games – including this Premium Edition – often include. However, it's probably because it's a game manual – you know, a little booklet of information telling you how to play the game, which was once a standard thing included with all titles – that some fans are a bit annoyed, to put it lightly.

"Don't give me something that was industry-standard 20+ years ago under the guise of it being a 'feature.' If shoving it in a premium version is the only way it can be affordable, then don't do it at all. Really dislike this," one user on Reddit writes. "Oh fuck all the way off with this shit. My god. A fucking game manual and you have to pay more for it? An art book makes sense but a game manual?!" says another.

I suspect that most people opting for the Premium Edition will likely be in it for the five days of early access, making Halo: Campaign Evolved playable from July 23 rather than July 28, in which case the digital manual will just appear as a bonus. Bearing in mind that the Premium Edition is an extra $20 on top of the standard price (making it $70), it's a considerable price increase for anyone who does simply want to own all the bonus goodies.

Halo: Campaign Evolved prequel story was written by the award-winning sci-fi author behind some of the best Halo novels.

Halo on PlayStation has officially made it out of the group chat, and now Campaign Evolved pre-orders are ready to go across PS5 and Xbox Series X. The Combat Evolved remake sees Master Chief retouched with current gen visuals, but Halo Studios also promises more of what made the original so great; more weapons, more vehicles, and more Skulls.

Halo Campaign Evolved pre-orders come in two casual flavors, Standard and Premium, with so-far out of stock Collector's Edition stacked with physical goodies. While the latter is already proving tough to get hold of, the former are readily available in physical and digital form across the web.

What do you get for pre-ordering? All standard and physical editions will come with the Foundry Armoury Pack, with some slick new skins for that Mark V Mjolnir suit. Those who upgrade to the $69.99 / £69.99 Premium Edition, though, will also storm the battlefield with the Alpha Halo Armoury Pack, a digital story and art collection, and up to five days early access.

Pre-order Halo: Campaign Evolved in the US

Pre-order Halo: Campaign Evolved in the UK

With Summer Games Fest rolling to a close there's a bunch of titles to get on your shopping list. We're also showing you where to pre-order Call of Duty Modern Warfare 4 and helping with all your Fable pre-orders as well.

The Xbox Games Showcase just showed us our first look at Halo: Campaign Evolved's prequel missions, which we'll finally get to play this July.

Halo: Campaign Evolved is billed as a faithful remake of the iconic shooter, but Halo Studios is still taking a few nice liberties with Master Chief's first adventure. Most notably, the game's taking us on a three-mission romp, called Operation: METEORITE, set a year before Master Chief's awakens from cryo-slumber and gets dropped onto an alien ring.

Dear old Sergeant Johnson's along for the ride, Cortana looks much different than her original 2001 counterpart, and, oh, you can pilot alien vehicles in massive space battles. Take a look in the trailer below.

We already got a brief glimpse at the remake's brand-new additions via an accidental leak on the Xbox Store (quick, act surprised) alongside a few paid cosmetic DLC packs that weren't shown off in the trailer. So expect some customization options that weren't present in the OG Xbox original, too.

"Sneak into a Covenant science fair in Operation: METEORITE," the game's Steam page explains. "Before the events of Halo: Combat Evolved, these all-new, action-packed missions follow the Master Chief and his most stalwart ally, Sgt. Major Avery Johnson, as they encounter new threats, new allies, and untold surprises aboard a Covenant vessel."

Halo: Campaign Evolved launches July 28, 2026 on PC, Xbox Series X|S, Game Pass, and PS5.

Pre-orders for the remake are up now with a Standard Edition that costs £50/$50, and a Premium Edition that costs £60/$60 and comes with five days of advanced access, a cosmetic pack, and some extra digital goodies.

Here's everything announced at Summer Game Fest 2026.

Only a day away from the big Xbox Games Showcase, screenshots from Halo Campaign Evolved leaked onto the official Microsoft Store and they revealed quite a bit about the upcoming game.

Before today, Halo Studios had only really lifted the lid on one specific mission in Halo Campaign Evolved. That's all changed now thanks to screenshots attached to what sounds like two cosmetic DLC packages called the Alpha Halo Armory Pack and the Foundry Armory Pack, which have since been deleted from the storefront... but not before fans spread them online.

The screenshots include delightfully fluffy brutes, first looks at remade levels outside of Silent Cartographer, dear old Sergeant Johnson, and a blue (not purple) Cortana design that I'm sure won't be controversial at all within the community, right? Oh, there's also the reveal that Halo Campaign Evolved will take us into space combat sections.

That last point is a particularly big deal since 2001's Halo Combat Evolved had no such feature. In fact, Halo as a whole hasn't given us playable space battles since Halo Reach more than a decade ago - if you're not counting the aerial fights in Halo 4, I guess.

Still, Master Chief's been able to pilot alien aircraft since the very beginning, so it's not too jarring of an inclusion for a modern remake. Halo Studios previously revealed that Campaign Evolved would feature three all-new missions starring Johnson, so there's also a good likelihood these space sections will appear during that prequel arc. Though it's not impossible for them to be threaded into certain pre-existing levels, too.

Halo Campaign Evolved is set to launch sometime this year on PC, Xbox Series X|S, Game Pass, and PS5. Tomorrow's Xbox Games Showcase should give us more official information about the game.

For now, here are five Xbox games to watch for at Summer Game Fest 2026

Halo Studios has thrown Halo Infinite a bone in the form of a new co-op survival mode, months after announcing the end of major updates for the shooter and months before the developer moves on to Halo: Campaign Evolved. For now, it's resisting those Halo Finite allegations.

"Seconds into your first match of Firefight: Gauntlet, you'll understand the name," a new blog post from the developer explains. "This deviously difficult PvE mode introduces upgradeable attributes, elimination objectives, and auto-scaled difficulty settings to a boss-filled Firefight experience designed to challenge even the toughest Spartans."

Firefight was already introduced in Halo Infinite years ago now, but what's particularly interesting about this new Gauntlet variant are the roguelike elements. Five maps are connected by a supply area, and between rounds you can upgrade your Spartans to try to prepare for the raging brutes and sticky-bomb-kamikaze grunts coming up.

"Gather ammo and equipment, roll for power weapons, or level up your personal buffs (Speed, Resistance, Regeneration, and Damage) for the onslaught ahead." Then, each round crescendos to a boss fight that's already kicking players' butts.

"Halo Infinite's new Firefight Gauntlet mode is really damn fun," one popular content creator tweets, calling it "hard as balls but very very very fun" and claiming it should be used as "a template for a Firefight variant in future Halo titles."

Even Mint Blitz, a content creator who frequently goes viral for pulling off in-game stunts worthy of Master Chief's extended universe shenanigans, calls it maybe "one of the hardest challenges in gaming history," adding, "holy hell is this a challenge."

"Rumors of Halo Infinite's death have been greatly exaggerated," a popular reaction on the Halo subreddit reads.

Should you be struggling to make a dent in those enemy waves, Halo Studios says you can retrieve an Oddball from a map called Harbinger to activate the mods you'd normally get from campaign Skulls. Doing this also boosts all four players' personal scores.

Halo lead mocks rumors that the studio is chasing Arc Raiders and Marathon with a PvE extraction shooter spin-off.

Extraction shooters are all the rage right now between Arc Raiders and Marathon, but you might want to take rumors of an extraction shooter set in the Halo universe with a grain of salt.

A new video report from Rebs Gaming recently claimed that plans for a long-rumored Halo battle royale - said to have been a partnership between Certain Affinity and Halo Studios - had been shelved in favor of a PvE extraction shooter codenamed Project Ekur.

The channel's sources are a little unclear on how Project Ekur would come out, however. Whether it's a standalone multiplayer release or a bolted on mode for whatever the next mainline Halo ends up being called is up in the air, apparently.

Either way, Halo Studios community director Brian 'ske7ch' Jarrard seemingly mocked the report on social media. "Exclusive report: someone told me the next Halo game is a pottery party game," he tweets, "(am I doing it right?)"

Jarrard's joke was posted alongside a friendly bit of brand synergy as Halo Studios celebrated the release of Kiln, an actually very real pottery party game from fellow Xbox-owned developer Double Fine.

"Hard to remember when it wasn't always super serious doom posting and infighting and data mining and rumors," he says in a follow-up tweet. "I totally get it, especially when it always drives engagement, but yeah, I think we all long for when it was about having fun and shared enjoyment of a videogame. We'll get back there."

Of course, the community lead's reply isn't actual confirmation or denial of anything. Similarly, all rumors and reports shouldn't be taken as fact until more concrete information comes along, although one Halo dataminer did find mentions of Ekur dating back to last year.

With that being said, a PvE Halo extraction shooter isn't the most outlandish idea in the world. Heck, a former series developer even said an ODST game very similar to Helldivers 2 had been pitched many moons ago but eventually went nowhere, and I could totally see that working.

Underpowered grunts facing hordes of outsized aliens, landing onto maps in drop pods, and calling in supplies from above is a particular type of power fantasy that ODSTs lend themselves to very well. Or you could just make those grunts overpowered as heck and replace the ODSTs with super soldier Spartans. I'd be down for both.

In the meantime, the developer's gearing up to release a second pretty faithful remake of Halo: Combat Evolved sometime later this year, this time with a three-mission prequel arc and a customizable Master Chief. Back when 343 Industries rebranded into Halo Studios, it also announced there were multiple Halo games in development, so it's entirely possible (if not incredibly likely) that another multiplayer Halo project is also in the pipeline.

Halo dev accusing the studio of harassment fights "devs hate Halo" theories in tell-all post: "No one works a 60- or 80-hour week out of spite"

A former Halo art director of 17 years, who recently made some pretty damning allegations against the studio, has now taken a Gravity Hammer to common misconceptions around the storied franchise. Top of the list are those "devs hate Halo" allegations that fans frequently throw around.

Earlier this month, Halo Infinite's art director and a former series veteran Glenn Israel accused senior Halo Studio staff of "numerous unethical and/or unlawful acts," including blacklisting and "multiple harassment campaigns." But he's now turned his gaze to fans theories in a tell-all social media post.

First up, "devs hate Halo." Israel says "this just isn't true" because Halo Studios, previously 343 Industries, "only hired fans, and while there may be truth to the idea that they hired some fans who were willing to express critical opinions on the franchise, or had ideas about how it might evolve or improve, that’s true of every single fan here," over on Reddit. "No one works a sixty- or eighty-hour week out of spite. No one risks their health or their friendships or their sanity to spit in your eye."

The proverbial joke about no one hating on [x franchise] more than its fans is especially true with Halo, as each entry and each era has its mix of both passionate fans and detractors. Israel is right to point out that, theoretically, you could plop 100 people from the series subreddit and still not come to a consensus about what Halo should be.

"I’ll reiterate, the studio I knew only hired fans," Israel adds "They agree with you more than they're allowed to say. I’ll also reiterate that, early on, super-fandom in the studio for the “extended universe” was a real problem – the narratives were too dependent on lore the average player did not know and would not be motivated to discover in a book or a comic." Looking at you, Halo 4.

Finally, the long-time Halo dev then takes aim at allegations that DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion) "ruined" the franchise. Israel explains that Microsoft had emphasised diversity and inclusion across the company, but people shouldn't "get lost in the fog of culture war" because he was "never asked to raise one voice or silence another [and] never had a 'quota' to fill."

"My interpretation of the policy (and the guidance I gave to my reports) was that D&I is as much about diversity in thought and inclusion in opinion as it is in identity, about recognizing and setting aside one's assumptions about a group to engage with someone fairly as an individual," he writes. "In practical terms, it might just mean making sure that the introverted genius in the corner who knows their manager is making a mistake feels safe enough to speak."

He then sums it all up pretty succinctly: "Halo is stronger when all Spartans are welcome." Hear, hear.

Legendary Master Chief actor says he didn't like doing voice work for Halo 5's misleading ads because it made it harder to "stay true to the character"

FPS games are ubiquitous on consoles nowadays, but there was a time when the concept was so novel and rare that gamers would allegedly launch drinks at Seamus Blackley - often cited as the father of Xbox - for merely suggesting that Halo: Combat Evolved could be a good game. How dare he?

Perfect Dark and Goldeneye 007 certainly proved FPS games could work without a mouse and keyboard, and were definitely noticeable steps up from what had been attempted before, but neither were quite as tight as the shooters that had thrived on PC for years - your Dooms and Quakes and such.

In an interview with Expansion Pass, Blackley talked about what promoting Halo: Combat Evolved was like during "a time period where people would f***ing die on this hill, probably literally, that a shooter would never work on a console." Pretty awkward for the man who built a console, the OG Xbox, set to launch alongside an FPS.

"Crazy town," Blackley said. "Dudes threw beverages at me that exploded on me because they got so frustrated that I was saying that Halo might be a good game on a console."

PC gamers allegedly complained that you had to have a mouse and be sitting at a desk to enjoy the thrill of digitally mowing down aliens, but to Blackley, someone with a background in physics, he would say: "I understand time and rotation, like, it's going to be fine."

Of course, those complaints didn't make much of a dent on anything apart from Blackley's clothes. Halo became the Xbox's killer app and, more than that, legitimized the entire genre on consoles with lots of small but smart design choices, like letting players throw grenades and use melee attacks without having to equip dedicated weapons. It didn't hurt that Halo: CE was also plainly fantastic, full of creative levels and a suite of multiplayer maps that felt more like a party game built for chaos.

The iconic game's returning later this year with Halo: Campaign Evolved, a full-on remake with three additional missions.

Veteran Halo developer of 17 years accuses the studio of blacklisting, fraud, and "multiple harassment campaigns"

Halo Infinite's art director and a developer who's worked on the franchise for 17 years, Glenn Israel, is accusing senior Halo Studios staff of "numerous unethical and/or unlawful acts."

In a series of LinkedIn posts, the long-time Halo developer says he either witnessed or was personally subjected to "blacklisting, fraud, rampant favoritism/cronyism" and "multiple harassment campaigns designed to provoke the constructive discharge of "unwanted" employees otherwise in good standing" between January 2024 and June 2025 - a few months before his eventual departure from the Xbox Game Studio.

"After filing several documented complaints with Microsoft ‘s Human Resources department in June 2025, a senior Global Employee Relations (GER) representative threatened retaliation on first contact and promised to quash any further investigation," Israel continues. He also claims that "senior Halo Studios representatives engaged in a four-day-long act of harassment intended to manufacture a cause for my termination," and that Microsoft's HR departments apparently "failed to take any appropriate disruptive action" during and after the alleged incident.

Israel adds that "the catastrophic mismanagement of Halo Campaign Evolved created an opportunity for senior Halo Studios representatives to temporarily reassign the art team from my unannounced project and falsely characterize my role as "redundant", a plainly retaliatory act."

The Halo Infinite lead makes a number of other allegations aimed at both Halo Studios and Microsoft as a whole, and in a follow-up post, he also says he suspects that "Microsoft routinely contrives or otherwise exploits layoffs to rid itself of employees who have filed proper and effective complaints."

Glenn Israel joined the franchise during its Bungie days before hopping over to 343 Industries and staying at the company for its rebrand into Halo Studios.

We've reached out to Xbox for comment.

For now, Halo Studios is gearing up for the release of Halo: Campaign Evolved, a top-down remake of the iconic first game in the series coming later this year.

Part of Overwatch's enduring popularity lies in how it feels like you're playing a totally different shooter depending on which hero you choose. Soldier 76 is the straightforward FPS guy, for instance. Widowmaker is the traditional sniper. Lucio arguably has some parkouring Titanfall DNA. And in a big-brained move to appease 30-year-olds everywhere, one of Blizzard's newest heroes can be neatly summed up as the Halo guy.

Joining the roster as part of Overwatch 2's rebrand back into Overwatch, DPS hero Emre should be more than familiar to people who cut their teeth on classic Halo games. He has a three-round burst rifle that's an effective headshot popper at any range, two bouncing grenades that you can customize into sticky bombs, plus a temporary transformation that gives him a fast-firing pistol and a floaty jump. Not to mention the AI 'companion' attached to him - it's almost like Master Chief's in the room.

Countless online posts noticed the similarities, too, with some mentioning that Emre feels like home for veterans of Xbox's sci-fi franchise. "Very nice of them to add Halo guy to Overwatch," one fan says. "Hero Emre or should I call you by your real name, John-117 aka Master Chief," another writes.

"I'm glad I'm not the only one who went 'this guy is Halo' when he has the pistol out, immediately reminded me of Halo. If Soldier is Call of Duty man, Emre is Halo man," a third fan says.

Master Chief, mind telling me what you're doing in Overwatch? from r/Overwatch

Some even took the opportunity to call for an official Halo crossover in the game, which seems likelier than ever with Emre's introduction and the fact that Microsoft now owns Activision Blizzard. Emre would or, at least, should put on Master Chief's iconic green armor, but fans had ideas for Halo's extended cast as well.

"I could see D.Va as a hunter or promethean [and] one of the support girlies as Cortana," one theorized. "As long as Torb gets a Grunt skin, I'll be happy." Another popular fancast imagined Reinhardt as one of Halo's bulky, hammer-wielding brutes, and I imagine that would make for another sick skin.

Overwatch more frequently crosses over with pop culture forces outside of gaming, like the current Hello Kitty collab or the event featuring K-pop group Le Sserafim, but it's no stranger to inviting gaming superstars into the fray, as it's done in the past with Persona 5 and Street Fighter. Heck, other Blizzard IP such as Diablo and World of Warcraft have also been represented - why not stuff from the wider Microsoft canon too?

"The mood all week" - After a year of Marvel Rivals taking its lunch, Blizzard is just happy you're playing Overwatch again

The iconic voice of Master Chief in Halo, Steve Downes, has spoken out about Halo 5's weirdly misleading promotional videos... more than 10 years later.

In case you weren't around or have forgotten, before Halo 5's release in 2015, 343 and Microsoft released various trailers and promotional videos showing all sorts of stuff that would end up not being included at all and in some cases was seriously misleading, specifically Master Chief's relationship with the game's other playable protagonist, Spartan Locke.

According to Downes, it was difficult to perform for these misleading ads because he felt like it was a betrayal of character.

"When I was in session for the game, we also did separate sessions that ended up being promos and trailers to promote Halo 5, and as many of you know, those stories, those trailers sort of led you to believe one thing when in fact it was another thing in the actual game," said Downes in a recent YouTube AMA. "And I sort of knew that when we were doing it, and felt that perhaps the Chief was being pushed in a direction that I didn't feel was particularly right. So, trying to keep the director happy and also be true to the character became a little more of a challenge than what I was used to."

There's never been an official explanation for why these pre-release materials were so deceptive, but a common theory is that the game went through a major rewrite after the ads had been produced and it was too late to re-do them.

At another point the AMA, Downes got onto the much more topical issue of generative AI in video game development, and made his stance very clear: AI voice cloning is "where we cross a line."

Halo: Campaign Evolved is a faithful remake tasked with relaunching a legendary franchise: "We see this as a way to grow, expand, and reconnect the Halo community"

Steve Downes, the iconic voice behind Master Chief from the Halo franchise, has joined the chorus of high-profile voice actors speaking out against the use of AI in voice performances. However, his concern is very specifically related to the alarming prospect of developers using real voice recordings to make AI clones of those voices.

In a YouTube AMA going live today, Downes made it very clear that he does not approve of anyone using AI to replicate his voice. "That's where we cross a line that gets into an area that I am uncomfortable with," Downes said in a clip taken from the AMA and shared to his official YouTube channel.

"I'm not a proponent. I don't like it, and I would prefer that it not be done," Downes added.

While he's clearly passionate about the issue of AI in voice acting, Downes struck a measured tone and clarified that he believes AI has "many, many positive effects on not only showbusiness but humanity in general" - but that it "can also be something that deprives the actor of his work.

"I'll go on the record with that," Downes said.

Yeah, all in all, not exactly a full-throated rebuke of generative AI in game development. Certainly not an endorsement either, but Downes limited his critiques of AI to its voice cloning abilities, whereas you've got actors like Neil Newbon, who played Astarion in Baldur's Gate 3, straight-up saying "fuck AI" and "there's no fucking way" AI could make anything like Baldur's Gate 3. Hating AI is a spectrum, I suppose is what I'm saying.

Downes, rather excitingly, is returning to voice Master Chief for Halo: Campaign Evolved, Halo Studios' ground-up remake of the 2001 FPS classic, Combat Evolved. Notably, one of the project's lead developers said last October that AI is "a tool in a toolbox" comparable to Photoshop, but assured "the people are the ones who are creating the game."

Halo: Campaign Evolved is a faithful remake tasked with relaunching a legendary franchise: "We see this as a way to grow, expand, and reconnect the Halo community"

Just as Sonic the Hedgehog eventually found his way onto Nintendo hardware, Master Chief is about to make the leap onto PlayStation with Halo: Campaign Evolved, a top-down remake of the classic FPS. Putting the face of Xbox on PS5 is a bold move, but it's one made with the idea of further unifying fans of the franchise, and ushering in a new era.

In an exclusive interview with GamesRadar+, two leads from Halo Studios (the renamed 343 Industries) explain exactly why it made sense to release this iteration of the iconic shooter on a Sony machine. "We hope to bring along the series veterans who have been with us for the past 25 years on the Xbox and PC platforms, and have them be able to play with this entirely new generation," Damon Conn, executive producer on Halo: Campaign Evolved, tells us.

"Maybe [it's] people who have never been exposed to Halo, because they've always been on Sony products," he continues, "or maybe they just missed it, or maybe they switched consoles at a certain point, and they want to kind of come back together."

He, rightly, notes that "the original is a masterpiece," and the team's goal isn't to make a replacement, but something that sits alongside Combat Evolved. There are some tweaks and quality-of-life improvements, like four-player cross-platform co-op, allowing people to enjoy the narrative together regardless of their system.

"Halo is really, you know, best played when we have a large, healthy community," Max Szlagor, creative director on Campaign Evolved, says. "We're able to honor the Halo legacy on PlayStation," Conn adds. "It's just paving the way to expand our Halo universe, that's how we see it."

Halo: Campaign Evolved comes almost five years since the last new entry, Halo Infinite, in 2021. In that time, Paramount's ill-fated Halo TV show is the only substantive release that we've seen, but there are apparently multiple games in the pipeline. If all goes well, there'll be plenty more Spartans ready to enjoy them after this comes out.

Check out our Big in 2026 spotlight series for more on the video games that are set to define this year.

Halo: Campaign Evolved may be the most important Xbox Game Studios release of 2026. When executive producer Damon Conn says that this "is an opportunity to pave the way for the future of Halo" he isn't being hyperbolic. "We're building a game in Unreal Engine 5, on a platform that we've never supported, while offering more ways for players to play with each other than ever before. We're excited to reignite the spark that started it all," he says, "but we don't take it lightly."

Halo: Campaign Evolved is pitched as a "faithful and modernized remake" of Master Chief's most iconic adventure, "and a celebration of Combat Evolved" ahead of its incoming 25th anniversary. Creative director Max Szlagor stresses that Halo Studios (formerly 343 Industries) "has been careful to craft the game in such a way that it stays true to the original's tone, atmosphere, feel, and emotional impact" as it grapples with the complexities of recapturing Chief's bounding momentum in a new game engine.

A New Dawn

Recapturing the classic Halo feel is key, because the future of the franchise is inextricably tied to UE5. The studio announced that it was hard at work on multiple projects back in October 2024, with a focus on crafting "the next generation of Halo with Unreal Engine" following the discontinuation of support for both Halo Infinite and the proprietary Slipstream engine.

I recently had the opportunity to play through a short section of the rebuilt, still iconic Silent Cartographer mission. Call it an amuse-bouche ahead of release later this year, a chance to reconnect with the floaty jumps, thunderous melee, chattering MA5B assault rifles, and bouncy Warthog rides that helped define the original adventure. Movement and momentum, combat and physics land in a way that feels as fresh as it does nostalgic. "It's important for us to be authentic to the feel, to the things people loved," says Szlagor.

Despite a focus on careful restoration, Halo Studios isn't afraid of making appropriate amendments to modernize Combat Evolved. "We were able to implement some changes that just kind of make sense," says Conn. "Like adding the ability to pick up and use the energy sword, Fuel Rod cannon, and Sentinel Beam Gun. You can also pilot the Wraith tank. These were all things you couldn't do in Combat Evolved."

Szlagor says that "being authentic to the material that's there" is a guiding principle, although Halo Studios is considering more foundational changes as it "rebuilds every mission, every encounter, and every cinematic" from scratch. "Another opportunity we have is to address player feedback, and look for ways to improve wayfinding and the diversity of encounters," says the creative director, alluding to the idea that a new generation of players needn't languish in The Library like so many of us had to 25 years ago.

If Halo Studios gets Campaign Evolved right, it should go some way to quelling lingering fears about whether this franchise can find a path forward on UE5. The introduction of brand new content should also demonstrate how strong a handle the studio has on the core ethos of the franchise – a key consideration as we wonder where the next mainline installment may take Chief and Cortana in the future, following the divisive response to Halo Infinite.

"We are also designing three brand new story missions focused on Master Chief and Sergeant Johnson," says Szlagor. "They take place before the events of Combat Evolved, and it'll be the kind of mission that Chief and Johnson would have gone on during that time period – featuring new environments, enemies, characters, and weapons." While Szlagor won't be drawn on more details, he does confirm that this special Campaign Evolved adventure "takes place before the events of Reach."

Whether you're here to indulge in some nostalgia, play the first new Halo campaign missions in five years, or dive into Installation 04 for the first time, you'll do it with a larger playerbase than ever before. Halo: Campaign Evolved marks the series debut on PlayStation, and it's undoubtedly the biggest first-party franchise to land outside of the Xbox ecosystem so far – joining Forza Horizon 5 and Gears of War: Reloaded, which arrived on PS5 last year.

"We hope to bring along the series veterans who have been with us for the past 25 years and have them play with an entirely new generation," says Conn, who confirms that four-player online co-op with full crossplay is supported. "There are people who have never been exposed to Halo. Maybe they've always been on Sony products, switched consoles at a certain point, or just missed it at the time. We want to bring players back together."

"Halo is best played when we have a large, healthy community," says Szlagor. "We see this as a way to grow, expand, and reconnect the Halo community." Conn adds: "We want to honor the Halo legacy on PlayStation, and we're paving the way to expand our Halo universe – that's how we see it. And it's not a small thing. We don't and we won't take it lightly. We definitely feel the weight of it."

With Xbox preparing for its biggest year of the console generation so far, we are exploring the publisher's most anticipated first-party games (and some key Game Pass releases) as part of our Big in 2026 Spotlight series. Join us every day this week for exclusive interviews, new previews, and fresh insights into all of the upcoming Xbox games you need to have on your radar.

In a game stuffed with unforgettable moments, the one Halo: Reach mission that throws you into the thick of a giant space battle remains a glowing highlight, but it was apparently a battle in itself to even get space combat into the game at all.

Responding to a viral Halo: Reach mod that lets players enter ship-to-ship combat against each other, former Bungie designer Niles Sankey remembers pitching the iconic mission The Long Night of Solace and then struggling to keep it in for launch.

"Might surprise people that we had to fight tooth and nail to keep space combat in Reach," Sankey tweets. "Higherups at Bungie wanted to cut space combat (which wasn't unreasonable, since the feature/content requests were significant). In fact, there was originally TWO space combat mission planned in Reach. The second was to happen right before the last mission."

This second space combat mission was apparently only ever really an "idea on paper," but it would have had players zoom into space to repair various orbital cannons before returning to the planet surface and calling down death from up high, according to Sankey, who says the section was cut due to "budgets and resource constraints."

"We added the boardable mac cannon at the end of the" Pillar of Autumn mission, he continues, "and called it a day, and then they let us keep the first space mission and ultimately we made it our E3 gameplay reveal."

He adds that "the Halo mod community make such incredible content," and wishes that Microsoft "was able to create official Halo content that was half this cool."

Space combat hasn't returned to the series since The Long Night of Solace, though Halo 4 did feature a couple rad flying segments that would fit the bill if they were, you know, set outside of a planet's atmosphere. This year's Halo: Campaign Evolved is unlikely to have any ship-to-ship combat either, on account of it being a remake, but there are multiple Halo games in development at the moment, so you never know what might happen.

Take a trip down memory lane with the best Halo games of all time.

Cortana, the blue AI that guides Master Chief through almost the entirety of the Halo series, is in many ways a larger than life character, capable of helping to save or nearly destroying the universe. But Bungie didn't give the character's voice actor much direction outside the fact that Cortana had to sound like "the girl next door" in the player's ear.

Cortana's long-time voice actor Jen Taylor (who also has roles in Dota 2, Left 4 Dead, and played Princess Peach for almost a decade) appeared in a Fall Damage video to try to guess some of her most iconic lines. And when recalling the legendary shooter's early days, Taylor said she "didn't have inspirations from other media" when creating the character.

"The direction I got was, 'Listen, we're walking a line here because you're going to be telling us what to do, so your voice needs to be pleasant,'" Taylor remembered. "And they really wanted the sound of the girl next door, somebody that you like. At the time, it was somebody that you cared about and wanted to hang out with, but you're not in love with… she's not that girl."

Hearing that is interesting because there's always been fan debates around how deep Master Chief and Cortana's relationship really goes. Do they share the bond of comrades or is there something romantic going on? I always thought the pair mirrored each other quite nicely: there's the human who acts like a machine and the machine who acts human both taking care of each other. But maybe all the Cortana and Chief shippers are projecting. Who's to say?

Halo Infinite is finished with "major" updates after its next release as devs focus on Halo: Campaign Evolved, fans lament it's "going out on a whimper"

Halo and Master Chief's co-creator Marcus Lehto recently went into detail about the series' earliest days, and has even spilled the tea on how Microsoft wrangled the game out of competitor Apple's hands.

Before Halo became the killer app for Microsoft's Xbox console, it was actually supposed to be a third-person shooter for Apple's Macs. CEO and company founder Steve Jobs even introduced the game to the world on stage during 1999's Macworld Conference, which still had an epic theme tune and aliens but was otherwise very different to the Halo we know now.

"We got up on stage with Steve Jobs at Macworld and we talked about it there," Lehto remembered in an interview with Kent State Magazine, the college he once attended.

Looking for studios and exclusives to bulk up its Xbox launch slate, Microsoft eventually called the studio, which was at that point in a spiky financial situation. "And then Microsoft said, 'Steve Jobs can't have that. We're going to buy you and move you all to the Pacific Northwest, and then we're going to have you build this game for the Xbox.'"

I'm guessing that was creative, incomplete paraphrasing on Lehto's part, but imagining Bill Gates and Steve Jobs embroiled in some kind of tech billionaire civil war over the rights to Halo does bring a smile to my face. The rest is history, though - Halo: Combat Evolved launched alongside the OG Xbox and the series has become synonymous with Microsoft's consoles ever since.

Elsewhere in the interview, Lehto said that he actually redesigned Master Chief nine times before landing on the suit featured in Halo CE.

Reminisce with the ten best Halo games, ranked.

Everyone with a passing interest in games probably recognizes the green man that usually reps Xbox and Halo - for a time, in the Xbox 360 era, he was almost as ever present as Mario. But before Master Chief (AKA John 117 or John Halo) became a gaming mascot, his creator rebuilt his design nine times to get it just right.

Halo co-creator and Bungie's former art director Marcus Lehto recently spoke with Kent State Magazine, the university he once attended, about his long career. Lehto recalled that he was first attracted to the FPS hit maker after playing the original Marathon and was quickly doing UI work for the company on Myth: Fallen Lords.

But what Lehto would become most known for was, arguably, the Master Chief. "The creation of the Master Chief is something that I went through so many ringers to try to find the right look, the right feel, the right stature for such a character," Lehto said, adding that the design was changed nine times before landing on the suit we see in Halo: Combat Evolved.

"And then from a visual design standpoint, I really did focus on some of the things I learned here at Kent State to break it down into the most basic visual elements," he continued. "It's such a key thing to get right in order to not overly complicate a design."

What were those "basic visual elements," then? According to the Kent State report, Lehto took inspiration from seemingly random places, like the shape of an M1 Abrams tank and a BMX helmet, which sort of makes sense when you see Master Chief's orange-visored helmet by itself.

"It took forever, but I wasn't going to stop because I had learned through the program here that you don't stop when you're just on your first iteration," Lehto said. (Good spot, Gamespot!)

Of course, the Master Chief's gone through more redesigns since 2001's seminal shooter. Almost every single sequel has made adjustments big and small to his super soldier armor, and next year's remake, Halo: Campaign Evolved, is set to once again reimagine the design 25 years later.

Halo co-creator says Campaign Evolved "looks and feels genuine": "It's gorgeous in a way I wish we could have built it originally back in 2001"

Over the years, Halo has become a massive part of my life. Like many, I grew up with the franchise and have distinct memories of staying up later than I'd like to admit, playing multiplayer with my friends, or trying our best to beat any given level on Legendary with them. As I've gotten older and much of my life has changed, one thing has remained the same: staying up unreasonably late to play through the Halo campaign with my buddies. This is largely thanks to Halo: The Master Chief Collection, developed by Halo Studios.

Lots of people have yearly traditions that they look forward to. Sometimes it can be as simple: a birthday, an anniversary, or getting together to watch a season opener for your favorite sports team. I'm no different in this regard, too, but instead of getting together to yell at Matthew Stafford on the Los Angeles Rams in his opening game, my friends and I instead yell at one another while trying to complete the entire Master Chief Collection on Legendary.

As one might imagine, this is no easy task because some of the best Halo games are significantly harder than others (I'm looking at you, Halo 2). Still, the hardest thing about all of this is scheduling time to do so. If getting older has taught me one thing, it's that getting any group of adults together is a task all on its own. Yet we always manage to dedicate some time out of the year to run through everything The Master Chief Collection has to offer.

Back in the fight

Halo, in a lot of ways, is timeless. When the series originally came out, it was during a very formative time in our young lives. It showed us what console gaming can be, and how good storytelling can stay with you for years. In many ways, replaying this with friends is a lot like rewatching your favorite movie with someone who enjoys it as much as you do. Even though you know exactly how it ends and what twists and turns are waiting for you, they still hit as hard as they initially did the first time you played it.

Every time we embark on this yearly tradition, it's usually done in chronological order. The opening of Halo Reach sets the tone for what's to be expected. It's an emotional journey that captivates us all the way to Halo 4. By the time we get to the end of Reach, we're usually emotional wrecks, having witnessed some of our favorite characters in the series die one by one. But despite the emotional damage, the ending is always the best part of the game for us because it always becomes a challenge to see which one of us will survive the longest.

The challenges don't end there. As we make our way through the games, almost like clockwork, we always fall into these role-play situations where we pretend to be in the UNSC fighting whatever the Covenant or Flood is throwing at us. Because of this, it makes it significantly funnier whenever one of us is shot in the head by a Jackal or beaten to death by a Brute. Most of these deaths are followed by a salt in the wound quip – funny for those of us who see the calamity from a safe distance, at least.

But nothing will bond you and your friends quicker than dying repeatedly to a Brute Chieftain with a Gravity Hammer, or a white armored elite chasing you down with an Energy Sword on Installation 04. Jokes about dying stop being funny, and now you all have a common enemy whom you all equally hate and want to see dead. Finally seeing them bite the dust is a feeling that never gets old.

Halo naturally has a lot of fantastic over-the-top moments that are only elevated when playing with a friend. Nothing will make you feel more like an action hero than blowing up a bridge with your buddies to stop the Covenant from closing in on you in Halo: ODST, or by outrunning an exploding planet like you do at the end of both Halo Combat Evolved and Halo 3. Some of these sequences feel impossible – but so is trying not to grin when Forward Unto Dawn plays out.

Halo: The Master Chief Collection has a lot to offer. Each story has its own unique identity that makes the games well worth playing at least once. The Halo series is a giant space opera, and there are a lot of little things to get attached to. Despite knowing that Sergeant Johnson is going to die at the end of Halo 3, it still hits all of us like a truck when it inevitably happens. I have just as much fun playing through these games now as an adult as I did when I was a child when they first came out. Playing through the entire collection with my friend group is something we look forward to doing every year, and we've already made early plans to do it again in 2026. If you haven't had the pleasure of going through The Master Chief Collection with your friends, it's something I'd highly recommend – you'll be in for one hell of a time.

As the Xbox Series X turns five, we've rounded up the best Xbox Series X games you can play today

Halo Infinite is apparently not so limitless, as community manager John Junyszek announced in Halo's November community livestream that the game's next major update will also be its last. Fans of the 2021 first-person shooter seem resigned to their newly finite existences.

"This upcoming Halo Infinite update will be our last planned major content release. And that's going to be Operation Infinite. And it's… got some good stuff in it," Junyszek says.

He makes it clear that Halo: Campaign Evolved, the developer's remake of the memorable 2001 shooter Halo: Combat Evolved, is "kind of the future of where our studio is starting to invest more and more of its time."

"We did kind of want to let people know about that," Junyszek continues. "We're really focused on now doing Halo: Campaign Evolved, and now getting Halo Infinite – all the stuff that was in the pipeline, out to our players. And a lot of that will be customization."

"So for the final season update," says one commenter on YouTube, "we just get shop items and the ugliest armors for the season pass."

"Going out on a whimper," the same user says in a second comment.

"The sad thing is," says a popular reaction on Reddit, "4 years of 'support' would've been great! But much of that 'support' was stuff that should've been there at launch. Too little too late."

Halo developers have been struggling against player expectations for a while; despite some fans always acting hungry for more Infinite, the past few years of layoffs at Microsoft have seemingly discouraged devs from maintaining the game rather than devoting themselves to new projects. Now, players are like parents who can't believe the Halo studio's poor manners – not mad, just disappointed.

OG Halo CE dev reacts to the remake's new sprint: "If you make a game mechanic optional you have abandoned your post, thrown up your hands and admitted you have no vision."

Halo 5 just crossed its 10th anniversary, and to celebrate, a pair of former Halo designers are talking about why the series' earlier cinematics are so much better.

Released in 2015, history hasn't been especially kind to Halo 5, and its flashy, cinematic, ultimately controversial opening scene is either seen as a standout in an otherwise lackluster single-player campaign, or a glitzy prophecy of what would follow. Either way, original Halo: Combat Evolved designer Jaime Griesemer and Halo 3 campaign designer Niles Sankey have thoughts on how it compares to older Halo cinematics.

"For me, this was the moment when Halo went from being a War Story with futuristic elements to a Sci-fi Superhero Story," said Griesemer on Twitter.

"It's an impossible shot. The camera flies around and through objects, time speeds up and slows down at random, the camera anticipates events that are scripted instead of reacting to capture them, there is no sense of space or proximity or cause and effect..."

There comes a time in any beloved franchise, whether it's in film, TV, or video games, that fans feel like it lost its soul. That moment, for most Halo diehards, is the Halo 5 opening sequence.

"It's like they gave the camera to Superman," added Griesemer. "That's all fine in a Superhero Story, but it breaks the stakes of a War Story. If the audience perspective is not grounded, then the stakes of the story are not grounded. It's exciting and flashy, but has as much impact as a kid playing with dolls."

Echoing this sentiment in a different framing, Sankey argued that video cinematics shouldn't outdo the actual gameplay, sharing this insight from his time at Bungie.

"A few of us at Bungie had an unspoken rule about Halo cinematics: Never make the player in the cinematic feel more 'badass' than the actual game," said Sankey. "We don't want players thinking 'I wish that's how the game actually felt'. Cinematics should serve the gameplay, not compete w it."

Indeed, one of the most enduring and persistent paint points about Halo 5 is that the opening cinematic writes a check that the ensuing campaign can't cash. And that appears to be precisely Sankey's point.

"Can you point me to the gameplay clip where players: Airdrop in, slide half way down a mountain, run through rocks, parkour a Wraith, jump into a Phantom while parkouring a Jackal, and then karate roundhouse eject an Elite out the side? I'd love to see that," he wrote in a follow-up tweet.

I'd love to see that too.

Halo co-creator says Campaign Evolved "looks and feels genuine": "It's gorgeous in a way I wish we could have built it originally back in 2001"

Ensemble Studios' (of Age of Empires and Halo Wars fame) Halo MMO was apparently killed to secure an Xbox executive's bonus, according to one former developer.

Cast your mind back to Halo's golden years in 2008 - Halo 3 just became a juggernaut, Ensemble Studios' Halo Wars strategy game was on the horizon, and whispers about the same studio working on an MMO set in the sci-fi universe were in the air. However, things took a bit of a nosedive when Microsoft unceremoniously shut down Ensemble.

Now, Sandy Peterson, a prolific developer who worked on everything from Doom and Quake to Age of Empires and the mysterious Halo MMO, has taken to social media to dish on the project.

"In 2008, Ensemble Studios started planning a gigantic MMO set in the Halo universe," the former dev recently tweeted. "We code-named it Titan. It was to take place tens of thousands of years ago, before the Halos were set off and destroyed all sentient life in the Galaxy. I was in charge of the universe-building - planet histories, alien species, etc."

Peterson explains that players could choose to take control of the Forerunners, the ancient civilization that built the Halo rings, or "their enemies, the Covenant." Not to be an insufferable lore nerd, but the Covenant didn't exist as we know them during the Forerunner era, so perhaps the MMO would've found a way to repurpose already recognizable Halo aliens, like the elites and grunts, into a faction with a new name.

And it sounds like the ambitious project was pretty far along, too, as the team "had quest lines all worked out, homeworlds for the species, etc." Microsoft had even projected that it would make $1.1 billion, at the very minimum, but "it was all brought to naught when Don Mattrick realized that his stack bonus was based on income MS had from games in 3 years."

"You see, we estimated 3.5 years to finish Titan if we did it right," Peterson continued. "And that's beyond Mattrick’s drop-dead date. So by firing ALL of Ensemble, he didn't have to pay for our expensive studio for 3 years, and he didn't care about Titan. All he lost was a game studio who never sold less than 3 million copies of everything we made. I don't believe he did justice to Microsoft stockholders but hey - Don started as an EA hatchet man so what would you expect?"

Another Ensemble developer, Dusty Monk, said the project was killed because Microsoft wanted to appeal to a more casual audience and wasn't too receptive to "this very expensive, very long, and very protracted $90 million USD project we were working on"... back in 2010.

Age of Empires eventually came back under a new studio called World's Edge, and multiple other companies were spun up by ex-Ensemble talent. Though that Halo MMO never recovered from the fallout, at least we have these alleged Titan screenshots to puff on for copium.

Halo co-creator says Campaign Evolved "looks and feels genuine": "It's gorgeous in a way I wish we could have built it originally back in 2001"

It may have taken a few years, but we finally know the real name for The Weapon, Cortana's replacement AI introduced in Halo Infinite. Designed as a clone of Master Chief's former companion, The Weapon has operated under her pseudonym until now.

During this year's Halo World Championship, Jen Taylor, the voice of Cortana and The Weapon, participated in reading passages of upcoming novel Halo: Edge of Dawn by Kelly Gay, with Steve Downes, Master Chief's long-running video game performer. The excerpt revealed the AI's real name: "I am UNSC AI serial number CN0435-0, name designation Joyeuse."

That's pronounced 'joy-oose,' if you're finding it tricky. There was applause, since we've been waiting for this since 2021. Joyeuse is the name of a sword wielded by Carlonginian Emperor Charlemagne, a significant political force in Europe through the mid-to-late 700s. While that may seem an obtuse reference, it carries on a lineage started within Bungie back before the Covenant.

The Weapon’s New Name Revealed at HCS Worlds 2025 from r/halo

Marathon, Bungie's futuristic FPS from 1994 and very much a precursor to Halo, contained an AI named Durandal, named for a word carried by Roland, a French Paladin with ties to Charlemagne. Cortana, then, comes from the blade of Ogier, another French Paladin. Charlemagne has clearly remained a benchmark despite Halo Studios (formerly known as 343 Industries) taking over the mainline games from Bungie some years ago now.

While it is a fun reveal, we've no real clue when it's going to matter. Several Halo projects are in the works, with Halo: Campaign Evolved, a full remake of the first game in Unreal Engine 5 on PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X/S and PC, coming next year. Future installments are expected to be multi-platform from now on as well. Whenever Halo 7 arrives, you can bet we're all saying Joyeuse in our heads until it's properly made canon.

OG Halo CE dev reacts to the remake's new sprint: "If you make a game mechanic optional you have abandoned your post, thrown up your hands and admitted you have no vision"

Former Halo lead Jaime Griesemer has commented on the debate about whether Halo should have a sprint function after it was retroactively added into Combat Evolved's upcoming remake.

Halo: Campaign Evolved was announced last week, joining 2025's Gears of War: Reloaded in returning to a beloved Xbox series. However, Campaign Evolved is not an exact remake, as the game adds things like sprinting and changes to the level design. Former Halo lead Jaime Griesemer is wary of some of the changes, including the removal of some rocks that were intentionally placed so that you couldn't destroy your enemies from the safety of a Warthog, calling Campaign Evolved "like the dance remix of a classic song that skips the intro and the bridge and just thumps the chorus over and over."

In a thread on Twitter, Griesemer says, "Right, I'm going to settle this question once and for all in a definitive thread on the topic…'Should Halo have sprint?'" before following up with the type of rambling you'd find on a log in a horror game. "That's an absurd question. 'Should' implies a moral imperative. Game mechanics have no inherent moral value. This question has no legitimate answer and any attempt at answering it will result in a phone booth full of badgers."

Griesemer elaborates, "No mechanic makes a game unequivocally "better" because games are systems and changing a system is always a trade-off between positive and negative consequences." He then explains some of these in his view, saying that a positive aspect of sprinting is that it "allows players to get where they want to go in less time," and that "impatient" players want it for tasks like "back-tracking or they've played before."

But Griesemer adds that "sprinting breaks mission pacing and the sense of exploring a mysterious environment", and it "makes vehicles less useful and important." He cites playtests where "players complete an entire vehicle mission on foot because sprint makes it less obvious they are doing the wrong thing."

However, he doesn't believe that giving players the option to turn sprint off – the way Campaign Evolved will – is a good compromise, saying, "If you make a game mechanic optional you have abandoned your post, thrown up your hands and admitted you have no vision and that someone else should design the game. In this case, everyone else should design the game."

Halo co-creator says Campaign Evolved "looks and feels genuine": "It's gorgeous in a way I wish we could have built it originally back in 2001"

Halo: Campaign Evolved was officially revealed last week, and it's got the community divided. It's the same story we've seen with numerous other recent remakes, as some fans love the new, high-fidelity look while others think it's lost the soul of the original. But those new visuals have one very important endorsement: the approval of Halo's co-creator, Marcus Lehto.

"My honest impression of seeing the new Halo Campaign Evolved is this," Lehto says in a tweet. "I absolutely love where this is going. The game looks and feels genuine. It's gorgeous in a way I wish we could have built it originally back in 2001. It warms my heart to see Halo CE like this."

Lehto served as art director on the first three Halo games and is credited as the co-creator of the franchise as a whole, having designed the Master Chief, the Warthog, and many of the other iconic elements that give the series its visual identity. (He also served as creative director on Reach.) If anyone knows how Halo should look, it's Lehto.

Of course, Lehto wasn't the only one who worked on the OG Halo, and designer Jaime Griesemer has been substantially less positive about Campaign Evolved, likening it to a "dance remix of a classic song that skips the intro and the bridge and just thumps the chorus over and over." In an era where we're seeing numerous approaches to remaking a classic, I guess there's no pleasing everyone.

Halo: Campaign Evolved hands-on: Is this Unreal Engine 5 remake a bizzaro world Combat Evolved or an "opportunity to pave the way for the future of Halo"?

A game designer who worked on 2001's Halo: Combat Evolved isn't taking kindly to some of the remake's changes, specifically the removal of a couple of rocks.

Halo: Campaign Evolved was announced last night at HCS 2025, and Halo Studios decided to reveal it to the world by showing off arguably the game's most beloved mission, The Silent Cartographer, which sees good old John Halo go from driving around a sunny beach to shoot outs in claustrophobic alien interiors and back again.

But OG Halo: CE designer Jaime Griesemer didn't have nice things to say about a 13-minute walkthrough of the remade mission posted online.

"You aren't supposed to be able to take the Warthog up to steamroll the Hunters," Griesemer tweeted. "I intentionally placed rocks in the way so you had to fight them on foot. When you can just smash the crates out of the way it wrecks the encounters. But the worst part? They put trees in the landing area of the WooHoo Jump. Lame."

He's of course referring to a moment in the demo where our Master Chief takes a machine-gun-fronted vehicle into an encounter with two Hunters (Halo's big hulking baddies) and wrecks them pretty quickly, which arguably makes the moment less of an event and speeds up the entire mission.

"It's like the dance remix of a classic song that skips the intro and the bridge and just thumps the chorus over and over," he added.

On the other end of the spectrum is Halo co-creator and frequent art director Marcus Lehto, who said it's "good to see the new and familiar faces building the Halo team" and "the explorations look fantastic."

Halo: Campaign Evolved is being billed as a faithful remake built on top of some original code, but Halo Studios has also been open about how they're updating certain missions to make them fit for four-player online co-op and to remove very 2001 quirks, specifically in The Library. So, it's hard to tell if the small change makes the game worse or just... different without seeing the full package sometime next year.

Halo: Campaign Evolved hands-on: Is this Unreal Engine 5 remake a bizzaro world Combat Evolved or an "opportunity to pave the way for the future of Halo"?

PlayStation is getting its first ever Halo game in the form of the newly unveiled Halo: Campaign Evolved - a remake of the landmark first shooter in the series, also coming to Xbox and PC - and it sounds like the era of exclusivity is over for Master Chief.

Halo: CE is probably Xbox's most iconic game, but seeing the PS5 logo pop up in its reveal isn't too surprising after the console maker ported former exclusives like Forza Horizon 5 and Sea of Thieves to its former rival's platform. And it's just going to get more common, according to Halo Studios.

Speaking at a livestreamed panel from HCS 2025, community director Brian Jarrard said "Halo is on PlayStation going forward, starting with Halo: Campaign Evolved," perhaps hinting that there's more in the works apart from 2026's remake. "It's just gonna mean more Halo for everyone. It's really a new era."

All that talk was only bolstered by the official PlayStation Blog in a post also penned by Jarrard, aka ske7ch. "As the Master Chief once said: 'I think we're just getting started.'"

"For some of you, it'll be a chance to revisit a classic in a completely new light. For others, it'll be the very first time setting foot on the ring and discovering what makes Halo unforgettable," the blog continued.

Halo coming to new platforms shouldn't be too dramatic a surprise as Xbox president Sarah Bond just recently called exclusive games outdated because people "want to be able to play with your friends anywhere regardless of what they're on."

Halo: Campaign Evolved hands-on: Is this Unreal Engine 5 remake a bizzaro world Combat Evolved or an "opportunity to pave the way for the future of Halo"?

It's finally happening. Halo is going to be playable on PlayStation. This is the sort of thing which would have been utterly unimaginable when Combat Evolved landed nearly 25 years ago, that Microsoft would have ever allowed Master Chief to wander beyond the borders of the Xbox ecosystem. Everything changes with time. After all, it would have been equally unimaginable back then to think that Halo would ever be in the position that it is today – struggling for relevancy in a genre it once revolutionised.

What we're looking at here is Halo: Campaign Evolved. It's the original 2001 campaign reimagined in Unreal Engine 5. A remake built atop the legacy codebase, an engineering trick The Coalition has pulled with Gears of War in the past, and more recently, Bethesda with The Elder Scrolls 4: Oblivion Remastered – though, to be clear, what Halo Studios is shooting for here is far more ambitious. Halo: Campaign Evolved feels newer, as if the past is being used as a guiding hand rather than a direct reference point.

It's why controversial features like sprint and weapon magnification return, a hangover from 343 Industries' contributions to the franchise. And why more forward-thinking improvements are coming; nine weapons which weren't available in Halo: Combat Evolved, including the Energy Sword and Battle Rifle, find their way into the arsenal; there's the ability to pilot the Wraith too, and hijack enemy vehicles. The principal cast has returned to deliver new performances, and Halo Studios has even promised that slight tweaks are coming to the dreaded trudge through The Library.

I was able to play a subsection of the iconic Silent Cartographer mission on Xbox Series X. This very early work-in-progress build of Halo: Campaign Evolved doesn't necessarily represent the final experience that's shipping on PC, PS5, and Xbox in 2026 – it's more proof-of-concept than anything else, a showcase designed to settle any fears about the Halo franchise shifting to Unreal Engine 5. Bungie's proprietary Blam! game engine powered the first five core Halo games, with Infinite shipping on 343's in-house Slipstream. These sorts of changes can have seismic impacts – across everything from movement, momentum, weapon-feel, physics systems, and so on.

What I'll say is that Halo: Campaign Evolved does feel suitably Halo. The MA5B assault rifle still chatters as it tears through Elite energy shields. The M6D pistol still hits like an overtorqued bolt through Grunt and Jackal skulls, their bodies littering a beachhead restored with an impressive attention to detail. It's good to hear actual Cortana again, actor Jen Taylor unburdened by any hint of rapancey or resets.

Foehammer whipping Echo 419 around to drop off a Warthog is as exhilarating today as it was 25 years ago. It's here where I first catch the horizon, following the bending arc of the Installation 004 superstructure up beyond the axis of my vision. It's stunning. I honestly can't wait to see The Pillar of Autumn, and some of the wider vistas, born out in this more luscious art style. And the Warthog is still stunningly silly to drive, bouncing around terrain as hapless UNSC soldiers drag a blazing turret around.

The physics feel right, which was my primary concern heading into this. For series veterans, Halo: Campaign Evolved will undoubtedly be a nice flash of nostalgia, a return incentivised by the addition of four-player online co-op (with full crossplay support) and a promise of the most gameplay-modifying Skulls to ever feature in a Halo campaign. For those coming in for the first time, this early demo signals that the wonders of Halo: Combat Evolved built to modern standards of visual fidelity and performance is incoming.

I think my big fear here is how elements like sprint are ultimately going to disrupt the foundations of Combat Evolved. Halo Studios says it has gone to great lengths to preserve the pacing of the original adventure; that's easy to say, but I'm not convinced that giving players even the option to blindly sprint through environments does make this goal largely unachievable.

Sprint can be disabled in the menus, but the problem the feature inherently creates isn't rooted in player choice but rather the intentionality in which Bungie approached the original underlying design. Halo: Combat Evolved's pacing is almost entirely dictated by the speed in which you are able to amble through its atmospheric environments. Increased movement speed made sense in Halo Infinite's sprawling open-world, but here it feels unnatural. I worry about how this design decision will impact the experience for first-time players, and whether it will weather away the awe, the tension, the release.

Perhaps debates surrounding attempts at modernization versus design intention will fade over time, as more of the game is made playable. Either way, with Halo Studios banking on Halo: Campaign Evolved to act as a proof-of-concept for the future of the franchise, the devil is in the detail. Nowhere is that going to be truer than in three new prequel missions that will feature new environments, gameplay, characters, and enemies – tracking Master Chief and Sgt. Johnson on a new adventure set before Combat Evolved. I'm keen to see these sections for myself in the future.

Faithfully remaking the original game will demonstrate whether Halo Studios has a handle on the basics, but entirely new missions will give us clear insight into whether the group has the vision to deliver something all of its own. As executive producer Damon Conn tells me (and I'll have more to share from our chat in the days ahead), Halo Studios believes that Campaign Evolved "is an opportunity to pave the way for the future of Halo." That's a journey which begins with "rebuilding the classic that started it all in a brand new engine for a new audience and veteran players alike."

What I have seen and played of Halo: Campaign Evolved so far are promising, even at this early stage. There's still a lot to see and a lot more to learn, but it's certainly true that Halo is in desperate need of some new energy. So what better place to start than where it all began.

The OG still ranks high among the best Halo games of all time.

Halo: Combat Evolved is a beloved game full of memorable levels, but its most famous stage is more often remembered for the wrong reasons. The Library is the part Halo fans warn series newcomers about, and the devs behind the upcoming remake aim to make an array of changes to fix the infamous stage.

The upcoming Halo: Campaign Evolved will feature an array of changes to improve the pacing and playability of certain stages, and in an Xbox Wire post breaking down the remake, the devs are very explicit about the implications: "Yes, we mean The Library."

"We learned from Halo: Combat Evolved Anniversary that there was still an appetite for things like better wayfinding, navigation, and diversity in enemy encounters," creative director Max Szlagor says. "In The Library specifically, which features several Flood encounters, we wanted to reevaluate the pacing and enhance the environmental storytelling. We've added new lines to Guilty Spark, which guide players through the level, and there’s new dialogue that gives more insight into the narrative as it plays out."

It's been years since I last played Halo 1, but even with that distance from it, I still remember The Library mostly as a seemingly endless series of hallways where the fleshy Flood enemies would keep pouring out of the rafters. The level's reputation may overstate just how bad it is – you're still playing Halo at the end of the day, so there's a limit to how terrible it can be – but it's certainly a low point of the campaign.

There are other tweaks to the campaign, too, with weapons and vehicles from later entries appearing here. The game also now supports four-player co-op, which means the devs "had to think about how all of the original encounters and spaces can scale to accommodate that many players," according to Szlagor.

In the end, though, even with some bigger changes coming to a level like The Library, the developers are "not changing the stories, it’s about refining and adding context to this moment, and other levels like it, so players can stay on track."

These are the best FPS games you can play today.

If you find yourself in a room full of Halo fans and the desire to sow chaos takes hold in your heart, just toss out this question like a grenade: Should Halo have sprint? Halo: Campaign Evolved, the upcoming remake of the original game, is letting you choose your own answer to that question.

"You can sprint now," as the devs say in an Xbox Wire post detailing the newly announced remake, "if you'd like or disable it if you don't."

The original Halo didn't feature a sprint option, and that tradition continued through Halo 3 – even as popular FPS titles like Call of Duty were making sprint feel like a genre staple. In 2010, Halo: Reach offered sprint as an optional ability and in 2012, Halo 4 made it part of the standard control mechanic, which is what it's continued to be throughout the rest of the series.

Of course, letting you sprint is a pretty fundamental change to the basic feel of a game, which is why it's always been such a controversial topic among the Halo fandom. Offering it as an option sounds like a nice compromise, but how's the pacing of the levels going to feel? The original stages were built with Halo 1's original feel in mind, but the devs say there are some tweaks to the level design, particularly in the Library. I fear the true debate over sprinting may just be getting started.

Halo: Campaign Evolved is building on one of the best Halo games of all time.

True to the rumors, Halo Studios has just announced Halo: Campaign Evolved, an appropriately titled Unreal Engine 5 remake of the game that kicked off the entire series - Halo: Combat Evolved, of course - coming to PC, Xbox Series X|S, Game Pass, and PS5 next year.

As you can probably guess by its name, the remake is solely focused on remaking Halo CE's campaign and is stripping out the competitive multiplayer modes, but it is making up for the omission with new additions that are both exciting and inevitably divisive.

Pretty facelift aside, Halo: Campaign Evolved is updating some level designs as the studio specifically called out how pathfinding in missions like, infamously, The Library could be a headache. But maybe the most exciting addition is a little three-mission prequel arc that follows Master Chief and Sgt. Johnson. (Ahh, the nostalgia.)

Maybe more controversial is that Halo Studios is going back to add features seen in newer games. Iconic weapons, such as the Energy Sword and Battle Rifle, are also making an appearance here, for example, which is really cool, as is the inclusion of two-player couch co-op and four-player online co-op for the first time ever. Oh, and you can hijack vehicles too.

The addition of sprint, however, will probably bring back the heated discourse from 2010... and 2012... and 2015... and... you get the gist. Though, thankfully, you can disable it if you like.

An Xbox Wire post states that "all of the new content created in Unreal Engine 5 is layered on top of code and systems carried directly over from the original games," to hopefully retain the feel of moving a 1,000 pound super soldier.

"We've added new lines to Guilty Spark, which guide players through the level, and there's new dialogue that gives more insight into the narrative as it plays out," creative director Max Szlagor added. "We're not changing the stories, it's about refining and adding context to this moment, and other levels like it, so players can stay on track."

"This is Halo for everyone," executive producer Damon Conn said.

Could Halo: Campaign Evolved be one of the best Halo games of all time?

Master Chief voice actor Steve Downes has joined the chorus of people hinting that something big will be announced at this year's Halo World Championships.

Halo Infinite is in a weird spot where – despite being a good game – it's still talked about like it bombed, and now everyone assumes that the series is due for somewhat of a reboot. 343 Industries rebranded itself Halo Studios last year, marking what should be a new era for the series, not to mention that Halo's official esports tournament is moving on from Halo Infinite next year.

The prevailing theory is that it's most likely going to be a remake of Halo: Combat Evolved, with Phil Spencer teasing "a classic that's been with us since the beginning" coming in 2026 at June's Xbox Games Showcase. And considering the "official scoop on what Halo Studios has been working on" has been hinted at for the Halo World Championship in October, all signs are pointing to that happening this month.

Master Chief voice actor Steve Downes has joined in on the hints, posting an image from a recent appearance at a convention in Chicago, where he's wearing a "I love Cortana" T-shirt, shouting out her voice actor Jen Taylor. He adds, "Jen and I can’t wait to see you guys at the Halo World Championships in Seattle, October 24 & 25!" and that "PS: BIG NEWS A’COMIN!!"

While it may have been obvious to most that we're seeing a new Halo game, more evidence to this is always a plus. Let's just hope it's actually a new game and not the announcement of a new version of Cortana AI or a new Call of Duty crossover.

After 17 years, veteran Halo developer leaves series, says "our industry seems dire" and promises to share more details about his departure "when it is absolutely safe to do so."

A Halo developer who's been with the iconic shooter series since 2008 (17 years ago!) has left Halo Studios with an odd message about the state of the industry.

Glenn Israel first joined Bungie in 2008 during the development of Halo 3: ODST, but soon moved to 343 Industries (now called Halo Studios) as an art director on Halo 4, Halo 5, the most recent Halo Infinite, and likely whatever's cooking at the developer these days.

But his tenure in the sci-fi universe was put to end this past week as Israel took to LinkedIn to announce his departure. "As of today and after seventeen long years, I am officially no longer contributing to the Halo universe," he writes, before saying he can't share much at the moment but intends to spill the beans on "this particular story in its entirety when it is absolutely safe to do so next year."

"I know that the state of our industry seems dire, but never forget that you are *free to choose*. No illusion of security nor promise of wealth or fame or power is worth trading away your health, your dignity, your ethics or values – and no one can force you to. Stay strong, take evidence when necessary, and find where you belong," Israel continues.

Halo Studios has been through its fair share of shake ups in the last few years, most notably when the developer's entire leadership shifted after Halo Infinite's rocky launch. Last year, the company also rebranded and promised that its turbulent development history was in the past.

As for what Israel may be alluding to, Halo-centric content creator Rebs Gaming recently claimed that studio sources have told him about leadership issues. We should start to see signs of Halo's future later this month at the Halo Championship Series, either way.

After Halo 5 had the iconic series on thin ice, Halo Infinite's big bad was created in Halo Wars 2 to "get back to" the FPS' "dark" past

Halo kinda struggled to find an enemy faction that would stick as much as the OG Covenant and the Flood after its initial trilogy, but I think the series hit a homerun with the Banished, a rogue alien group exploited by the original game's big bad who also happens to be led by an ultra badass brute. Though the faction was only created to get back to the series' roots after Halo 4 was a little too dark and Halo 5 was... well, bad.

Speaking to FRVR, Halo Wars 2 writer Dion Lay explains that 343 Industries (now Halo Studios) came up with the idea for the Banished to introduce in the RTS sequel, laying the groundwork for them to take center stage in Halo Infinite.

"343 was like we want you to get back to [the roots]," Lay says, explaining that the studio saw the faction as a course correction. "I really loved Halo 4 as well because it was quite dark and then some of it was a bit more realistic, and they [343] wanted to bring some of the fun back, but they didn't want to lose the thrill of action."

Lay goes on to explain Halo's "balance" was all about "really fun" gameplay that feeds into a "quite funny" superhuman power fantasy, "but then underneath the story is really dark and really complex and it does a really amazing job of balancing both things at the same time."

While Halo 4 might've swung too far in the dark side, Halo 5 swung in a direction that simply made no sense, leading to a more grounded but still slightly fun enemy faction for the next mainline game.

"Blur were making the cutscenes as we were making the game," Lay recalls. "'Yeah, it's gonna be Atriox is going to fight three Spartans and beat them all.' And you're like, 'What? Spartans?' And it's like, 'Yeah, and this is going to be big,' and it was a massive deal."

Halo: Combat Evolved is reportedly getting "some form" of a remaster as Xbox considers bringing the iconic FPS series to PS5 for the first time

The Halo Championship Series, the shooter's official live esports event, is moving on from Halo Infinite next year, which prompts some obvious questions about Master Chief's future.

Halo Studios announced as much in a blog post where it said that two upcoming Majors and a full-fat Halo World Championship are still coming later this year. But "once a world champion is crowned in October, the HCS will be retiring Halo Infinite from Official HCS Competition." The studio said Halo Infinite's competitive scene will still receive support, though it'll be "moving on from Halo Infinite for official competition."

Esports lead Tahir 'Tashi' Hasandjekic explained the move comes "as the studio continues to shift more and more towards the next era of Halo." Some reports said that a potential Halo: Combat Evolved remake could be in the pipeline, and Xbox's Phil Spencer also recently teased that "the return of a classic that's been with us since the beginning" will come in 2026. I'm starting to connect some dots...

Before hopium completely takes over, we should keep in mind that Tashi also told folks "the studio is fully focused on the future of Halo," but the Official HCS competition won't return with a new title in 2026. That doesn't completely rule out the possibility of a new Halo game, however - it just means whatever comes probably won't have a multiplayer component.

Last year, Halo Studios announced it was working on multiple games in the series, so it wouldn't be too outlandish to think the potential Halo: CE refresh is simply reimagining the classic's campaign, and might be followed by a different multiplayer-focused game sometime after. It would at least streamline development after Infinite's reportedly messy production.

Here's the top 10 best Halo games to help you catch up.

Helldivers 2 players are crossing their fingers and toes for an official Halo collaboration, but not everyone's on the same side of the galactic war table.

Helldivers 2 is coming to Xbox Series X|S on August 26 - PlayStation seems to be doing a cheeky trade for fellow sci-fi shooter Gears of War, whose remaster is hitting PS5 on the same day - so divers took the opportunity to pine for a Halo crossover in the game. Helldivers 2 got a warbond themed after Killzone, after all, so there's already a precedent for collabs.

All this week, divers deployed onto the game's maiin subreddit to share their wildest dreams. Some even created mock ups for the potential warbond containing ODST (who are basically helldivers in all but name) armor, weapons like the energy sword, and a poncho modelled after Master Chief's walks across the desert.

I'm so ready for a Halo Warbond (Concept) from r/Helldivers

Halo crossover Warbond idea, Would you buy this for over 1000 SC? from r/Helldivers

Thing is, there were plenty of naysayers, too. It's understandable. In a game where you play as somewhat fragile, ragdolling soldiers facing immeasurable odds, you don't want to look like the hulking Master Chief, who is canonically the universe's greatest weapon.

One particular post reminded folks that Arrowhead boss Johan Pilestedt actually put to rest those fears months ago, though. In a Discord message, Pilestedt basically implied that anything more advanced than Warhammer 40K grunts were probably off the table, including the Master Chief and Doom Guy, but Starship Troopers and ODSTs were a-okay.

For anyone not familiar with Halo, ODSTs (orbital drop shock troopers) are soldiers who are still stupidly brave enough to fight aliens multiple times their size, but they aren't genetically enhanced like Spartans. That puts them more in line with Helldivers - they even deploy from the sky in little pods, as well. See, it's perfect.

Helldivers 2 is "definitely not" coming to Game Pass despite its Xbox launch, and there are "no plans" for cross progression, but most players are just happy to be getting reinforcements

Halo fans have created their own Vampire Survivors-style game based on the iconic FPS franchise, and the group behind it has received a stamp of approval from Halo Studios.

While we are all waiting for the rumored Halo: Combat Evolved remake (that could be arriving on PS5) Spartan Survivors launched back in May. If the name didn't give it away, it's a Halo fan game that brings the franchise into the Vampire Survivors formula, complete with characters, weapons and enemies from the beloved Microsoft series.

Of course, with fan games it can go one of two ways, the classic route of the game being taken down (see: AM2R, Metal Gear Remake), or in other cases a company like Sega will embrace the fan community, even collaborating with them, as we saw with Sonic Mania.

Well don't worry about Spartan Survivors being taken away anytime soon, as the devs announced on Twitter that the game has the seal of approval from Halo Studios (formerly 343 Industries). "Really love to see the passion you and your team have poured into this experience" a Halo Studios rep told the Spartan Survivors team, adding, "it really is fun and we look forward to getting further in our play through and unlocking more stuff."

The team revealed that Halo Studios "requested us to add a minor update to the legal disclaimer in the game's credits and the store pages," but outside of that they are free to go wild. While the game is available free on Itch.io at the moment, the team has confirmed that it's coming to Steam in July, mobile and Xbox "later this summer," and also plans to do a PS5 release of the game, fulfilling the prophecy!

Time will tell if Spartan Survivors will make its way to the list of the top 10 Halo games.

Halo could be making a comeback "very soon," according to a well-known dataminer in the Halo community… oh, and it's for a PS5 game.

Halo Infinite will be four years old by the end of this year, and Microsoft has been suspiciously quiet about what used to be its marquee franchise (now that it owns Tony Hawk's Pro Skater, it's no competition). Other than 343 Industries rebranding itself Halo Studios last year, there hasn't been a whiff of a new game and considering how long Microsoft games take from reveal to release these days (I can't believe Fable wasn't at that Xbox Games Showcase either), I'm sure many assumed it'd be a while before we see Master Chief again.

Well, there's been nothing official anyway, as whisperings of a new release of Halo: Combat Evolved (either another remaster, or a full-blown remake) have been part of the rumor mill for a while. But after the Xbox Games Showcase ended without a trace of Halo – outside of a brief tease about "a classic that's been with us since the beginning" coming in 2026 from Phil Spencer – the evidence started piling up.

However, Halo dataminer "gruntdotapi" has noticed that a Halo game has now appeared on the 343 Retail API and that it is specifically pegged to be a PS5 game, with no mention of a Nintendo Switch or Switch 2 version to be found. The user also posted that it has a new ID, ruling out the chance of it being a previously existing release like the Master Chief Collection or Halo Infinite.

While gruntdotapi doesn't have an ETA of a release date, this, combined with Phil Spencer hinting something Halo-related is on the way, leads me to believe we'll be getting this rumoured CE remaster sometime in early 2026. That or Spencer was hinting at the return of a REAL classic like Blinx the Time-Sweeper.

You simply will not guess the main character of the Psychonauts studio and Brutal Legends art director's new mind-bending adventure.

Two Halo 3 streamers became only the second group to beat the game's hardest challenge without dying once, and they did it in record time to boot.

Streamer JerValin teamed up with Reflection just yesterday to take on the classic shooter's Legendary difficulty. As if that wasn't already a hair-pulling, sweat-inducing challenge, the two also turned all Skulls on and attempted a no-deaths playthrough. And, somehow, they made it through alive.

The only other known person to ever beat Halo 3's Deathless LASO (Legendary All Skulls On) challenge was Thesus, who made history and conquered the challenge in four hours and 23 minutes. JerValin and Reflection's broke that record time by a slither and reached the ending at the four-hour and one-minute mark.

Halo's Legendary difficulties are so infamous because it doesn't simply buff enemy damage - it dramatically improves how smart each and every alien baddie is. Snipers aim with near-perfect accuracy, leading to countless one-shot kills. Elites won't hesitate to apply pressure and flank you. And even the normally pathetic grunts can take you out with well placed sticky bombs.

For anyone not in the know, Skulls are the series' unlockable difficulty modifiers and are what makes LASO runs stand out. Halo 3's Skulls in particular will disable all HUD elements, make your weapons invisible, and stop your shields from recovering unless you land melee attacks. Long story short, it's a (sometimes hilarious) nightmare.

JerValin himself is no stranger to the gruelling LASO grind, however. Two years ago, he claimed a $20,000 prize by beating the same deathless LASO challenge for Halo 2, and he seemingly couldn't get enough of the nail-biting near misses. Regardless, the duo's new stream is well worth the watch since Halo 3 has some especially tight missions (hello, Cortana) where maneuvering around foes is basically impossible.

If you'd like to attempt the challenge yourself, Halo: The Master Chief Collection makes it pretty simple to start since there are a number of curated 'playlists' in the collection's menus.

Microsoft said "'Nah'" to the Halo x Doom crossover pitched for Amazon's Secret Level, but I'm crossing my fingers for Season Two

Secret Level is an animated anthology show that reimagines a handful of iconic games - from Pac-Man and Spelunky to Armored Core and The Outer Worlds - in small, self-contained episodes, but the series' creators had originally pitched a badass-sounding crossover between Halo's Master Chief and the self-titled Doom Slayer that sadly never came to be.

"I get a little chafed when I read online, and they're like, 'Hold on, these assholes took Spelunky when they could have taken Halo?,'" series creator Tim Miller said in a chat with Collider, before revealing that the team behind Secret Level actually did pursue Xbox's sci-fi franchise. "Man, you think that we didn't talk to Halo or something?"

Things get even juicier when supervising director Dave Wilson chimed in to reveal that the "creative director at id Software is a good friend of ours, and so are the folks at Microsoft" - so the creative duo decided to make a "big plea" to combine the two iconic shooters. "We wanted to make a Master Chief/Doom Slayer crossover episode, and I spent the whole weekend crafting this impassioned letter of my childhood."

If you've ever spent more than 10 minutes scrolling across Reddit, chances are you've definitely seen adoring fan art of the two icons ripping and tearing it up together. Sometimes they're smashing demons. Sometimes they're massacring aliens. Metroid's Samus sometimes makes an appearance. The two are even pitted against each other in fan fiction, a la Death Battle, ad nauseam. 

So the pitch makes sense. They're both the immortal faces of two of the most important shooters in history, they're both chunky space boys, and they're both cool as hell. Even the animation house behind the show, Blur Studios, has tons of experience with Xbox's FPS, having handled the cinematics of Halo Wars and Halo 2 Anniversary.  

But despite pitching the match made in heaven, the answer Miller and Wilson got was a plain and simple (and heartbreaking) "'Nah.'" It's not clear whether the rejection came from Doom makers id Software, Halo Studios, or the rights holder of both, Microsoft, though. Maybe that's a good thing considering how bad the PlayStation mash-up episode was. 

Master Chief and Doom Slayer shippers don't need to completely give up hope for a crossover just yet, though. Amazon Prime Video renewed Secret Level for a second season just last month, where it'll keep adapting more video games. "Of course, we begged for Half-Life," Miller also noted.

Doom: The Dark Ages is taking our beloved Slayer to a historical hellscape this year, meanwhile, a massive Halo leakage recently spilled 25 years of history onto the internet. 

Despite a rocky launch year, Halo Infinite is still alive and well - and one developer is particularly grateful for its enduring legs considering just how brutal 2024 was for struggling live service games.

"Lots to be thankful for in 2024," Halo Studios' senior community manager John Junyszek tweeted to usher in the new year. "After taking a step back to reflect, it's been great to see how much Halo Infinite improved this year. In a climate where games can be shut down with little notice, I'm happy that we were able to deliver so many player-requested features while also working on other future projects."

Junyszek goes on to call out the game's Forge improvements, that surprising third-person mode, new maps and weapons, fairer customization, and the return of a series favorite feature: Match Composer, which lets you queue for the exact modes you want in any given playlist. 

To catch you up, Halo Infinite had a stellar debut back in 2021 and even attracted more than 20 million players in its first few months, but things went downhill pretty quickly as 343 Industries (now in its Halo Studios era) struggled to fix what was broken, re-add missing features, or push out new post-launch content before most of its playerbase moved on. If 2024's taught us anything, it's that big publishers won't hesitate to pull the plug on a live service game if they can't immediately fund the next 30 generations of an executive's bloodline - look no further than Concord's shutdown - so in hindsight, Halo Infinite's relative longevity is somewhat surprising. 

But Halo Infinite entered 2024 as the full FPS package that was promised at launch, fully feature complete and fun as hell to play. And even though Halo Studios said support for Infinite would slow down more than a year ago, the shooter just got a throwback update that deletes sprint and adds classic maps in celebration of Halo 2's birthday.

In semi-related news, almost 100GB of classic Halo content leaked online over the holidays, including the famous 1999 demo from when the legendary FPS was a third-person Mac exclusive.  

After Insomniac Games, Rockstar, and the Pokemon Company were all hit by major leaks in recent years, Halo Studios has now fallen victim to a similar situation where almost 25 years of vaulted content from the shooter series has spilled onto the internet. 

The leaks are said to have originated from Halo Studios' (formerly 343 Industries) long-running collaboration with modding team Digsite, which has been excavating scrapped content and old files before adding them back into the classic FPS games. Halo 2's infamous E3 2003 demo was recreated and modded back into The Master Chief Collection just last month, for example, as was an Arbiter mission that never crossed the finish line two decades ago - all of which were reconstructed with official design documents leftover from the Bungie era.

That collaboration seems to have led to this week's massive leak, which includes unfinished and cut content from those old-school Halo games, as well as a long-lost demo from the series' brief time as a third-person shooter. Before Bungie joined Xbox's roster, Halo was first unveiled as a third-person Mac exclusive with a big Macworld demo from 1999 - that infamous demo is now fully playable on PC.

One former Digsite modder confirmed the leaks are real, but claimed that none of the current or former members of the team were responsible for the leakage. "For reference, myself and the recent departures actually didn't have access to some of these files like the debug DLLS," they tweeted earlier this week. "Wild this happened but, uh, Merry Christmas fellas."

Another Digsite member explained that they left the modding outfit because "half of us on the team couldn't afford rent or food staying on" on social media. "While we accepted these would be volunteer positions, our hard work continued not only without pay, but with basically no studio support or resources beyond our own backs," they tweeted. 

"It was made clear to us that [Halo 2] E3 was more successful than Microsoft expected, and they want us to deliver another release on that level, still with no pay, and no resources," they continued. "I do not believe the studio behind Halo will ever actually engage or support the legacy or community-interests of Halo with any sincerity or authenticity for multiple reasons, partially also why we quit... (Once again, we aren't the leakers.)"

Maybe now’s the time to reminisce with our list of the best Halo games, ranked. 

After years of fans speculating the contrary, Halo Wars' lead designer has revealed that the lack of a certain series figurehead from the 2009 spin-off wasn't Bungie's fault after all.

"We didn’t want to use Master Chief," Ensemble Studios' Dave Pottinger tells VideoGamer Podcast of its executive decision, omitting the character from the RTS because the game "needed you to care about everybody else. We thought as soon as Master Chief shows up, that’s all anybody’s going to [care about]," he explains. This means theories that Bungie snubbed Ensemble by withholding the Master Chief license – and that the publisher objected to the game's existence in the first place – aren't true after all.

Spinning off a series renowned for delivering some of the best FPS games of all time, Pottinger stressed how the strategy elements made it integral for players to keep an open mind in Halo Wars, and how a lack of Master Chief made fans less inclined to prefer the Spartans by default. Still, the choice to leave him out entirely was not taken lightly. Ensemble "had these conversations seriously with people internally and externally," said Pottinger, which left the studio with a new question to parse: "How can it be an RTS? Clearly, Spartans are the best unit. Our challenge is making Spartans not the best unit, but making them an equal option [weighed against] the other units. That’s what a strategy game is.”

Having a Halo game without Master Chief sounds like a misstep off the cuff, but when Pottinger puts it that way, it makes perfect sense. Given the cult status the humble RTS has achieved since its initially tepid 2009 reception, and how its popularity sparked a sequel years later from Alien: Isolation developer Creative Assembly, it seems Ensemble's gamble paid off handsomely. You're off the hook this time, Bungie!

From Wars to Infinite, check out the best Halo games from across the Xbox series.

A Halo 2 level that was scrapped well before its 2004 release has now been officially excavated, dusted off, and made playable within The Master Chief Collection. 

Halo Studios and modders The Digsite Team have been restoring lost Halo content for years now, starting off with never-before-seen maps and weapons and vehicles that original series developer Bungie left on the cutting room floor. It's fitting for a series all about exploring ancient, long abandoned alien structures, but Digsite have recently gotten even more ambitious with its goal.

For Halo 2's massive 20th anniversary, the team went back to the game's infamous E3 2003 demo that never made it into the full game, spruced it up with existing assets and all-new ones, and then released it as a mod for Halo: The Master Chief Collection's PC version. They've now done the same with a long-lost Arbiter mission that sent humanity's alien bestie to a desolate moon impaled with the shards of the titular Halo from the first game.

"This scenario is a composite reconstruction of the 2003 mission '05_alphamoon' assembled from archived data, design documents, and our own restorative work to showcase early Halo 2 development," the mission's start-up screen reads. "While care has been taken to present this level in a further completed state, Alpha Moon originally never developed beyond the 'Halo 1.5' phase." As such, you might bump into some unintended bugs or difficulty hikes.

That's a small price to pay for another classic Halo campaign level, though. Alpha Moon follows a formula that the series has used over and over for a reason. It starts out lowkey with the Arbiter touching down on his lonesome, equipped with nothing other than a rifle and an invisibility power-up for some stealthy back melees. But it doesn't take long for those explosions (and explosive guitar riffs) to come in as the level soon puts you into a Covenant tank where, in classic Halo fashion, you're blasting an outdoor corridor full of little grunt gangs and cranky enemy vehicles.

Reminisce with some of the best Halo games of all time.