This is all assuming Microsoft and/or Acti don’t cancel it, as well.

It’s also a bit funny to me that they’re giving a year-ish long timeline to release a novella which was already at least developed enough to have cover art.

voice acting was bad. cutscenes were ruined. No drive to keep playing

I played the first mission on Legendary.

I only died once or twice. There were times that Elites just stood there, halfway behind cover, letting me shoot them. They didn’t seem to care to dodge grenades either.

The part where the covenant are on the upper landing? I used to get stuck there, repeatedly dying, even in co-op. Breezed right through it.

Visually, the game looks pretty decent when it was still but most of the time everything had that hiss-y UE5 quality to it.

Didn’t feel at all compelled to keep going after that. It just made me want to play Halo CE Anniversary instead.

They didn't understand the source material, fucked up the combat and level design, fucked up the visual/art design, fucked up the music, turned Cortana into Navi 2.0, and the original mission they made is an asset swap mess with atrocious dialogue.

Par for the course for 343/Halo studios, so happy they had it taken away from them. They haven't had a clue since the start.

What in particular? I have been a fan for a long time, but I cannot justify buying newer hardware to play. I am not sure how well it might run on a Steam Deck.

Oh yep, I totally missed the paragraph on the source, good catch

I did a double take, and forgot Activision is also under Microsoft now.

It’s honestly crazy, from all my perspectives.

When I was younger, if you had told me the two biggest names in shooters (CoD, Halo) would merge without the feds blocking it, I wouldn’t have believed you.

A bit older, I owned a bit of Activision-Blizzard stock. I sold it after a while, as even from a purely financial perspective… the company enshittified. I remember it being steeped in controversy, making games I’d never want to play.

So of course Microsoft buys them. And Halo. Microsoft simply cannot help themself.

And here we see rumor/"leaks" being presented as fact:

Firefight was not the thing that campaign evolved was missing, I’m expecting a lot of those circular areas of the prequel missions where they sent in a few waves of enemies to be recycled into the firefight maps

I don't mind that they're leaning more into the Primordial/Flood connection, but something about it still seems off.

Maybe I'm just having a hard time overcoming my jadedness for Halo these days.

Theres some really interesting concept art at the end, presumably concepts for the Infinite sequel. The most interesting one to me is the crashed Infinity with what appears to be a functioning frigate docked or at least in the air.

Also, finally, an official depiction of the primordial:

Halo CE needed a remake because Anniversary was horrible. Not sure if any other sequel would benefit from a remake, especially H2 which already has a very nice remaster.

halo 3 remake, whenever it comes, needs to have a native VR mode. this is the only acceptable way forward.

I personally would have welcomed a Halo 2 remake solely for 4 player co-op. That is the biggest reason I’m thankful for Campaign Evolved.

I have a feeling it's gonna get worse and in time people will do historical revisionism and start praising the 343 era games.

Yea I don't understand how that's even possible. I get that investigating a new engine for future projects take time, but the point of moving to Unreal Engine was to get a functional, modern platform, as well as developers that are familiar with it and don't need to be trained nearly as much. At this point, as a studio you should already have written & storyboarded the next installment at the bare minimum, more likely be halfway through production. What a trainwreck

The original plan was to keep expanding infinite, but the player retention numbers didn’t support that idea. You could tell it was already going downhill when they stopped doing the story cutscenes for the multiplayer operations.

Why not continue development on Halo Infinite? I thought part of the title was to continue adding to the campaign and multiplayer.

I do not really know what they can do to improve things at this point. Their core Halo fan base has either moved on to other games or enjoys the master chief collection.

The CE remake was cool and all, but I think 2 and 3 remakes would have been such a waste, especially if they tried to keep recycling the Reach AI used in the CE remake.

It’s crazy to think five years after the release of Infinite that Halo 7 was barely in early planning. I have seen projections that an Activision Halo likely won’t come until 2030, but Halo 7 by HS would have taken just as long. When they said Infinite was going to be a ten year game, they really meant we wouldn’t get another full Halo game for ten years, oof.

There has been quite a bit of speculation ranging from Halo Fest is canceled to Halo Fest is being rebranded to Xbox Fan Fest Seattle so I appreciate some kind of info about it. Most of the other info can wait, but this one affects fans who have already paid for flights, hotels, and made any other travel plans for an event coming up fast.

I’d probably try to refund my tickets and just explore the Seattle area if they tried to turn it into Fan Fest, I want to go to an all-Halo event

there is apparently still one more wave of layoffs remaining.

I mean at this point, morbid curiosity is getting the better of me.

Like I wonder if they'll continue to support proton for online play.

Damn from a dogshit dev to another dogshit dev.

No no, literally any studio would be an improvement coming from 343 "Halo Studios." I would take a Halo game from an Electronic Arts or Ubisoft studio at this point. There is no way to make it any worse, so at most it would stay the same.

I certainly would have preferred not Activision, but at least they have a lot of experience with a wide variety of games they published. There is more potential there than with 343.

They should have let it go yeah, but they didnt want to risk it with new IP. So, we milk the existing franchise instead, with people who dont understand what Halo is/was.