Field Report VI: Halo Studios at the End of 2025
by gamer_152
The retirement of Halo Infinite's "Operations" was both unsurprising and unexpected...
The retirement of Halo Infinite's "Operations" was both unsurprising and unexpected. Last month, loglines overhanging gaming websites described Halo Studios as suspending the flow of "major updates", but some would argue that they did that long before November. Over 2025, Infinite took receipt of three new weapon variants (the Mutilator, the Vestige Carbine, and the Fuel Rod SPNKR), one new vehicle (the Falcon), a new mode (Invasion), and drastically expanded Forge's possibility space. All good stuff, yet it's been a lifetime since we saw wholly new weapons, maps, or features with 343's name on them. Development duties have largely been conferred to the community, to the extent that even Survive the Undead, Halo's star opposition to CoD: Zombies was fried up by fans in the heat of Forge. The technical splinters in Infinite that were embedded four years ago haven't been extracted either; you just feel their pangs less often, be they excessive latency, lobbies crashing, or whatever this is:
The campaign is in an even sorrier state, having received no substantial updates since co-op and mission replays were added three years ago. The skeleton crew of this waterlogged brig have been about as productive as any could be, but they are still a skeleton crew. Half the reason I gave up writing these "Field Reports" in mid-2024 was that there was little new to report on. Also, it would have meant playing more Halo Infinite.
A service this neglected was a prime candidate for the chopping block, but its feebleness is nothing new, so why now? "Well Gamer, you fucking dunce", you say, "Halo Studios just gave us the first peek at Campaign Evolved and then said they'd be airlifting devs from the wreck of Infinite to shore up other projects. With Campaign Evolved being the new all-hands mission, Infinite has been left to rot". But in response, I have to say, you're being very rude to me, and just because the Unreal campaign was announced in October doesn't mean that that's when the game entered main sequence development or needed an injection of labour. Although, now we know there will be a remake of the remake of Combat Evolved, Infinite's superintendents can terminate it while having something close to a justification in the public eye.
The community had suspected that Infinite's Halloween season may be its last, as the associated Battle Pass was free and dropped off a suspicious amount of the premium currency: Spartan Points. It's as if 343 was saying, "We're closing in a minute anyway, you might as well have one on the house". But we reckoned that if Infinite was shutting up shop, the studio would have issued an official bulletin saying so, and they didn't. I also had a pet theory that the Pass portioned out so many Spartan Points because Halo Studios was running out of resources with which to model new cosmetics. It turns out that the development house was decommissioning Infinite; our prediction was just one season out. The final Operation has been running from November 18th and is live indefinitely. "Infinite" is apparently a games industry term which means "Lasts four years".
But let he who is without fuck ups cast the first stone. I have to make a correction to a couple of my previous Field Reports. Long before the announcement of Campaign Evolved, I told you that the insider scoop was that Halo Infinite was being ported to the Unreal Engine. According to Jason Schreier, this was a possibility that had been tossed around within the studio like a volleyball for years. Later, 343 did confirm an exodus to Unreal, but specifically for future enterprises. They weren't verifying that Infinite would also make the jump to Unreal. However, I was citing the post-2022 reports as if they were evidence that the Infinite Master Chief would soon be bagging and tagging Grunts on the same engine as Marcus Fenix. Many of the articles covering the move could have been clearer in their wording, but ultimately, my bad.
After 343's "New Dawn" video hit in October 2024, I also saw a lot of players say they were smitten with the new Halo on Unreal, but remember, there was no new Halo. The studio was as loud as a fire bell that the 3D renders they'd produced were just research and concept art. That clarification is posted across the bottom of the screen throughout New Dawn. I sometimes feel like there are groups of people on the internet whose media comprehension has eroded to the point that they can't absorb explicit and key points from text or a video.
Early signs are that Halo Studios is betting on a winning horse by building atop Epic's tech. During Campaign Evolved's reveal, Installation 04 gleamed in the sunlight and glowed beautifully against plasma fire. A convincing leak by YouTuber Rebs Gaming appears to show that internal research from 343 proved Unreal's lighting superior to Slipspace's.[1] Some loyalists have voiced anxieties that Epic's templates would rob Halo of its crucial feel, but if you can believe it, a video game discussion was once again plagued by misunderstandings about engines. At one time, much of Halo's kinetics came from its styling of the Havok physics engine. No small number of people have pointed out that it's irrational to think those physics will be lost in the transfer to Unreal because the Havok engine is compatible with Unreal. However, Halo hasn't used Havok since its third entry, nor did it before its second, so the point is moot[2]. A much better argument that Halo's physics can sustain is that its feel remained consistent even outside the Havok engine.
A lot of the people defending Unreal are also talking as if a game's physics are the sole determinant of how an experience feels in your hands, but they're not. You've also got factors like controls and weapon movement. Yet, it all feels irrelevant when Halo Studios has been saying since reveal day that Campaign Evolved is being built atop the original Bungie code, which defined the game's feel. Tells in the game's function and animation have led fanatics to believe Campaign Evolved is likely built atop the Reach sandbox specifically. A lucky few enjoyed test flights of the game at the Halo World Championships, and their consensus is generally that Campaign Evolved's feel is faithful to the original.
We will never know what faults Infinite might have been spared had its transmission also been driven by the Unreal Engine. Yet, there's no doubt in my mind that the eighth Halo would have emerged less error-prone and more complete if 343 hadn't been trying to invent an original engine and a vehicle to wrap around it at the same time. I suppose it's better that Halo Studios came to the helpful tech late rather than never at all, but even with this redoubtable system on their site, I still don't see them making progress as a company.
In nine years, Bungie went from the blocky beginnings of Combat Evolved to the heartfelt goodbye that was Halo: Reach. 343 has had fourteen years since its debut Halo release, and it feels like they're back at square one. When the studio gingerly handed the public Combat Evolved: Anniversary in 2011, we happily accepted it, knowing that original and quite possibly brilliant 343 games were coming down the pipe. It was also understandable that the developer would need a training bike like Anniversary on which to get to grips with the series. Now, Halo Studios is meant to be all grown up and able to tie its shoes, but it's regressing back to Combat Evolved like an adult desperately attempting to squeeze back into their childhood clothes.
I can talk for hours about why I adore the original Halo, and I'm enamoured by the potential of the prologue missions in this upcoming story mode. Yet, we've been to Alpha Halo before, we've freed Keyes from the Truth and Reconciliation, unlocked the Library, and disarmed the Covenant's weapon world countless times. Returning to the rings is the chorus of the series. If you include the remakes, this next entry will be our seventh trip to an installation. I don't want the games industry to end up like the music industry with its insatiable appetite for rereleases and remasters. To add to the agitation, it's only a campaign mode that 343 is releasing in 2026, meaning that a series once renowned for its multiplayer is now going to be bereft of one in active service. That can't be what Halo Studios thinks is healthy for their namesake.
I, and everyone I've heard from, believed that as Microsoft's first-party games were cloned to the PlayStation, it would stay business as usual on the Series S/X. In retrospect, that assumption was naive. Of course, changing the audience would change the media. There are numerous PlayStation diehards who've never touched a Needler in their lives, and Microsoft wants to give those fresh faces an introduction to the 26th century. This is why Brian Jarrard keeps talking about the "new generation" of players in that CE roundtable. What better place for the PlayStation battalion to start than Combat Evolved, the big bang of the Halo universe, and a game already proven to set hearts on fire? For maximum audience buzz and cross-play potential, Microsoft is also going to want gamers on the PlayStation and Xbox playing the same Halo. That can't be a current Halo because it's not like Infinite is in any state to show company. So, they've dusted off one of Dad's old records.
To be fair, there are a lot of Spartans who've had it out for 343 since day one, and I hold some of this company's material in much higher regard than a lot of the rest of the community. I'll be the first to tell you that Halo 4 has a muscular campaign and that the Halo 5 multiplayer deserves loud applause. Hell, the 5 PvP with its brisk BPM and its resplendent future is one of the best competitive online experiences I've chomped down on. Still, 343 has failed to establish a consistent vision for what Halo should be without Bungie, probably because the constant churn in its offices kept changing who was doing the envisioning.[3][4]
By the time of Halo Infinite's hour in the limelight, the studio was fractured and uncoordinated, so unable to transcribe from design to software that two-thirds of their campaign was left on the cutting room floor. That development hell was extended post-release through the modern miracle of the seasonal model. A studio that overruns deadlines is going to flounder at the best of times, but they're especially ill-suited to games as a service, where every few months they get a new due date for some shippable. That leak from YouTuber Rebs Gaming also shows 343 head, Chris Lee, referencing "culture" problems at the studio. This sentiment was echoed by former employee Morgan Lockhart.[1][5]
It took six months to haul Infinite from Season One to Two and nine months to drag it from Two to Three. The company broke promise after promise in this period, and strung along the community with the hope of a local Co-Op mode for over a year before telling them it was vapourware. Multiple former devs have blamed the choppy production on malignant management, and by the time that the firm was managing to produce new updates on a three-month cycle, it had been ruptured by a tsunami of layoffs.[5] Many key personnel would also voluntarily quit over the course of Infinite's lifetime, including:
Design Lead Christopher Blohm.[6][7]
Lead Sandbox Designer Quinn DelHoyo.[8][9]
And more others than I have time to list here. To this day, neither the company nor Infinite has recovered.
Even 343's sceptics have to admit that the studio wrote the book on remakes with The Master Chief Collection, but The Master Chief Collection was twelve years ago, and when it came time to reconstitute the explosively popular Halo 3, the studio couldn't bring themselves to do it. According to former 343 Concept Art Lead, Darren Bacon, this was because of the company's reliance on contractors and a pool of resources that couldn't cover both a Halo 3 Anniversary and the crumbling Halo Infinite. Project Tatanka, another Halo shooter at the studio, sponged resources for years with no crop to show for it. Tatanka eventually met cancellation in 2023.[10] So, Halo Studios coming home to the Pillar of Autumn doesn't feel like a triumphant victory lap. It feels like them failing to make it in the big city and having to slink, shamefaced, back to their hometown.
There's been a fire at Halo Studios. The company needs to be reconstituted, maybe even relearn the basics of how to develop Halo. Campaign Evolved is poised to knock veterans off their feet and bring in plenty of new recruits, but if it does, what's the endgame? Halo Studios is going to have to release another original shooter eventually, and if it can't cast out the dysfunction that has dogged it the last seven years, all it's going to do is disappoint two communities. Thanks for reading.
Notes
Why Halo Infinite Wasn't Developed in Unreal Engine (Exclusive Report) by Rebs Gaming (July 22, 2025), YouTube.
Compare the credits across Halo games.
Tweet (Archived) by Jason Schreier (August 27, 2020), Twitter.
Ex-Halo Infinite developers criticise "incompetent leadership" at Microsoft by Ed Nightingale (January 19, 2023), Eurogamer.
Former 343i devs respond to Microsoft layoffs: 'They set Halo up for failure' (Update) by Brendan Lowry (January 22, 2023), Windows Central.
Halo Infinite Developer Joseph Staten Is Leaving 343 Industries And Returning To Xbox Publishing - Report by Jenny Zheng (January 18, 2023), GameSpot.
INSIDE INFINITE – JANUARY 2021 by 343 Industries (2020), Halo Waypoint.
A Tweet by Quinn DelHoyo (December 13, 2021), Twitter.
Quinn DelHoyo by SMU Guildhall Staff (Date Unknown, Accessed December 20, 2025), SMU.
Halo’s Canceled Project Tatanka Game Explained by Ethan Mallory (October 2, 2024), Game Rant.