Secrets of Halo Infinite’s abandoned 10-year plan revealed by new leak

Details around Microsoft’s early plans for Halo Infinite have been uncovered by a fan, including campaign DLC and a battle royale mode.

Halo Infinite may have been relatively well received when it launched in 2021, but in the years since it has become regarded as a huge missed opportunity for Xbox.

The multiplayer’s popularity dropped off a cliff due to the lack of updates and countless delays to promised content like the Forge and split-screen co-op – the latter of which was cancelled altogether. In the years that followed, the studio was impacted by significant layoffs and staff exits.

There have been reports around some of the cut content for Halo Infinite, including an open world inspired by Zelda: Breath Of The Wild, but now new details have allegedly emerged from developer 343 Industries’ (now called Halo Studios) original 10-year plan for the sequel.

A 2020 interview on IGN, with former 343 studio head Chris Lee, revealed how Halo Infinite was originally planned ‘as the start of the next 10 years for Halo’. Now, five years later, known Halo insider Rebs Gaming has information on what was originally supposed to happen.

As shown in pitch documents, in the YouTube video below, is that the start of the plan was similar to the actual launch of Halo Infinite, albeit two years earlier. Halo Infinite launched in 2021, starting with the multiplayer mode in November, before the campaign arrived a month later in December.

According to these documents, the multiplayer portion was originally meant to launch in autumn 2019. We already know Halo Infinite was originally planned as an Xbox Series X/S launch title for 2020, before the game was delayed – so this 2019 date may have been a provisional launch date for Microsoft’s console.

The documents describe the multiplayer as having the ‘lowest barrier of entry to any Halo game’ and providing ‘meaningful early access’ to a game that people ‘will play for years’ – suggesting it was always planned to be free-to-play.

Several large scale game modes were also a scheduled for the multiplayer portion, including the previously rumoured battle royale mode called Tatanka and Warzone, which was a 24-player multiplayer mode in Halo 5: Guardians.

Interestingly, according to this pitch, the campaign was originally slated to come out a whole year after the multiplayer, in autumn 2020, with an ‘evergreen campaign’ and ‘yearly updates’.

One of these planned campaign updates was called Atriox’s Reign, which was slated for autumn 2021. This is advertised as having a ‘new Warlords system’ for the open world, but it’s not clear exactly what that would’ve been.

According to Rebs Gaming, this 10-year plan was scrapped due to ‘severe leadership issues’ within 343 Industries and because all content developed in the Slipspace Engine was cut, as the studio shifted to Unreal Engine. No other details beyond 2021 are shown in this video, so there might be more information to come in future uploads.

This jump to Unreal Engine 5 for future Halo games was confirmed in October last year, and was described as allowing the studio to ‘focus on making games, versus making the tools and the engines’.

In a blog post, Halo Studios lead Pierre Hintze said: ‘We believe that the consumption habits of gamers have changed – the expectations of how their content is available. On Halo Infinite, we were developing a tech stack that was supposed to set us up for the future, and games at the same time.’

As part of this announcement, the studio confirmed multiple Halo projects are currently in development – with one rumoured to be a remake of the original Halo: Combat Evolved. It’s unclear, however, when this, or any mainline sequel, will be released.

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