For months and months and months we heard about a Halo Infinite battle royale game being in development during the game's lifecycle. It was never formally acknowledged by Xbox, but some big sources spoke about it on multiple occasions - and now an official LinkedIn description has shed some more light on its development.
Mike Clopper, studio design director at Raven Software, shared this little tidbit on the game from his time working on it at developer Certain Affinity:
"MP Halo Infinite - I led a large team of designers working on a canceled Battle Royale mode for Halo. I believe this product could have been a game changer for the franchise. We loved playing it and working on it was a fantastic experience in spite of its cancelation."
This is a pretty frank admission, and a bittersweet one at that. We are excited about the future of Halo on Unreal Engine 5 - but we can't say that we wouldn't have been into trying this battle royale, had it managed to see the light of day. Alas, the spin-off has now been cancelled, and we'll have to see what 'Halo Studios' has planned for the future of the series.
Those future plans include multiple titles using the Epic Games technology, so you never know, some form of Halo battle royale may still release one day. One thing we do know is that a 'Halo Infinite 2' — that was supposedly in development before the move to UE5 — will be another title resigned to the cutting room floor over at Xbox.