Another Halo CE Remake

While watching the last Halo Infinite competitive tournament I was awaiting the Halo Studios announcement of the next game - confirmed to be in Unreal Engine 5 instead of the proprietary engine of the past. Prior to the live announcement on Friday by a solid 30-40 minutes Xbox actually tweeted out the videos and more - so I watched the video of the announcement which then was announced "live" on stream almost an hour later. I'm sure that was an honest mistake, but that was a bit upsetting waiting for an announcement for it to be officially released early.

The announcement was Halo: Campaign Evolved a remake of the first Halo game and boy I was torn on how to feel. If we look at all the games that started Halo or remade the 1st game we could get a list like this.

• Halo: Combat Evolved - November 2001
• Halo: Combat Evolved Anniversary - November 2011
• Halo: The Master Chief Collection - November 2014

The first game that jump started the next best video games of all time (Halo 2 & Halo 3) was the first ever Halo game. A decade later they re-release a remastered campaign of the 1st game that you can toggle between the old and new interface with a single button. A few years later the buggy MCC game was released which held the campaigns of the previous titles, including Halo: CE.

We could argue that Halo MCC re-releasing Halo CE Anniversary is not technically a new game, but since it supported a new platform (Windows) it was quite a modern shift once the game actually worked. So when that announcement talked about another remake of the inaugural Halo game with only campaign I was conflicted.

First off we are sitting at the Halo World Championship watching all the competitors play against each other and the announcement has no multiplayer which is sad. I fully understand swapping to a new game engine though takes time and probably wasn't wise for the studio's first foray into the engine being a full fledged Halo 7.

The larger announcement was of course the exclusivity ending and Halo will now be on PlayStation as well. So I was torn with a bit of excitement to play the original campaign across platforms with friends, but the same game again was draining. So I withheld hope for another announcement as folks on the ground at the event said a chunk of the venue was still closed with an update slotted into the schedule for the next day.

A day later that announcement came and went and it was Halo Fest - a conference and concert for everything that surrounds Halo like the soundtrack and community. Sure they announced a bit of funding to support some tournaments throughout the year, but it seems all we know still is the studio is only announcing Halo: Campaign Evolved thus far.

For competitive players I don't think a few scattered non-major tournaments are enough to fund a true profession, so we might see an interesting set of teams for these tournaments even with a sporadic $100,000 investment into the prize pool. I'm going under that assumption because I imagine the true top 16 players who could make this a living need to make a pivot to a new game or a new line of work.

Regardless of what a new game means for the professionals as a random gamer who appreciates Halo I'm worried. When Halo 1, 2 and 3 came out the type of video games being played at the time were far different than the games that are played today. How can Halo Studios take a 25~ year old game and modernize it without breaking what made the original game great?

I'm sure Halo Studios have plenty of fans that are now employees to keep the game true to its core, I just can't garner the same amount of excitement of what feels like a 3rd remake of the same original Halo game with no multi-player.