Back in 2021, that dark epoch known as the Pre-Edwin Age, there was but one Ed at Rock Paper Shotgun – the venerable Ed Thorn, aka Edders. Edders had a dream, the dream of Halo Infinite getting a battle royale mode. Like Moses descending from the mount with a Needler in either hand, he bedazzled and amazed us with visions of “an enormous playground stitched together from some of Halo’s most iconic maps of yore; Warthogs and Mongooses roaming the lands; players racing to the M41 SPNKR as it spawns; grappling to a rooftop and laying down covering fire; some contrived reason as to why there’s a circle of poison gas closing in… but hey, rings are what Halo does best, right? It’s 100% doable.”
Ed Thorn has always been a journalist of great sagacity and supernatural insight, so it was of no surprise to the RPS editors of the era when rumours bubbled up a few months later that Certain Affinity had partnered with 343 Industries (nowadays Halo Studios) to make Halo battle royale a reality. These rumours have now been confirmed by Certain Affinity’s former design director Mike Clopper, who says the now-cancelled mode could have been a “game changer”.
That’s pretty much all Clopper had to say, sadly. Here’s the full quote from his LinkedIn, as passed along by VGC:
I led a large team of designers working on a cancelled 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.
In the absence of anything further from Clopper, who is now design director at Call Of Duty developer Raven Software, I guess I’ll echo Ed’s sentiment that Halo battle royale could have been fabulous. The battle royale’s star is thoroughly sunk, of course. Everybody’s sick of them, even the millions who play Fortnite, which I barely comprehend as a game any longer: it’s more of a giant intellectual property festival. Did you know they have an Edward Scissorhands now? Nonetheless, Halo’s existing big team modes feel like a natural foundation for an excellent battle royale.
As Edders argues, one of the genre’s virtues is its capacity to act as a flexible hangout space: you can decide exactly how intense you want the experience to be simply by choosing your initial landing site. It reminds me of how I’d chill out on Blood Gulch simply by avoiding the bases and heading for the caves or the deeper dunes. The key thing would be preserving the physics, with such large groups of players involved, because what would a Halo game be without the joy of flipping a Warthog with a surgical grenade throw?
Certainly, I’ll take this over Halo Studios’s current visions for Halo as an Unreal Engine series, which seem overly cautious and dedicated to more cosmetic questions of texture and lighting, possibly because the videos in question were designed for the purposes of recruiting Unreal Engine developers.