Austin, Texas-based support studio Certain Affinity has worked on a number of high-profile games, including the Call of Duty franchise, Hogwarts Legacy, Hearthstone and of course, Halo but there’s one cancelled project with which the studio was involved that former design director Mike Clopper thinks “could have been a game changer” for the Halo franchise: namely, the Halo Infinite battle royale.
The Halo Infinite battle royale, which Certain Affinity was rumored — yet never officially confirmed — to have been working on with 343 Industries, was discovered by data miners who found files, game settings, and playlist titles which correlated with the Halo Infinite battle royale mode being tested and possibly integrated down the line. At one point, Bloomberg even reported that the Halo Infinite battle royale was codenamed “Tatanka” and that the project “started off as a battle royale but may evolve in different directions.”
Clopper, who joined Call of Duty studio Raven Software this month as design director, recently listed the cancelled Halo Infinite battle royale on his LinkedIn profile.
343 Industries
“I led a large team of designers working on a cancelled Battle Royale mode for Halo,” Clopper said on his LinkedIn profile. “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.”
Although the Halo Infinite battle royale was cancelled, much like the insanely popular battle royale Fortnite, the game will be adding a third-person mode later this year.
Microsoft will be moving the Halo franchise to Unreal Engine 5 for future installments of the game, shifting away from the Slipspace Engine, the latter of which was built from the ground up by 343 Studios for Halo Infinite. 343 Studios will also be newly christened as Halo Studios.
“We’re not just going to try improve the efficiency of development, but change the recipe of how we make Halo games,” Halo Studios head Pierre Hintze said in an official Xbox announcement.
Halo Studios art director Chris Matthews added, “One of the primary things we’re interested in is growing and expanding our world so players have more to interact with and more to experience. Nanite and Lumen [Unreal’s rendering and lighting technologies] offer us an opportunity to do that in a way that the industry hasn’t seen before. As artists, it’s incredibly exciting to do that work.”
Do you agree that the cancelled Halo Infinite battle royale ‘could have been a game changer for the franchise’? Or does a battle royale mode within Halo not mesh as well as many might think? Let us know in the comments.
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