For the last 25 years, Xbox and Halo have been inextricable. The first-person shooter game and its iconic green-armored protagonist, Master Chief, are household names even to non-gamers. For players, the franchise is a key pillar of the Xbox ecosystem — maybe even the pillar. Halo is Xbox, and Xbox is Halo, and console warriors participating in the decades-long fanboy battle against Sony and PlayStation point to Master Chief as their four-star general.
But now, as the lines blur between console libraries (PlayStation recently shared its beloved multiplayer game Helldivers 2 with Xbox, and Microsoft released its Gears of War remake on PlayStation back in August), Halo Studios wants to bring an entire new generation of fans across every platform into the fold. That’s where Halo Campaign Evolved, a ground-up remake of the original 2001 title, comes in.
Rolling Stone recently went to Halo Studios to play the Halo: Campaign Evolved demo and spoke with studio executives about the past, present, and future of the franchise. Nostalgia has a death grip on the video game industry, so there are plenty of reasons to be skeptical about Campaign Evolved. Luckily, some features will pique the interest of even the most cynical amongst us: three brand-new missions, a whole host of new gameplay modifiers, and the fact that Halo is coming to PlayStation for the first time ever.
Still, why this game, and why now?
Combat Evolved, Again
Halo: Campaign Evolved is not to be confused with Halo: Combat Evolved Anniversary, the 2011 remaster that updated the original game’s graphics and added some new features. Campaign Evolved is the first game developed under Halo Studios, formerly known as 343 Industries, and the first to forgo its proprietary game engine in favor of the more streamlined, standard Unreal Engine 5.
It’s also just the campaign; there’s no multiplayer mode, which will ruffle some feathers. Previously, Halo: Combat Evolved had local, LAN-based multiplayer only, while the Anniversary edition added online multiplayer.
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For many, Master Chief is the face of the Xbox brand.
Xbox Game Studios
“It’s a campaign experience, but it’s not only a single-player experience,” executive producer Damon Conn says. “The way that you played in 2001, maybe on a couch with your friend on the console, you can do that again today with this, or for the first time ever, you can play four-player online co-op across Steam, Xbox, and PlayStation. So if you’ve had friends who have moved on to different consoles over the years, you can reconnect with them, and there’s cross-play and cross-progression across all those.”
A Halo game on PlayStation is already huge, but Campaign Evolved is much more than just a fresh coat of paint. For the first time ever, aspects of the original game that were gated to players, like picking up and wielding the famous Energy Sword or driving the massive alien tank, are available to enjoy (Halo: Campaign Evolved will let players use nine additional weapons). And there are more gameplay modifiers (known as skulls in the Halo universe) than ever before, which allow players to add some extra difficulty and chaos to their sessions.
Campaign Evolved is also getting three completely new missions. Few details have been released about these additions, just that they take place before the events of the original game, are centered around Master Chief and beloved Halo character Sergeant Major Avery Johnson, and will feature “new enemies.” For fans of the franchise, more Sergeant Johnson is always a good thing.
The remake is the story campaign only, meaning no competitive multiplayer mode will be included.
Xbox Game Studios
Halo Studios also invited lead actors Steve Downes (who voices Master Chief) and Jen Taylor (Cortana) to re-record all of their voice lines from the game, some of which have been slightly adjusted to strengthen the story. “These folks have been with the franchise for a long time, and they’ve also evolved as actors and in their performance. And so for telling a great story, I think it just helps to enhance the overall experience,” design director Max Szlagor says.
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Cut-scenes have been tweaked with entirely new motion capture to help make a 25-year-old game feel more cinematic and modern. Expect the Flood missions (Halo’s surprising and effective foray into horror) to be more creepy, eerie, and gloopy than ever before, as Unreal Engine 5 lets the team add dismemberment mechanics to really up the yuck factor. “Every mission, every encounter, and every cinematic has been rebuilt and retouched with the spirit intact of the original’s awe, sense of discovery, and heroism,” Conn says.
The AI Issue
Naturally, with the sheer scope of this project, and after rumors swirled that Halo Studios was using generative AI in its developmental process, the big question is: did the team use AI to rebuild and retouch Halo: Campaign Evolved?
“I want to be very clear … People are creative. People make games. AI can improve workflows. It can do things for the game,” Conn says. “But I want to be very specific and clear that the people are the ones who are creating the game, and there’s an opportunity to improve a workflow, or something along those lines, we’ll look at it again. It really should be additive to the creation of a game.”
Xbox has come under fire for rumors of generative AI being used to develop games.
Xbox Game Studios
When pressed to confirm or deny if anything players would see or hear in the game was made with generative AI, game director Greg Hermann steps in. “It’s a tool in a toolbox,” he says. “I may go a little off message here, but some of that gets very challenging when we look at how integrated AI is becoming within our tooling. We use Photoshop. There’s generative fill, for example. The boundary lines can get a little fuzzy. I will say, though, again, to Damon’s point, it really is about that creative spark that comes from people and improving just overall workflows.”
Later, an Xbox rep reached out to add more context, saying, “There is no mandate to use generative AI in our game development, and that includes Halo: Campaign Evolved.”
What’s Old Is New
Halo is the reason I write about video games, and upon booting up the Halo: Campaign Evolved demo, I’m hit with an avalanche of emotions. The cynic in me is cautious and keenly aware of the often empty allure of nostalgia, while the teen girl who spent her entire summer job money on an Xbox 360 and Halo 3 is vibrating with excitement.
The demo is a slice of the The Silent Cartographer level, and as the Pelican ship swoops in over the sparkling waters of Alpha Halo to drop Master Chief off on a beach, the graphical fidelity is almost astounding. The sloping curve of the Halo ring slicing through the skyline, the metallic purple hull of a Covenant ship reflecting sunlight into your eyes, the detailed faces of the Marines who will undoubtedly get blown to pieces with a plasma rifle in the next few minutes — Campaign Evolved looks light years better than Halo Infinite, which only came out four years ago.
Campaign Evolved looks even better than the last big Halo title, 2021’s Halo Infinite.
Xbox Game Studios
The quality of life adjustments and gameplay streamlining are immediately noticeable, which include and expand upon changes made to Halo when it was ported into the Master Chief Collection (a compilation of the first four games) ten years ago. But there’s also not, as Conn says, “modernization for modernization’s sake.” Pulling the left trigger will aim down sights, a now-common mechanic that shooter players will instinctively do, and you can sprint (or turn that off completely for more throwback experience). Some of this can feel a little odd for the veteran Halo player — the gameplay and movement smoothness of more recent titles feels almost incongruous when applied to the original game.
But expect the Warthog, the franchise’s version of a Humvee, to drive exactly as it did 25 years ago, because, as Szlagor says, “it felt great in 2001, and it feels great today.” Except now there’s a fourth seat to ensure your entire squad can roll out together. There’s a level of smug satisfaction when I hop into the Warthog, and muscle memory reminds me to beep the horn at the Marines piling in next to me.
After a particularly difficult firefight during which I am repeatedly blown up by an Elite hucking a plasma grenade at my feet like some sort of Halo-tinged Edge of Tomorrow scene, I pause and take a breath. With every enemy dead, the familiar sounds of the Halo universe are gone — there’s no Grunts squeaking insults or Jackals chattering in another language. But as Master Chief idles awaiting my input, I hear the sound of flies buzzing in my left headphone, the universal indicator of death. It’s little details like this, ones that players don’t even notice in modern games because they expect them, that act as cogent reminders of how far games, and the Halo franchise, have come in the last quarter century.
Much of the gameplay is upgraded, but it’s easy to feel the comfort of nostalgia in action.
Xbox Game Studios
For much of the demo, despite playing on Heroic and getting repeatedly whooped by Hunters, I’m grinning like an idiot. Nostalgia is a hell of a drug.
But Why, Though?
Why go back to the beginning after something like 2021’s Halo Infinite? The ambitious approach to the series featured the first-ever open-world campaign, and 343 Industries had plans to regularly add to it for years with story DLC, split-screen co-op (which it was supposed to launch with), and more. Except those features never came.
Infinite should have hosted Halo content for years after its launch, but aside from regular multiplayer updates, it’s long been abandoned. Five years later, and a year after 343 Industries became Halo Studios (and showed off Project Foundry, three Halo “experiences built in Unreal Engine 5), announcing a game like Campaign Evolved makes a rather emphatic statement: we’re going back to what worked. No more experimenting.
Campaign Evolved is a safe bet in an increasingly unstable market that tugs on the heartstrings of veteran fans while pulling in a whole new community of potential PlayStation players conveniently in time for its big anniversary. But is it a cop-out? It follows in the footsteps of several remakes and remasters released in the last year alone, from Gears of War: Reloaded to Metal Gear Solid Delta: Snake Eater, all of which are capitalizing on an already exhaustive trend that feels like the game industry is hurtling towards creative bankruptcy.
The remake might be yet another cash grab, but will it serve to help restore the franchise’s luster?
Xbox Game Studios
But Xbox Studios is seemingly taking this development process seriously, with the entire team dedicated to producing something that not only respects the original but also expands upon it for a new, modern audience.
That modernity means Halo: Campaign Evolved occasionally feels a bit weird, like Halo Studios jerry-rigged a jet engine to a Subaru Outback. But other times, the ability to sprint away from two flanking Hunters on Heroic mode is a welcome reprieve from watching Master Chief get ragdolled across a map over and over again.
The team says that rebuilding the original game in a brand-new engine is also a great way for developers to learn the Unreal Engine 5 ropes (though they also leveraged their connections with other Xbox studios like Rare and The Coalition for advice). “[Campaign Evolved] is just a natural place to start off, and it’s paved the way forward for what the future will be for the franchise, which is really exciting,” Conn says.
It’s known that Halo Studios has a few games in development at the moment, but the team declined to speak about any of them. “We’re excited to launch this in 2026 on Xbox, Xbox on PC, Steam, and PlayStation,” Conn jokingly intones twice: Once when asked about other games, and again when asked if Halo Studios planned on porting Campaign Evolved to the Nintendo Switch.
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For better or for worse, the Halo franchise seems to be done with wacky campaign experiments and is returning to its roots. Unreal Engine affords the team some developmental luxuries that will make working on future titles more streamlined, which could mean we get stronger games at launch rather than whatever the hell Infinite was. And there’s certainly something to be said about putting one of the most important games of all time in the hands of an entirely new generation of players and those who have been locked out of enjoying it because they bought a PlayStation all those years ago.
Whether Halo: Campaign Evolved will resonate with old-school fans and newer gamers alike remains to be seen. It’ll release on Xbox Series X|S, PC, and PlayStation 5 sometime in 2026.
