Known leaker Rebs Gaming believes that Halo Studios will focus on outsourcing development work for future games in the Halo franchise. He also pointed out that Halo: Campaign Evolved’s development also involved quite a bit of outsourcing, with its credits including 15 different studios like FX – Chamber, Arrival, Devoted Studios, Digic, and Keywords Studios, among many others.
Abstraction is missing from the credits list as a whole studio. However, many of its employees are instead present in the Special Thanks section. Interestingly, we last heard of Abstraction from another report that indicated that the studio had done considerable work to bring over Halo: Campaign Evolved from its original Blam engine to Unreal Engine 5. However, as was noted at the time, this work was ultimately scrapped, and Halo Studios began the process of porting the game to the new engine anew.
Halo: Campaign Evolved isn’t the only project that has made heavy use of outsourcing, however. The rumored now-cancelled multiplayer project, Ekur, was also being developed by Halo Studios working alongside outside development teams. One of the YouTuber’s sources even noted that Project Ekur’s development relied on outsourcing more than any other Halo game so far.
As for the future, Halo Studios might start working more closely with Activision on the development of future games. One of Activision’s core Call of Duty studios – Sledgehammer Games – is expected to help with the development of a new Halo project. While sources have claimed that this idea is still in the exploratory phase for now, Activision is also believed to have started testing a prototype for a new Halo game. This prototype was seemingly pitched to leadership back in June, and reportedly only included basic gameplay, like the player moving around.
The source went on to claim that this prototype ultimately got cancelled in July. As RebsGaming notes, however, a cancellation of a prototype doesn’t necessarily mean that Activision won’t work on another game.
The YouTuber believes that all of these facts line up to indicate that Halo Studios will make heavy use of outsourcing for the majority of development work moving forward. While how this will ultimately affect the franchise remains to be seen, it could end up being a good thing, with different teams being able to offer their own spin on Halo, and potentially even accelerating the number of titles released in the coming years.
Halo: Campaign Evolved was released on PC, PS5, and Xbox Series X/S last month. In our review, we gave it a score of 9 out of 10 thanks to the improvements made to its combat flow thanks to the inclusion of sprinting, and the quality of its visuals and gameplay. Others, however, haven’t been too kind to the title.
One of the creators of the Halo franchise, Marcus Lehto, has been quite vocal on social media regarding his criticisms of the remake. Along with calling the lack of PvP multiplayer the result of a “lack of oversight” and “poor planning” on Halo Studios’ part, he has also called out the game’s art direction.
