XBOX |OT|

[trunkswd]

shikamaru317 said:

🚨HALO STUDIOS INSIDER REPORT DROPS

> Xbox has laid off almost the entire Halo Studios team
>30 staff members remaining
> No Halo titles were in full production
> Early pitch concepts included Halo 2 and Halo 3 remakes, Halo 7, and a campaign spin-off adapting the First Strike… pic.twitter.com/XZ5No5jhAa

— Gaming.Bo3.gg (@Gaming_bo3gg) September 25, 2026

Jeez louise, if this source of Rebs Gaming is legit, Halo Studios was a complete mess. Cronyism in hiring practices was talked about by this source 2 days ago. Those leaks about Halo 1 Remake and Halo 7 being in development at the same time since 2022, false, Halo Studios paused the main series for 5 years to do a remake of Halo 1 and apparently planned to keep it paused for much longer than that. When Bonnie Ross got replaced by Pierre Hintze in 2022, he was apparently somehow worse than her, and she was pretty bad.

Halo Studios was planning to do Halo 2 and 3 remakes before Halo 7, with short 5 mission singleplayer campaign plus firefight novel adaptations releasing in the off-years between Halo 1 and 2 Remake and between 2 and 3 remake and between 3 remake and 7, starting with a Halo: First Strike standalone campaign + Firefight missions in 2027. None of those projects were in full production before the layoffs began. Halo 2 and 3 remakes had a small team working on their preproduction, Halo: First Strike would have had a larger preproduction team on it since it was planned for release so soon, and Halo 7 had just been pitched to Asha about a week before she decided on the layoffs at Halo Studios and handing Halo over to Activision. 

The studio meanwhile, once with 350+ devs in the wake of Halo Infinite, has dropped to just 30 developers across several rounds of layoffs, the largest being this latest one. No project currently greenlit. The remaining 30 developers, which include Pierre Hintze and his inner circle, are researching AI tools that can ease development workloads so that a smaller team like them can make a larger game, and trying to find possible 2nd party partner studios that could assist them with an Unreal 5 remake of Halo 2, which they will pitch to Asha when they finish the research and make their presentation.

Halo Studios was going to somehow make an entire game in a year to a year and a half? That isn't happening with today's development cycles. All those plans sound delusional.

Don't get me wrong. I'd LOVE for Halo: First Strike to get its own game. Plenty of content in the novel to have a full length Halo game. But the prequel levels showed the current (former?) team isn't good at creating entirely new levels. Sure, IMO 343 Guilty Spark was fantastically done and the other levels in 2nd half of the campaign were improved. But they also aren't entirely new levels. 

For the Halo 1 remake I would have done things differently. Changed things up a bit more rather than having the first half of the game being 98% the same as before. And rather than 3 random prequel levels I would have added new levels based on the novel like Alpha Base. Basically a new level or 2 between levels 2 and 3, and 3 and 4. Plus added the other cut content from the original game like the wildlife. 

I also would have implemented at least a basic Firefight mode. Take certain areas from the main campaign (Ie. one of the areas where you rescue the Marines in the 2nd level) and turn them into firefight areas. Doing this would require far less work than creating new levels for the mode.