Xbox’s Halo franchise is now under the Activision umbrella, but a new report has shed light on some of the projects that were in development before the major internal shakeup.
Developer Halo Studios was essentially gutted as part of Xbox’s sweeping restructure last month – only a small team remains to handle support for ongoing Halo games, events and an upcoming novel. The layoffs came only weeks after the studio shipped Halo: Campaign Evolved, a campaign-only remake of the series’ very first game.
A new report from well-connected YouTuber HiddenXperia (below) now claims the studio were once working on a multiplayer game that was part battle royale, part extraction shooter, citing anonymous sources who were caught up in the mass layoffs at Halo Studios.
The game reportedly started life as the mysterious Project Tatanka, a pure battle royale game that was in production sometime during and after Halo Infinite’s development. Tatanka was apparently set on a huge playable space that stitched together multiple recognizable Halo multiplayer maps.
It’s claimed that Project Tatanka soon turned into Project Ekur, said to have been an extraction shooter where multiple squads would drop down onto Zeta Halo before the map would shrink like in most battle royales. HiddenXperia’s sources say players could control either a UNSC Spartan or a Banished Brute (for the first time ever), and fight both player-controlled squads or the computer-controlled Flood (Halo’s zombie faction) who would infect parts of the map. The Flood outbreak would also serve as a narrative bridge connecting to an eventual Halo 7. Players could supposedly choose to work together at times to fight a huge map boss – think Gears of War: E-Day’s Invasion events.
Sometime during Halo: Campaign Evolved’s development, it’s claimed the studio wanted to instead build a more traditional Halo multiplayer game in Unreal Engine, which led to that interesting extraction shooter idea to fall by the wayside. Even that project was eventually scrapped, according to the report, as more devs had to move over to help Campaign Evolved’s troubled production.