Despite Bumpy Halo Infinite Ride, 343 Industries Starts Next Big Project
Despite Halo Infinite's less than stellar reception, 343 Industries is currently said to be working on a major new project, which is undoubtedly the next installment of Master Chief's adventures.
Halo Infinite failed to live up to expectations. In early February this year, the studio responsible for the game, 343 Industries saw major layoffs, as a result of which about 25% of the staff lost their jobs. There were even rumors that the team was removed from the series, but these have been dismissed. Now, however there are many indications that the situation at 343 Industries has stabilized and the team is said to work on a new "big project."
- The source of this information is Max Hoberman, the president of Certain Affinity.
- Certain Affinity was founded in 2006 by former Bungie employees. The team previously worked with 343 Industries on Halo: Combat Evolved Anniversary, Halo: The Master Chief Collection and Halo Infinite.
- This "big project," Max Hoberman says, is being developed as the fruit of Certain Affinity's collaboration with 343 Industries.
- Work on this game, which is practically certain to be the next installment of Halo, should already be at a fairly advanced stage. On the LinkedIn profile of a former developer at 343 Industries, we learn that before he was fired this January, he was working on an unannounced project.
Recall that Halo Infinite debuted in 2021 on PC, Xbox One, Xbox Series S and Xbox Series X. The multiplayer mode was made available in free-to-play model, thanks to which the game achieved very high activity scores on Steam. After that, however, it lost most of its players. Now the situation has stabilized and the game is doing decently. The recent launch of the fifth season has led to a small renaissance in popularity and now daily activity records are around 9-10 thousand concurrent users on Steam.
Particularly promising for the future of the game seems to be the addition of AI-controlled enemies in the fifth season to the Forge mode, which allows for the creation of new maps. This finally enables the users to create new single player adventures. The first ones have already begun to appear - for example, host of channel Nikos has developed a remake of the Silent Cartographer mission from Halo: Combat Evolved.
