The Year Of Halo

343i heals our aching bones with a new addition to The Master Chief Collection, and studio head Bonnie Ross hints at Halo Infinite’s future

We’re currently in our fourth month of 2019 and a the team at OXM is starting to show textbook symptoms of acute Halo withdrawal. What started as slight irritability towards the end of last year has progressed into full blown sweats, shakes and mindless gibbering about “finishing the fight”. You see, traditionally the mainline Halo games take around three years to develop, however we have been staring at the clocks and that time has well and truly passed. We’ve sought out many specialists, but their prognosis is always the same: unless we get our hands on a new Halo game soon, we may not see it through to Christmas.

Our hopes were raised briefly when Halo Infinite was revealed at last year’s E3 conference, but with no mention of a release date we were left wondering when we would get our next hit. Thankfully, things have been starting to heat up over at the Halo camp recently, and in the past few weeks and months there have been a series of reports and announcements that hint at 2019 being the year of Halo, and with it the prospect of us making a full recovery.

Last month, during an episode of Inside Xbox, 343 Industries’ community director Brian Jarrard revealed that Halo: The Master Chief Collection will be making its way to PC. This is fantastic news for PC owners, given that the only mainline Halo games they’ve ever been able to play have been the original Halo: Combat Evolved and Halo 2. But that wasn’t all Jarrard had to announce: alongside this news, he also revealed that Halo: Reach will at last become part of Halo: MCC, both on PC and Xbox One, and it will include the same improvements the other games in the collection have been treated to – such as 4K HDR visuals and 60 frames per second. The inclusion of Halo: Reach, which will arrive later this year, completes the set and makes every mainline game in the Halo franchise available natively on the Xbox One.