Microsoft Halo franchise development director Frank O’Connor has responded to the reports that 343 Industries is working on a battle royale mode for the upcoming Halo Infinite.
The battle royale rumours first surfaced via Thurrott.com editor Brad Sams, who claimed that the mode is early in development, and that 343 are attempting to put a unique Halo spin on the popular genre.
While Sams has a strong track record of revealing Microsoft news, O’Connor took to the ResetEra forums to rebuke the claims. He said that Halo Infinite will have “big social modes with loads of organic shenanigans”, but that the only BR in the game will be the Battle Rifle.
While O’Connor said that 343 weren’t currently working on a battle royale, he didn’t rule it out completely. In fact, it was kind of suggested that we could, in theory, see such a mode added to any of the games in the Master Chief Collection.
He explained:
We are NOT doing this as of now – and no plans to – but battle royale could be made for any of the Halo games in [Master Chief Collection] or [Halo] 5 with some content and scripting additions, because it is a mode. It would have limits based on each engine. I’m pointing that out to be clear that it’s one of the ways we think about gameplay possibilities rather than a single direction for a title.
There’s a chance Halo Infinite could simply have much larger multiplayer death matches than any of the previous games in the franchise, and this is where the battle royale rumours began to manifest. After all, the Infinite part of the title seems to suggest that online/multiplayer play will have a much larger focus this time around.
Microsoft 343 studio head Bonnie Ross recently confirmed that Halo Infinite will be shown at E3 2019, so we can expect to learn plenty more about the game then.
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Ewan Moore is a journalist at UNILAD Gaming who still quite hasn’t gotten out of his mid 00’s emo phase. After graduating from the University of Portsmouth in 2015 with a BA in Journalism & Media Studies (thanks for asking), he went on to do some freelance words for various places, including Kotaku, Den of Geek, and TheSixthAxis, before landing a full time gig at UNILAD in 2016.