It’s been a shaky few years for Microsoft’s Halo franchise, and it seems a rumored battle royale take on the series isn’t coming to revive its fortunes. Halo Infinite arrived in 2021 to solid reviews, but 343 Industries has failed to deliver a satisfying flow of live-service content for the game’s free-to-play multiplayer. Back in 2022, Austin-Texas-based studio Certain Affinity confirmed that they’d been hired to evolve Halo in “new and exciting ways,” and the rumor was they were working on some sort of battle royale experience codenamed “Tatanka.” Later, it was rumored Certain Affinity’s project may have gone in a somewhat different direction, but it likely still had plenty of battle royale DNA in it.
Well, don’t get yourself too worked up about that Halo battle royale. According to Shpeshal Nick on the XboxEra podcast, who has delivered accurate information on Xbox and Halo matters a number of times in the past, Certain Affinity’s Halo project has canceled. Nick’s XboxEra co-host Jon Clarke also stated that he’d heard rumors the project is no more.
As with all rumors, take this one with a grain of salt. Of course, the problem with a rumor about an unannounced game being canceled, is that we’ll probably never get official confirmation one way or another on the matter. The game simply won’t get announced if it has been canceled.
That said, the battle royale genre is getting harder and harder to succeed in and development has reportedly begun on the next core entry in the Halo franchise. Certain Affinity is a longtime Halo support studio, so it would make sense for Microsoft to reassign them to the next mainline Halo game rather than a spinoff project that may or may not succeed.
What do you think? Is a Halo battle royale game (or some sort of similar larger-scale multiplayer experience) something that holds promise? Or is it best for Microsoft and Certain Affinity to just cut bait and move onto helping with the next core Halo title?
