Goodbye, ‘Halo Infinite’ (2021-2025)

On December 8, 2021, 343 Industries released Halo Infinite. As of today, November 18, 2025, the developer—now going by Halo Studios—has released the game’s final update, fittingly dubbed “Operation Infinite.†With this, priorities have shifted to Halo: Campaign Evolved, and a purported 10-year plan for Infinite has capped off at just over four.

Halo has had its ups and downs since original creator Bungie moved on to Destiny, and Infinite was specifically positioned as a righting of the ship. On a campaign level, it did this by putting Master Chief as the sole protagonist and exploring a new Halo ring in an open-world structure. Using the Grappleshot to get around Zeta Halo and throw explosives at enemies really did do a lot to liven up an otherwise routine campaign that focused on rehabilitating the series’ image instead of doing anything ambitious, best exemplified by Chief and his AI buddy Joyeuse (née The Weapon) fighting another race of Forerunner-adjacent aliens and a Covenant faction.

Multiplayer was another matter, and it’s where Halo Infinite did some of its most interesting and frustrating work. Already, the game had an uphill battle to climb with the lack of long-running Halo features at launch, like campaign co-op and the Forge map editor. But for what was there, it seemed to do everything right: it moved, felt, and shot like Halo, feeling like its own distinct thing while also in conversation with its predecessors. Like apparently every live-service or free-to-play game, it was also plagued with server problems at launch, to say nothing of its battle pass progression and players wanting more than it was able to provide.

Over time, Infinite became the multiplayer game Halo fans wanted. It ditched the traditional three-month seasonal cadence in favor of smaller, more agreeable content drops dubbed “Operations†that came every month or so. Forge and campaign co-op eventually arrived, new updates led to new maps and mode variants, and you could even return to previous battle passes and level them up. This all made for a shooter that was fun to pop in for a few weeks, dip out, then come back again. It was never boring seeing what armor or weapons have been added, seeing player-made creations go viral, or learning there were now wholly new features like Forge tools to let players make their own campaign missions for others to share and a third-person mode that works better than you think. In its best moments, Halo Infinite felt like the franchise’s definitive multiplayer experience in a way not dissimilar from what Warzone is for Call of Duty.

Even so, it’s hard to ignore how shaky the foundation of Infinite and these post-Bungie Halo sequels is. Infinite’s development was troubled, and while we don’t know the full extent, things were bad enough that several ex-343 workers condemned Microsoft for mismanaging the project, and Joe Staten, a longtime Halo alum who came on to help with development, eventually jumped ship. While Xbox publicly put its faith in the shooter’s turnaround early on, its pursuit of Activision Blizzard and the Call of Duty franchise in particular has been hard to ignore. In owning the biggest shooter in the market, Microsoft seemed to wipe its hands of Halo, despite likely being a contributor for why it’s in such a state to begin with. No franchise has had a completely flawless streak, but it’s hard to lay full blame for Halo’s woes on 343 when other studios have been in similar disarray due to a lack of support from their parent company.

For a long time, Halo was synonymous with Xbox, but what is it now? As of a few weeks ago, the answer is a soldier of…well, not “fortune,†but maybe opportunity. Like other Xbox-owned properties, it’s going multiplatform, with Campaign Evolved hitting the PlayStation 5 alongside the Xbox Series consoles in 2026. This isn’t just a one-time thing; whether remake or wholly new game, future Halo titles will also be on PlayStation, where it can meet a new audience that may only know of it through osmosis or watching Red vs. Blue in their youth.

For anniversary reasons, and likely some technical ones as well, it makes sense for the first Halo game to hit PS5, but it’s a shame that honor doesn’t go to Halo Infinite, which could’ve used the new lease on life. The game was meant as a refresh of the series that would help Halo Studios do whatever it chooses next and redeem the series’ good name. As is, the game reminded players for a spell that Halo’s still got the juice—you just can’t help but wish it got to last longer just so we don’t have to go through this comeback story again.

Thanks for the fun, Halo Infinite; can’t wait to see how you’ll be reappraised when you eventually hit the Master Chief Collection.

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