E3 2018: Halo Infinite reportedly split in two; Coming late 2019 and 2020

Yesterday at Microsoft’s E3 press conference, they opened their show by announcing a new Halo game called Halo Infinite. They showed off a brief trailer that showcased their new Slipspace engine and stated it would be Master Chief’s next big adventure, making us all wonder if this is Halo 6.

While Xbox and 343 have been quite vague on what this game really is. Is it a reboot? Is it some spin-off? Is the finale of this new Halo trilogy? We have no idea! To make things a bit stranger, Thurrott writer Brad Sams claims to know the release plans for Halo Infinite. Sams got tipped off about Halo Infinite last week and leaked the title before it was announced and has also stated the next Xbox is codenamed ‘Scarlet’ which others have corroborated.

With that said, Sams states that Halo Infinite’s release will begin at the end of 2019 with an exclusively single-player release if everything goes according to plan. The multiplayer would then follow sometime in 2020, this release strategy allows 343 to find bugs within their engine with the single-player Halo game and then eliminate them in time for the multiplayer version of Halo Infinite.

It’s certainly a different approach to the acclaimed shooter franchise but one that 343 will likely benefit from given how poorly received Halo 5 was. Sams also believes that Halo Infinite could be a next-gen game (likely on Xbox One and Scarlet) to showcase the power of the hardware, that’s pure speculation on his part but it doesn’t sound super unlikely.

Whatever the case may be, 343 will be doing some sort of early access program that allows players to join in on the action super early to give feedback.

“In the future, you will be able to join early flighting programs that will let members of the community play the game with us, and give direct feedback, much like the current Insider flighting program for Halo: The Master Chief Collection. It will take some time for us to be ready to kick those flighting events off, but when we do they will start small and grow along the way.” said studio head Chris Lee in a blog post.

As Lee states, it’s a ways off for that early access program so it could give some weight to Sams’ leak. We likely won’t have anything very concrete until E3 2019 at the earliest but until then, this gives us an idea of what to expect for the future of Halo.

Halo Infinite has no release date.