Halo: Campaign Evolved Roundtable Reveal

The Roundtable Reveal for Halo: Campaign Evolved premiered at the Halo World Championship on October 24, 2025. The video featured a discussion chaired by Brian Jarrard with three members of the Halo Studios development team, Greg Hermann, Dan Gniady, and Max Szlagor. The four gave an overview on the game and highlighted notable changes from the original Halo: Combat Evolved.

Transcript

• Brian Jarrard: Halo: Campaign Evolved is the next project coming out of Halo Studios. It is the ultimate Halo: CE campaign remake. It is coming to Xbox, PC, and, for the first time, PlayStation. It will be arriving next year. To talk more about it, we've got Dan, Max, and Greg from the development team. Guys, let's get into this. Why is this the right game for right now?

• Greg Hermann: We did this work on Halo: Anniversary. I felt like there were certain things that were left unsaid. There were certain things that we weren't able to achieve at that time. There were certain things we weren't able to do.

• Max Szlagor: It's a great time to revisit Combat Evolved, for new players, for established Halo players, and maybe even for old friends playing on different hardware today, to allow them to play together and enjoy the franchise together again.

• Greg Hermann: Going back to the Halo ring again for the first time.

• Dan Gniady: For the first time is really important. And for them to be surprised by new content and feel, like, excited again about exploring the ringworld.

• Greg Hermann: For new players, this is the right time for you to jump in. Think of this as your introduction into this huge franchise we've been building for the past 25 years.

• Brian Jarrard: I'm curious how you're going to focus on capturing the essence of the original, knowing that you need to evolve to kind of move the experience forward.

• Max Szlagor: Yeah. From design, we don't take that lightly at all. Whenever we make a change, the number one thing was to be true to the original game.

• Brian Jarrard: For every one of those topics that comes up, there's someone who is incredibly passionate on the other side saying, like, "The is sacred. We do not move that crate."

• Max Szlagor: It's really about looking across, you know, what we've learned over the years, what technology we've built, and how we can tie that back into this experience.

• Brian Jarrard: So in this game, up to four people can play the campaign together, regardless of which platform they're on, and then we're kicking it old school. We can play two player co-op on consoles, on the couch together, just like we did back in the original. What do you have to do differently to account, now, for four people running around?

• Max Szlagor: For different co-op counts, we will make some of the spaces larger. We also want to make sure we're authentic to the encounters themselves. So it's a balancing act between that difficulty tuning and, you know, making those encounters, the right size for the right space.

• Brian Jarrard: I understand that we've done some special tuneup works to the beloved Warthog.

• Dan Gniady: We have. There's a new seat. What I like to call the golf cart seat or the bumper seat. This is on the back of the Warthogs. Now, you can bring everyone with.

• Brian Jarrard: Let's talk a little bit about one of my favorite aspects of the Halo franchise. What is a skull? What's cool about it? What does it do?

• Dan Gniady: A skull is a gameplay modifier. Generally, mean spirited. It makes the game more challenging for the player.

• Greg Hermann: The combination of pairing of these different skulls and how that's going to create that new gameplay experience. Huge amount of replay options for folks.

• Brian Jarrard: I love the replayability that skulls bring to a campaign, and just there's almost endless variety.

• Dan Gniady: We have dozens of skulls this time.

• Max Szlagor: The most that we've ever had in a Halo game.

• Brian Jarrard: Are you a LASO guy? I think you, yourself, told me that you don't think anyone would ever be able complete this game with Legendary All Skulls On?

• Dan Gniady: I don't think so. I mean, there's a lot. And so if you can do a true Legendary All Skulls On run, let us know, because I'd love to see it! I think, I mean, that'd be really hard.

• Brian Jarrard: There's one thing that this community has shown us, is do not underestimate them and they will find a way.

• Brian Jarrard: So Halo's always been known for its sandbox. How has this evolved?

• Dan Gniady: We made sure that anything we included isn't going to drastically change the way the game plays, to change the sandbox in a drastic way, but there's some really fun kind of additions. And that's across, you know, enemies, weapons, vehicles, things that in the original CE you weren't able to do before that you now can. You finally killed the Elite with the sword? That weapon hits the floor, and you can pick that up and just- [Imitates weapon sound] You know? Kind of really, take it to the enemy.

• Brian Jarrard: [Laughter] The sound design!

• Brian Jarrard: All these weapons, by the way, have been painstakingly remodeled, rebuilt, higher fidelity. How do all these things kind of come to life?

• Max Szlagor: That comes across through the way they look, the way they sound, the effects, the actual panels on the weapons themselves, the ammo counters.

• Greg Hermann: With Unreal, the fully dynamic lighting within Lumen, allows us to get those effects, right? That rich plasma lighting up and brightening the environments.

• Brian Jarrard: Of course, one of the hallmark elements of Halo: CE is what becomes kind of a three way battle with the introduction of the Flood.

• Dan Gniady: There was quite a bit of development between Halo: CE and 3, to kind of how the Flood behaved and just how they interacted with the player. So we've pulled a lot of those Flood behaviors into this game.

• Max Szlagor: And I would say this is a learning specifically from CE to Anniversary, which is just kind of that mood, the atmosphere, the tension, the horror, and really delivering on that from the way that we staged the encounters and the set up and how we reveal the Flood.

• Brian Jarrard: In Halo legacy, there were some pure form units. We've pulled in a familiar friend, familiar fiend, if you will, to challenge the player.

• Brian Jarrard: Talk to me just a little bit about how we're approaching the narrative aspects to bring it up to the same level as the rest of this game.

• Max Szlagor: We want to tell an authentic story, and we want to level up the cinematics from the source.

• Greg Hermann: As we were building this out, we didn't just, kind of, put a new coat of paint over the original cinematics, right? We ended up revisiting exactly how they were blocked out, how they were sequenced, how they were put together. And we've done that across the board.

• Max Szlagor: We have access to original source assets, original source code, and access to the original storyboards. We are remastering, remixing the music to go along with these cinematics.

• Greg Hermann: We also had the core principal cast come in and rerecord all the lines. This really provides a degree of fidelity that we weren't able to do for Halo: Anniversay.

• Brian Jarrard: I'm super excited that this game will include three brand new bonus missions. Tell me a little bit about that.

• Max Szlagor: It was really important that we preserve the original story as it is. So these missions specifically are meant to be a prequel set up for, you know, the main course. These new missions are going to offer some new opportunities for character interactions, maybe between, you know, Chief and Johnson.

• Dan Gniady: We've got some new mechanics, there's some new AI behaviors, things that haven't been done before in Halo: CE.

• Brian Jarrard: So where are we right now at this stage in development? What can you share with us?

• Greg Hermann: Within the past few weeks, we've been able to start engaging and sending builds out to some of our community members.

• Max Szlagor: We can now see so many of the elements of the level really coming together.

• Dan Gniady: There's a point in every game's life cycle where it kind of just comes online.

• Max Szlagor: Seeing really high fidelity versions of the cinematics, elements of the sandbox, and encounter tweaks, and the lighting.

• Dan Gniady: You go to someone's desk and give feedback, live on an experience. And to me, that's like a really exciting time in game development.

• Brian Jarrard: The ultimate love letter to the game that started it all. I would call upon our entire Halo community to welcome with open arms this next generation of players. I'm excited to just relive these experiences again for the first time.