Last week, I got a tip from a reliable insider that said Microsoft was going to show off the next release in the Halo series at E3. Seeing as I was on vacation, I pushed out a simple tweet announcing this which unleashed a hell storm of angry emails and Reddit threads accusing me of only trying to grab attention. But, as we now know, this information was accurate.

Anyways, Microsoft showed off the next game called Halo Infinite yesterday which will be running on a new engine called SlipSpace but there were many details left out of that presentation, notably the release date.

Seeing as there is a significant amount of time between now and when the games will be released, take all of this with a pinch of salt as plans and timelines can change but this is what I am hearing about the release of the next Halo games.

Notice how I am saying games? Right now, the next iteration of Halo may only be a single player game and if all goes according to plan, could arrive, at the earliest, towards the end of 2019. The multiplayer aspect of this game is not expected to arrive until after the single player ships which pegs a 2020 release timeframe.

I was a little skeptical on this information until I saw that they were building an entirely new engine for the platform. Knowing this, the staggered release makes a lot more sense as it’s easier to build a single player game than a multiplayer shooter; thus, the single player arrives, they look for potential issues, then release the multiplayer portion of the game.

Here’s a bit of fun speculation, we also know that Microsoft is working on a follow-up to the Xbox One X console and my sources are saying that it is codenamed Scarlet. In the past, Microsoft has used Halo games to show-off new hardware, I wonder if the release of the next-gen Halo game will align to the release of the updated hardware with the new Xbox showing up in the more likely 2020 timeframe.

Any way you look at it, the future looks bright for the Xbox ecosystem.

Tagged with Halo, Halo Infinite, Xbox