After months of speculation, the cat is officially out of the bag — Halo is getting a Combat Evolved remake titled Halo: Campaign Evolved , and it'll be released on PlayStation next year in honor of the franchise's 25th anniversary and for the first time in history.
The name “Campaign Evolved” is particularly notable since the Halo Studios-led remake won't have any kind of multiplayer suite when it launches. It will have local co-op play, as well as online co-op functionality, but if you were hoping to play Slayer with your friends on the Xbox Series X and PlayStation 5 consoles, then sadly that won't be the case.
At this point, much of the focus in Campaign Evolved has been on new prequel missions, as well as additions made using Unreal Engine 5. But so far nothing has been revealed about why the first-person shooter title won't have multiplayer, like Gears of War: Reloaded when it launched in August.
As it turns out, Microsoft isn't even disclosing why.
Combat development didn't “start” Halo multiplayer, but it's still an important element
As The Verge's Tom Warren first reported, leading up to the official reveal of Campaign Evolve, where media had access to the pre-release beta, he asked Microsoft about the lack of multiplayer, which many consider a signature element of Halo as a franchise.
“I asked Microsoft for comment about the lack of multiplayer, but the company declined to discuss it,” Warren wrote.
Even with Microsoft's silence on the end, it's unclear what exactly led to the decision not to include multiplayer. While Warren notes that Combat Evolved wasn't technically “online” multiplayer, it did have local maps, and in the decades since CE's release, multiplayer has only grown more popular and synonymous with Halo, making the whole decision quite confusing to say the least.
Perhaps more interesting than figuring out why there's no multiplayer is how that affects the value of the game, which has yet to be revealed.
