Update: Game Developer cite a source familiar as having told them that Halo Studios staff have "departed as a result of external contractor shifts" and that no full-time staff have been laid off.

Original story below:

Halo studios appear to have cut an unspecified number of staff following the release of Halo: Campaign Evolved last week. A number of contract workers at the studio have posted about their departures on LinkedIn within the past day or so. Halo Studios' parent company Microsoft, lest we forget, laid off around 1600 workers in early July, while parting ways with several of the studios that had been under their umbrella.

Read more

Update: Exactly two minutes after publishing, I noticed that Halo - Chipmunk Edition's creator has AI-generated music videos on their YouTube channel. Laugh rescinded pending further evidence. Beware that searching for Halo: Campaign Evolved mods is very much a game of avoid/try to spot the AI use at the moment for those averse to the tech.

Original story follows:

Halo: Campaign Evolved's now it's out in full, so naturally the mods are flowing. In taking a look through the early ones, which include the usual sorts of performance a graphical tweaks which crop up for every new release, I've stumbled across a few works I'd class as pulling off interesting or noteworthy stuff thus far. There's a mod which purports to activate split-screen co-op the devs have left sitting behind the scenes and another which swaps Cortana's lines for ones from the original Combat Evolved. Both of those have been made using AI - Claude in one case, OpenAI Codex in the other.

So, I tried digging a bit deeper into the early combat mods which don't have any AI shoutouts in their descriptions. That's led me to Halo - Chipmunk Edition.

Read more