Twenty-five years after the original Halo: Combat Evolved launched alongside the first Xbox, the remake arrives on PC this Thursday. Halo: Campaign Evolved, developed by Halo Studios in Unreal Engine 5, begins early access on July 23 at 8 AM PDT for Premium Edition and Collector’s Edition owners. The global launch for everyone else follows on July 28. Standard Edition is $49.99 and is available via Xbox on PC, Steam, and PlayStation 5 on launch day. It is also included in PC Game Pass and Xbox Game Pass Ultimate with no additional charge.
This is a full remake, not a remaster. Unlike 2011’s Halo: Combat Evolved Anniversary, which was a graphical pass over the original engine, Campaign Evolved rebuilds the entire thing from scratch: new geometry, new lighting, redesigned encounters, modern movement mechanics including sprint and clamber, re-recorded voice acting, and a new music suite. The core 10-mission campaign from the 2001 original is all here, along with the new addition. Every edition includes Operation: METEORITE, a three-mission story arc set one year before the events of Combat Evolved, featuring Master Chief and Sgt. Johnson on a clandestine mission aboard a Covenant research vessel.
For co-op players, the original’s two-player co-op has been expanded to four players online, with two-player split-screen available on consoles. Cross-play and cross-progression are supported across Xbox, Windows PC, and Steam. Xbox Play Anywhere means one purchase covers both Xbox console and PC on the Microsoft side.
The PlayStation 5 availability is the headline nobody expected a few years ago. Campaign Evolved is the first mainline Halo title to launch on a Sony console. It is not on PlayStation via some legacy platform arrangement; it is a day-one simultaneous release.
Performance requirements for PC were published last month. PC users will need at least 100 GB to install the game and 16 GB of memory for 1080p/1440p, but are recommended to have 32 GB of memory for 4K. The game also appears to be ever so slightly demanding of CPU, with at least an AMD Ryzen 9 7900X or Intel CORE i9-13900K recommended for 4K Ultra. UE5 titles have historically been GPU-bound, and the 8GB VRAM question that we raised in our RTX 5060 Ti comparison is worth keeping in mind at higher quality settings.
Early reviews are under embargo until July 23 at 8 AM PDT, timed to early access.
Early access: July 23, 8 AM PDT. Global launch: July 28, 8 AM PDT.
Discussion (10 replies)
Join Discussion →So the layoffs will be next week then?
Ouch... I mean accurate... but OUCH.
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Related article: https://www.digitalfoundry.net/reviews/halo-campaign-evolved-gives-us-hope-for-a-reforged-franchise
Emails are probably already scheduled to be sent at midnight.
Sigh... I hate how accurate that feels.
And often in the world of IT we feel the same. Businesses see us as a drain on profit. An expense they want to delete from the budget spreadsheet. They always look for ways to make that number go down... because less is more.
And they often make massive mistakes that cost the company far more... until the next CFO comes along or CIO comes along that wants to pad their retirement check.
Agreed on all fronts.
I've seen the game streamed by several people, it looks like a very lazy remake. I was never a big fan of Halo, but this seems to have lost what little appeal the original had. The AI which was the standout thing about halo is awful. The balance is bad, sometimes too easy sometimes too hard on the same difficulty setting. Hitboxes are inconsistent, esp. for melee.
I understand blaming the big bad corporate overlord, but at which point are the developers responsible? I think most issues with modern games aren't a result of corporate mismanagement but incompetency on the the mid and lower levels.
I can't really say I disagree with this.
There are some that are squarely on the publisher - like decisions to force inclusion of DRM, or in-game advertising, or saying "We need more buzzwords" - but at the end of the day, the end result is the direct product of the developers. There are always constraints, and publisher requirements are just another set of those. It's up to the developer to implement a solution for the constraint and deliver the product.
Game plays pretty well.
Looks a lot like how you might imagine Halo to look, if you're imagining it after over twenty years of visual upgrades.
Edit: right until I got to a particular climactic point, and the game crashes. And then crashed two more times at the same spot. Even after updating the drivers.
Edit 2: same crash after rebooting. Guess I'll be waiting a bit to finish!
[URL unfurl="true"]https://www.eurogamer.net/halo-campaign-evolved-split-screen-pc-mod[/URL]
"The mod's description revealed the feature actually exists in the PC build; Halo Studios simply disabled it. In fact, the PC version has all the necessary UI elements that make split-screen work on consoles. 'This mod calls the code that is already sitting there,' the description reads."
Thanks a lot you f*cking @ssholes. Once again the community swoops in the save the day.
"...it's a little more unfortunate here as the creator used Anthropic's Claude Code AI to do some of the work."
Well sunuva b1tch.
"Support is also limited to two players, which is a downgrade from the four-player split-screen possible on consoles."
That's incorrect, the console versions only have 2P split-screen to begin with.