Ed Thorn has always been a journalist of great perspicacity and supernatural insight, so it was no surprise to the RPS editors of the time when rumors surfaced a few months later that Secure Affinity had worked with 343 Industries (now Halo Studios). Halo Battle Royale is a reality. Those rumors have now been confirmed by Mike Clopper, Specific Affinity’s former design director, who says the now-cancelled mode could have been a “game changer.”

Unfortunately, that’s pretty much all Clopper had to say. Here is the full quote from his LinkedIn, as shared by VGC:

I led a large team of designers working on a canceled battle royale mode for Halo. I believe this product could have been a game-changer for the franchise. We had a lot of fun playing and working on it, it was a fantastic experience despite the cancellation.

Since Clopper, who is now design director at Call of Duty developer Raven Software, has nothing else to say, I guess I’ll go with Ed’s opinion that Halo Battle Royale could have been fabulous. Of course, the battle royale’s star has completely fallen. Everyone is sick of them, even the millions who play Fortnite, which I barely think of as a game anymore: it’s more like a giant intellectual property festival. Did you know they now have an Edward Scissorhands? Nonetheless, Halo’s existing big team modes feel like a natural foundation for an excellent battle royale.

According to Edders, one of the genre’s virtues is its ability to function as a flexible meeting place: you can decide exactly how intense you want the experience to be simply by choosing your first landing spot. It reminds me of relaxing on Blood Gulch by simply avoiding the bases and heading for the caves or deeper dunes. The most important thing would be to preserve physics with such large groups of players, because what would a Halo game be without the joy of flipping a warthog with a surgical grenade throw?

I’ll definitely prefer this over Halo Studios’ current visions for Halo as an Unreal Engine series, which seem overly cautious and devoted to more cosmetic issues of texture and lighting, perhaps because the videos in question were designed to recruit Unreal Engine developers .