Details regarding the gameplay and world map featured in Xbox Game Studios and 343 Industries’ canceled Halo battle royale title have allegedly been leaked.
In his latest video on his YouTube channel, Rebs Gaming shared brand new details regarding the gameplay and world map featured in the canceled battle royale title. He mentioned that Halo fans have waited over two years to learn the truth about the unannounced game codenamed Project Tatanka. A few days ago, he spoke to a former Halo developer who worked on and tested Tatanka, and shared specific information regarding the game to him.
Beginning with gameplay details, Rebs mentioned that Tatanka started as a battle royale mode for Halo Infinite that would tie into Joe Staten’s campaign narrative. The map took place on some of the smaller fragments of Zeta Halo, and each fragment contained different biomes and man-cannons to launch players to other fragments. Players would have started each match in a launch bay and dropped into the map in ODST drop pods. Besides eliminating other teams, players could complete mini-objectives to receive power items, equipment, and partial overshields. Additionally, vehicles would be dropped in the from Pelicans throughout the match for players to fight over. This included a Falcon. If a player would get taken down, they would get turned into an AI bubble that could float around and be revived.
The Halo insider further shared that, throughout 2022, 343 Industries held weekly internal playtests for Tatanka, but in 2023, after leadership changed, the studio began rebranding the project into something else called Project Ekhert. According to former developers who still talk to current developers, 343 Industries decided to cancel Tatanka sometime in the summer of 2023 and fully pivot to the next mainline Halo game.
As per Reb’s sources, Tatanka’s development was not completed by any means, and 343 Industries did not have nearly enough resources to pour into the project and make it competitive with other established battle royale titles. The studio realized that there was no way it could possibly pump out content for Tatanka at even half the rate that Epic Games does for Fortnite. Additionally, he was told that Halo Infinite’s shock weapons were difficult to balance around to make vehicles viable, and the development team was not allowed to add much to the sandbox. As such, despite having a great concept, the canceled title was far from a state in which it could have been released, and 343 Industries doesn’t have the resources to support such a mode with a steady flow of new content.
