The canceled Battle Royale mode for Halo Studios’ first-person shooter, Halo Infinite, has been repurposed into an extraction game, based on the latest rumor.
In his latest video on his YouTube channel, Rebs Gaming, who is known for closely following the development of Halo titles, shared some new details regarding the canceled Battle Royale mode for Halo Infinite. According to his source, who is a former Halo developer, Project Tatanka was started by 343 Industries because the studio wanted to create a Battle Royale mode for Halo Infinite for a long time.
As per the Halo developer, a Battle Royale mode for Halo Infinite was a no-brainer back when its development began. However, eventually, 343 Industries decided to shut down the project, and handed it over to Certain Affinity. The latter continued to work on the project, known internally as Tatanka, for Halo Infinite until it was canceled in 2022 when 343 Industries’ new leadership took over and began to explore Unreal Engine for the series’ future. Rebs’ source confirmed that Tatanka was rebranded into a new project called Ekur around the same time in 2022.
However, another source, who had mentioned the name Ekur to Rebs earlier, now claimed that a Certain Affinity employee had told them back in March, 2023, about the Halo Battle Royale project being evolved into an extraction shooter. Furthermore, Grunt API believes Ekur may still exist. Apparently, they can access files within Halo studios’ database, and they discovered that an Ekur file still exists in the database. The files were claimed to have been created in October, 2023. As per Rebs, this suggests that Ekur may not have been cancelled, and that Certain Affinity may currently be working on a multiplayer-only Halo game.
Lastly, Certain Affinity recently announced that it has been acquired by Keywords Studios. Rebs mentioned that, if Certain Affinity is indeed working on a new Halo game, the acquisition provides a lot of support and stability for both the studio as well as the series. Te acquisition announcement also revealed that Certain Affinity is working closely with clients on a number of unannounced projects, one of which is likely to be Ekur.
