A coalition of Halo modders and developers have been digging up the series' forgotten history—including an adorable set of RTS vehicles
Last year, it was announced on the Halo: Waypoint website that 343 Industries would be working with a coalition of modders from the community to dive into «the darkest depths of ancient folders» and salvage what they could from the cutting room floor of 2001's Halo: Combat Evolved, then bring those scraps to the Master Chief Collection, which came to PC in 2019.
They released a three-part blog series:«Cutting Room Floor»,«Cutting Room Corps» and «Cutting Room Lore», then went dark until last week, tinkering away with what community writer Alex Wakeford calls «the secret tenth circle of Hell (the cutting room floor of game development)». Fortunately they survived Cortana's Inferno, and came out with some real gems.
The blog post starts with some maps that never made it into Halo PC's retail release, from a much more ambitious multiplayer experience that never was: «Some of these were cut before they even had a name more evocative than gbx_map#. Nevertheless, two were interesting enough to playtest and bring over the finish line within MCC.» The maps found were Indoor and Dusk, which were remade into Underground and Abyss by the team's modders.
The rest of the blog dives into a treasure trove of cut content. Among the more fascinating relics, however, are indications of Halo's previous concepts as both a third-person shooter and an RTS.
From the over-the-shoulder side, a bounty of weapons: «We do want to point out that the recovered weapons shown below were from the third-person era of Halo development [...] All of the cut pre-release Halo: CE weapons with first-person models in these Digsite releases were done from-scratch by the team as a labour of love!»
This arsenal includes an assault rifle/grenade launcher and an
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