Halo’s RTS and third-person roots are about to be restored

pcgamesn.com:

Halo The Master Chief Collection already brings together six of the most important FPS games ever made for you to play via PC Game Pass, and 343 Industries has now shown off a treasure trove of the cut content it promised to help modders restore, as the days of Halo as an RTS and third-person shooter come back with a plethora of enemies, vehicles, weapons, and maps. Soon Halo The Master Chief Collection is going to have so much preserved history it’ll make your head spin.

343 Industries is working directly with an intrepid team of modders, known as the Digsite team, to bring back a slew of classic Halo cut content, a lot of which has been known about over the years, but has never seen the light of day. It all began when 343 pledged to restore content from the fabled 1999 Halo RTS last year, and we’re even closer to that goal now. We’ve got cut enemies, vehicles, maps, and weapons all from the Halo PC port, the very early days as an RTS, and even when Halo was a third-person shooter as well.

With the help of 343, the Digsite team went into the Halo archives over the last year and uncovered a lot of stuff, saying that “Of particular interest to us were design/production docs, Bungie feedback notes, tags, compiled maps, and source data for previously unseen multiplayer maps.”

One of these pieces of cut content was a map called Indoor, from the Gearbox Software PC port of the original Halo, and this has been remixed with assets made by Gearbox that never saw the light of day into an all-new map: Underground.

“Gearbox had made a bunch of brand-new textures that were not being used whatsoever,” says Digsite team member Ludus. “I felt it would be a shame if these textures never got used, so I decided to remix Indoor into a