Microsoft opened its E3 2018 press briefing with a bang, announcing Halo Infinite, the next entry in Microsoft’s flagship first-person shooter series.
The brief teaser trailer doesn’t tell us much about Master Chief’s next journey. In fact, it wasn’t clear until about a minute in that the game being shown was a Halo game. The trailer looks to take place on Earth, as it has a myriad of animals including rhinos and moose. We see a group of soldiers walking across a barren strip of land before the camera pans back to show Master Chief. Interestingly, you only see his hand holding his signature helmet. Will we finally see Master Chief’s face for real in a Halo game? Perhaps. But we didn’t see it in the trailer.
The trailer also shows familiar Halo staples like the Warthog and the Halo Array.
There was much speculation ahead of the show that Microsoft and 343 Studios would announce “Halo 6.” At this time, it’s unclear if Halo Infinite will be a direct sequel to Halo 5: Guardians. The last non-numbered entry in the series was Halo: Reach, a game that didn’t star Master Chief. So this will be the first non-numbered entry to feature Master Chief. That probably doesn’t mean much, but it is an interesting tidbit.
As far as what to expect, head of Xbox Phil Spencer said, “We will join Master Chief on his greatest adventure yet to save humanity.”
Halo Infinite will introduce a new game engine as well. It would appear that Microsoft developed this new engine, called Slipspace, in house. Halo Infinite is the first mainline entry in the series since Halo 5, which launched on Xbox One in 2015. The most recent Halo-related game, real-time strategy game Halo Wars 2, launched just last year.
Microsoft didn’t reveal a release window for Halo Infinite, but the game will come to both Xbox One and PC at launch. This marks the first time since Halo 2 that a mainline Halo game will come to PC, and the first time ever that PC users will get to play a mainline Halo game from the jump.
The Call of Duty franchise has held a special place in my heart ever since I played my first Black Ops game back in 2010. That game's campaign was something else, with twists and turns that culminated in a mind-blowing finale. We can all admit that compared to those older campaigns, the recent CODs have been lackluster at best, and a complete and utter disappointment at worst. The reboot of Modern Warfare did give me some hope, as the first two installments were actually quite good, but the third game left such a bad taste in my mouth that I wasn’t exactly expecting much from Modern Warfare 4.
After recently finishing the campaign, I can say that this installment is nothing like the recent releases and instead feels closer to the franchise’s roots. For the first time in a long while, the campaign comes across as well-crafted rather than rushed to hit a release date. It arrives three years after MW3, and you can see exactly where all that time went. It seems the studio finally made listening to player feedback a priority.
Epic Games has just announced the 2026 Epic AI MegaJam, which is looking to see how much game development can be squeezed into a very short window. This is running from November 12 through November 15.
Participants can work alone or in teams of up to five people, build in Unreal Engine or Unreal Editor for Fortnite, and bring along “as many AI agents as you want.” Epic explicitly encourages coding agents, AI-generated assets, audio tools, writing tools, and other AI systems. The official event page literally says "Vibe your way to $50k.”
It’s turning into a pretty good time to be a Monster Hunter fan who plays on a phone. Capcom has confirmed that Monster Hunter Outlanders will launch on Android and iOS on October 29, giving the series a new mobile-first game just as Monster Hunter Rise is also preparing to make the jump to smartphones through Netflix.
Outlanders is being developed by Tencent subsidiary TiMi Studio Group under license and supervision from Capcom. Unlike Rise, which appears to be the full console and PC game adapted for mobile, Outlanders is a free-to-play survival hunting game made specifically for phones.