Activision should give Halo a hard reboot

For more than a decade, Halo has had trouble carrying one campaign into the next. Games end with major conflicts still unfolding, only for the next entry to return after the story has already moved somewhere else. Books and comics often fill in part of the gap, leaving players who only follow the games to catch up on events they never actually played.

Activision now inherits that problem alongside the series itself. A new development team can continue patching together old storylines while trying to establish its own version of Halo, but the series has already done variations of that several times.

Starting over would give the next team a cleaner foundation. A hard reboot only works, though, if Halo finally commits to the characters, conflicts and ideas it introduces instead of replacing them again a game later.

Halo Infinite ended with the Harbinger defeated, but the Endless were only beginning to enter the story. Their history on Zeta Halo and their role in whatever came next were left largely unexplored.

The Xalanyn survived the firing of the Halo Array, something the Forerunners considered dangerous enough to justify imprisoning them on Zeta Halo. That gives Halo a rare enemy tied directly to the purpose of the rings themselves, instead of another army simply fighting to control them.

The outgoing lore team returned to the Endless in its final Canon Fodder, "Heart and Soell", sharing new visualizations alongside artwork of frozen areas of Zeta Halo and survivors sheltering inside the wrecked Infinity. There was clearly more room left to explore the setting and the people trapped there after Infinite.

None of that confirms Activision will continue the story. Nearly five years after the Harbinger warned that the Endless were coming, there is still no announced campaign following up on them.

Dropping the Endless now would repeat one of Halo's oldest problems: setting up the next major conflict, then asking another game to start somewhere else. Continuing them would at least give Infinite the sequel its ending was clearly preparing for.

The Endless would not be the first major Halo threat to disappear between games. Halo 4 and Halo 5 both ended with major conflicts still unresolved, only for the next campaign to move on before players got to see them play out.

Halo 4 introduced the Didact as Chief's new Forerunner enemy, only for their next confrontation to happen in the Halo: Escalation comics. By Halo 5, the games had already moved on. Players who only followed the campaigns never got the continuation Halo 4 had seemed to promise.

Halo 5 then ended on a much larger cliffhanger. Cortana had taken control of the Guardians, the Created were spreading across the galaxy and the UNSC was on the run. After years of building Chief and Cortana together, their conflict looked ready to become the heart of the next game.

Instead, Halo Infinite begins after Cortana has already fallen. Chief wakes above Zeta Halo with the UNSC shattered and the Banished in control. Cortana's final days are pieced together through memories and recordings, while the campaign moves on with a new AI companion and a new enemy.

Players finished Halo 5 expecting to face Cortana. By the time they reached Infinite, that story was already over. The Endless are now in a similar position. If Activision drops them and starts again, Infinite becomes another Halo campaign that points towards a sequel players never actually get to play.

Halo Infinite was meant to stop Halo from starting over every few years. In 2020, then studio head Chris Lee described it as the beginning of the next ten years of Halo, with future stories building on the same foundation instead of replacing it.

The campaign left plenty behind for another game to use. Chief and the Weapon had only just started working together, the Banished still controlled much of Zeta Halo and the Harbinger's defeat opened the door for the Endless. A sequel could have picked up directly from any of those threads without another jump forward or change of enemy.

Some of that story has continued outside the games, including Halo: Edge of Dawn, but there is still no announced campaign taking Chief back to Zeta Halo.

Starting somewhere else would put Halo back in familiar territory. The next game would either have to explain what happened to the Banished and the Endless off-screen, or leave those questions hanging while another conflict takes their place.

A soft reset does not really solve that problem. It keeps Infinite in continuity while asking the new team to work around everything the previous campaign left unfinished. If Activision wants a cleaner starting point, a hard reboot may ultimately be less disruptive than pretending those loose ends are no longer important.

If Activision decides that another soft reset would only carry Halo's old problems forward, Halo: Campaign Evolved already shows where a cleaner version of the series could begin.

Released on July 28 for Xbox Series X|S, PlayStation 5 and PC, the remake brings the original campaign to a much wider audience. It remains part of the existing canon, but its story also works almost perfectly as a starting point. The Pillar of Autumn escapes Reach, discovers an unknown ring and suddenly Chief and Cortana are dealing with the Covenant, the Flood and a weapon neither of them fully understands.

A reboot could keep that foundation and change what comes afterwards. Chief and Cortana would have years of story ahead of them again without Halo 5 already waiting at the end of their relationship. The Forerunners could remain mysterious until the games are ready to explore them, while familiar characters could develop differently without decades of continuity dictating where they have to end up.

Activision would not need to reinvent Halo's beginning. The bigger opportunity is giving that beginning a new future, then actually following it from one campaign into the next.

Starting again after Campaign Evolved would also mean walking away from a lot of Halo that is worth keeping. The Forerunner history built through Greg Bear's novels, Chief's relationship with Cortana and the unfinished story of the Endless have given the current timeline far more depth than the original trilogy ever needed at the start.

There is also a perfectly reasonable case for simply continuing Infinite. Chief ended that campaign with the Weapon beside him, the Banished still on Zeta Halo and the Endless finally beginning to emerge. None of those threads need replacing.

Chief and the Weapon are especially worth following. After everything that happened with Cortana, another game could show him learning to trust an AI again without pretending those earlier experiences never happened. The Endless could finally move beyond a name and a warning and become the threat Infinite spent its ending setting up.

After nearly five years without another campaign, abandoning all of that would be frustrating. Trying to preserve the continuity while quietly cutting away anything inconvenient may be worse. Halo has already spent too many games half-continuing the story before changing direction again. If Activision wants to start over, making that break explicit would at least leave the existing timeline intact instead of slowly dismantling it.

Microsoft has handed the next Halo to a purpose-built Activision team separate from Call of Duty. A new studio gives the series another chance to decide what its version of Halo is going to be, but changing developers will not fix the problem that followed 343 through several campaigns.

The Didact led out of Halo 4. Cortana and the Created led out of Halo 5. The Endless now lead out of Infinite. Halo has rarely struggled to find an idea for what comes next. It has struggled to actually make that next game.

A hard reboot would give Activision the cleanest possible starting point. Chief, Cortana, the Covenant, the Flood and the rings are enough to build from, especially with Campaign Evolved already putting that beginning back in front of players. From there, the new team could decide where the story goes without inheriting every unresolved turn from the last fifteen years.

But the reboot itself is not the fix. The next campaign has to finish what it starts, and whatever follows it needs to pick up from there.

Halo does not need another ending that promises a different game than the one we eventually get. If Activision starts the series over, the next Halo should finally lead into the Halo that comes after it.