Halo Studios has reportedly cancelled a multiplayer project called Ekur, in a move that seems to align with the wide-ranging Xbox cuts announced last week.<\/p>\n
Halo reporter Rebs Gaming originated the story<\/a> on YouTube, saying they’d heard from multiple employees at Halo Studios that Project Ekur was no longer in development. The claim was backed up this afternoon by well-Microsoft-connected Windows Central reporter Jez Corden, who said<\/a> the information was “100 percent true”.<\/p>\n A week earlier, however, Rebs Gaming had declared Project Ekur – “or at least part of it” – would be the next multiplayer Halo game<\/a>, based on information from someone who’d worked with Halo Studios, plus a separate “someone else”. Nevertheless, a “recent development” changed this outcome and prompted the newer claim that the project is dead.<\/p>\n Halo: Campaign Evolved. (Or is it?)Watch on YouTube<\/a><\/p>\n Nowhere does Rebs Gaming mention the Xbox cuts as a reason why this has happened. The only possible explanation cited is “major development problems” with Halo 1 remake Halo: Campaign Evolved, which apparently sucked people away. “Sometime after that, Ekur was cancelled,” said Rebs Gaming, giving no further detail.<\/p>\n Project Ekur was reportedly prototyped by Certain Affinity, a studio Xbox has worked with numerous times in the past<\/a>. Certain Affinity built multiplayer maps for Halo 2<\/a>, and worked on a handful of Halo projects, up to and including Halo: The Master Chief Collection<\/a> in 2014.<\/p>\n Certain Affinity reportedly got the go-ahead from Halo Studios to develop Project Ekur after an Unreal-powered battle royale Halo experiment, called Tatanka, didn’t work out. Project Ekur would carry on exploring Unreal – coincidentally the engine Campaign Evolved is built on<\/a> – and use Tatanka’s map alongside Halo Infinite<\/a>‘s Slipspace map.<\/p>\n The Project Ekur prototype faced a green-light verdict in September 2023, Rebs Gaming said, and succeeded, after which an extraction shooter idea was toyed with before a “super big-team-battle idea” was settled on instead. Halo 5 Warzone<\/a> was cited as a touchstone for the project, and Project Ekur reportedly had playable Spartans and Elites, and full character customisation.<\/p>\n It’s not clear at what point – if at all – Certain Affinity handed the project over to Halo Studios, but dataminers and other Halo scrutinisers found evidence of the game existing on the studio’s servers relatively recently.<\/p>\n With Project Ekur reportedly cancelled, a question is left dangling about whether there’ll be any competitive multiplayer modes to accompany Halo: Campaign Evolved at any point. That game has co-op, remember, but nothing else.<\/p>\n Halo: Campaign Evolved is out in a couple of weeks, and despite divisive first impressions, does actually seem to be rather good. “I went into Halo: Campaign Evolved thinking it didn’t need to exist,” wrote Dom in Eurogamer’s Halo: Campaign Evolved preview<\/a> recently, “but after playing two levels I want full remakes of the original trilogy and Reach.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Halo Studios has reportedly cancelled a multiplayer project called Ekur, in a move that seems to align with…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":677110,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[59,86,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-690503","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-technology","tag-gb","tag-technology","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/690503","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=690503"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/690503\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/677110"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=690503"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=690503"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=690503"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}