Microsoft has finally unveiled Halo: Campaign Evolved, a remake of the campaign portion of Bungie's beloved Halo: Combat Evolved. Halo fans have spent most of the weekend debating the changes Halo Studios has made for this upcoming 2026 shooter, from the addition of sprint to the more pristine art style. But what do the developers of Halo: Combat Evolved itself make of the remake?
Jaime Griesemer is one of the key developers behind Halo. He was most involved with designing Halo's famous '30 seconds of fun' gameplay loop and designed much of the campaign itself. Now creative director at Highwire Games (Six Days in Fallujah),
Griesemer took to X / Twitter to deliver an early verdict on gameplay footage coming out of Microsoft's Halo: Campaign Evolved reveal.
He did not sound impressed.
"You aren't supposed to be able to take the Warthog up to steamroll the Hunters," Griesemer said. "I intentionally placed rocks in the way so you had to fight them on foot. When you can just smash the crates out of the way it wrecks the encounters.
"But the worst part? They put trees in the landing area of the WooHoo Jump. Lame."
Let's unpack this a bit. Griesemer is criticizing a key part of the iconic campaign mission, The Silent Cartographer: the first encounter with two Hunters. In the original Halo, this fight is meant to be played with Master Chief on-foot (players soon discovered it was possible to brute force a Warthog into the arena). But in Microsoft's remake, players can freely take their Warthog up to the Hunters and ride roughshod over their hapless victims. I imagine the Hunters, with their dying breaths, gurgling: "no fair!"
(Oh, and that WooHoo Jump?
Griesemer explained: "There's a ramp that is supposed to have a bunch of jackals at the landing spot. Your gunner would always say 'Woohoo!' When you got airborne.")
It's fair to say Griesemer's tweet, viewed 2.3 million times, has sparked a reaction online, with some fans insisting the level layout change ruins the gameplay flow, others saying this change and others like it will make the game more fun. As for Griesemer, in a subsequent tweet, he explained that if Microsoft is going to change Halo's crates to be dynamic, then they should have also redesigned the encounters that use them as permanent cover."
He continued: "Most people forced the Warthog through BECAUSE of the Hunters. The introduction of the Hunters was supposed to be intimidating and difficult, but in the light so you can understand them. Then you meet them in an enclosed dark area and they are even harder. But then you get Rockets and Vehicles and turn the tables. It's a three act play of enemy design and you want to throw it in a blender. Fine, it'll go down easier but it's not going to taste as good."
And: "It's like the dance remix of a classic song that skips the intro and the bridge and just thumps the chorus over and over."
Griesemer
later offered a potential explanation for this change: "On further analysis I'm sure it's because the vehicles take damage and so you're just as likely to destroy the hog as get it over the rocks. If anything that makes it -worse- because -none- of the vehicle tricks are going to work anymore."
Another aspect of Halo: Campaign Evolved that Griesemer has taken issue with is the addition of an optional infinite sprint button. Sprint seems to be the biggest talking point about Halo: Campaign Evolved; while you can choose not to sprint, some are saying using it destroys Halo: Combat Evolved's classic, considered gameplay pace and thus its sense of wonder. Others say believe it's essential for the fun factor.
Griesemer doesn't sound like a fan of sprinting in the Halo remake, either. In another
tweet, he pointed out that the player was able to sprint into The Silent Cartographer's shaft vignette so fast that it broke the music transition. "Who is this for?" he asked.
Then: "If the world isn't scaled to sprint, you will be able to trivially skip encounters."
Halo: Campaign Evolved's Needler, too, has caused quite the kerfuffle. This iconic Halo weapon shoots deadly needles into an enemy, then, after a cool-sounding charge, they explode. The Needler stands out because the ammo — the needles themselves — stick out the top of the gun, so you can easily see how much ammo you have at any given moment. Still, Microsoft saw fit to add an ammo counter on the Needler, just in case.
This change has drawn some ridicule online, and Griesemer is clearly not a fan. "By far the most comically unnecessary embellishment in the whole announcement,"
he said. "I'm not sure it isn't intentional satire."
Then: "But why would you add an ammo counter to a weapon that IS an ammo counter in the first place?"
In response to Griesemer's original, now viral tweet on Halo: Campaign Evolved, one user accused the veteran designer of "crying" about nostalgia, to which
he responded: "Because I made it right and they are breaking it for no reason."
He continued: "... I think there are dozens of changes (reload speeds, no health packs, falling damage, etc) that make the game 'slicker' but ultimately less interesting."
After Bungie left Halo behind to develop Destiny, Microsoft, via what was known as 343 Industries, continued the franchise with Halo 4, Halo 5: Guardians, and 2021's Halo: Infinite. The internet would suggest that with these games, Microsoft has struggled to recreate the Bungie "magic," for want of a better term. Certainly Bungie's Halo games are more fondly remembered than Microsoft's. But why has Microsoft struggled so?
Griesemer was asked this question, and in his response revealed his thoughts on the idea of remaking Halo and continuing to make new Halo games now, nearly 25 years after Combat Evolved came out.
"It's not the early 2000s anymore,"
he said. "Halo is of its time, maybe more than any other game franchise. So they are constantly trying to either take Halo out of 2001 and modernize it (which breaks it) or take players back to 2001 with nostalgia (which is impossible)."
One member of the original Halo team who sounds thrilled with Halo: Campaign Evolved is Marcus Lehto, who was the art director on Combat Evolved and thus heavily involved in the iconic look of Halo itself. Lehto, who recently left the now shuttered Battlefield 6 developer Ridgeline Games (
and hit out at EA for not properly credited former staff), offered a positive assessment of Halo Studios' work.
"My honest impression of seeing the new Halo Campaign Evolved is this,"
he said on X / Twitter. "I absolutely love where this is going. The game looks and feels genuine. It's gorgeous in a way I wish we could have built it originally back in 2001. It warms my heart to see Halo CE like this."
Halo: Campaign Evolved isn't out until 2026 (and probably near to the game's 25th anniversary in November), so Halo Studios has time to react to some of the feedback it's seen and make changes — if that's what it wants to do, of course. It may stick to its guns on the likes of sprint, those rocks, and the Needler's ammo counter. Meanwhile, the Halo community continues to debate the changes, fussing over every detail and what it means for the tone, feel, and gameplay of Bungie's seminal shooter. I suspect this will be a running theme well into 2026.
