Microsoft still won't give us an exact release date for Halo Infinite

Halo Infinite
(Image credit: Microsoft)

Microsoft didn't spend too long on Halo at this year's E3 conference, but it did debut our first look at multiplayer which got me plenty excited. It looks like Halo, classic Halo, but with a bunch of fun new stuff in it, like grappling hooks and new vehicles. Microsoft's Joseph Staten, a longtime Bungie developer who joined 343 Industries late last year to help ship Halo Infinite, also got on stage to talk a little bit about the game—but not to announce a release date.

Infinite's only a few months away, but we still don't know when, exactly, it's coming—Staten only said that singleplayer and multiplayer will launch together "this Holiday."

Microsoft rolled a brief clip of the new Halo ring, showing off a snippet of the environment. Then it cut to a singleplayer cutscene showing a new character—a new AI that looks and sounds an awful lot like Cortana, who went rampant in the last game in the series (that means she's the bad guy now).

Or is she? This scene in Halo Infinite implies Cortana is dead, but it sure sounds like more's going on.

"The rogue AI known as Cortana is gone. She's been deleted," says the new AI. When Chief asks how, he and the new AI realize something fishy's going on. "The mission's changed. They always do," says Chief. This nu-Cortana looks like she'll be our voice-in-our-head companion throughout Infinite.

Wes Fenlon
Senior Editor

Wes has been covering games and hardware for more than 10 years, first at tech sites like The Wirecutter and Tested before joining the PC Gamer team in 2014. Wes plays a little bit of everything, but he'll always jump at the chance to cover emulation and Japanese games.


When he's not obsessively optimizing and re-optimizing a tangle of conveyor belts in Satisfactory (it's really becoming a problem), he's probably playing a 20-year-old Final Fantasy or some opaque ASCII roguelike. With a focus on writing and editing features, he seeks out personal stories and in-depth histories from the corners of PC gaming and its niche communities. 50% pizza by volume (deep dish, to be specific).