While 343 Industries is gearing up for Halo Infinite’s co-op campaign beta, did you know that there was once plans for a Halo VR project? Details and even concept art and the like have surfaced recently thanks to 343 Industries dev Dan Chosich.
Chosich, is the Narrative Experience Director over at at 343 Industries, and has recently updated his own personal website to showcase what could have been a Halo VR game which was codenamed “Reverie.” Based on the site, it seems the project never got past the concept phase (and seems to be planned for Infinite), though there are concept shots and even control configurations mapped out. We’ve included some in the gallery below alongside an explanation by Chosich in his involvement with the project, and why it didn’t pan out.
This page is expressing some of the thinking and challenges we were trying to solve. Turns out, especially in 2017, there were a lot of hard challenges to overcome with VR. Most prominently the fact that it was only available to a small subset of people.
For me, the biggest problem was the lack of being able to move freely. However, there were a few examples that were never public from some companies we interviewed that showed an extreme amount of promise.
Strangely, my advantage on this project was that I was highly skeptical of it. I didn’t like 95% of the experiences in VR because they weren’t repeatable destinations. Cool to do once and never again. That was something I wanted to solve. – Dan Chosich, 343 Narrative Experience Director
For those curious, we did get a glimpse of what Halo VR would be like in this video created by 343 Industries and Halo MCC engineer Nibre_ that was shared way back in 2019:
In response to my post about the canceled Halo VR project, here’s our only look at what Halo VR would look like. This was created by Nibre_ who was hired by 343 as a Halo MCC engineer after he posted this in 2019 👀 #Halo #Xbox pic.twitter.com/UvOQGGw4mg
— Rebs Gaming (@Mr_Rebs_) July 8, 2022
While this might come as a bummer for those expecting to play as Master Chief in virtual reality, this doesn’t really confirm that no Halo VR project is being made, so there’s still hope yet.
Would you be interested in a Halo virtual reality game? Given how the Xbox consoles out right now doesn’t support VR, that would mean it’d be PC-only, which is something I suspect a lot of Xbox owners will be upset about.
Thanks, Rebs Gaming!