According to a developer, the big team battles of Halo might get a whole lot bigger, and the dev hopes to see Halo: The Master Chief Collection’s player cap of 16 pushed as high as 40 or 60.
Sean Swidersky, the 343 producers, highlighted during an Xbox stream (which was clipped by YouTuber Mint Blitz) that the team is doing “investigations on increased player counts above 16” in the throwback collection.
Swidersky said, “Halo is epic, and if we can add more people […] to go higher than 16 people, hell, go up to 40, 60, that’d be wild.”
He informed that, while implementing all the stuff is mostly not so hard in itself, the knock-on effects to performance are more of a pain point – particularly on older consoles still supported by the MCC. But while Swidersky doesn’t say anything about it, there also remains a big question about where you are supposed to fill all these players.
Taking the possible exception of Reach’s Forge World, Halo’s maps are quite dinky – with even the huge maps are only built for maybe 24 players. 16 players in Sandtrap feels manageable.
The same map having 60 angry Spartans would be uncontrollable chaos. But support for 60 players could be more beneficial for the game’s modding community, incentivizing more huge, Battlefield-sized maps like Extinction (assuming the MCC doesn’t break them more with each major update).
Halo Infinite is might not getting a battle royale. But if 343 somehow follows through with accelerating the MCC’s player cap, modders might just bring one instead.
