Want A New PS5 This Black Friday? Microsoft Just Gave You The Perfect Reason To Buy One

It may sound almost unthinkable, but come next year, you will be able to play a brand new Halo game on your PlayStation 5, right when it drops for the Xbox and PC platforms. Microsoft has remade the classic Halo: Combat Evolved using Unreal Engine 5, upscaled the visuals, added a trio of missions, injected new cinematics, and introduced a four-player co-op mode, as well. All of this legacy remastering will come bearing a new name — Halo: Campaign Evolved. "This fully-rebuilt campaign will introduce remastered 4K visuals, beloved Halo weapons and vehicles, plus brand-new story content," says Microsoft's Xbox division, hyping up the launch next year ahead of the franchise's 25th anniversary.

Long-time Halo fans will certainly be eager to play the game once again, reimagined with more visual pizzazz and mechanics, while an entirely new generation of gamers will finally get a chance to experience what made it such an iconic game in the first place. But the undercurrent is pretty clear — the lines are blurring and loyalists are going to be divided. "Today's announcement is one I'll never forget: Halo is coming to PlayStation," says Brian Jarrad, community director of Halo Studio, who has spent nearly two decades on the cult hit franchise.

To me, it seems Microsoft is playing it safe by refreshing an iconic hit and seeding it to an entirely new generation of games across the board. Some would say Microsoft is scraping the bottom of the barrel to find more tasters for its gaming platter, even if that means diluting the exclusivity appeal. On the positive side, Halo: Combat Evolved is as big of cult as it gets, and if reanimating it as Halo: Campaign Evolved can attract old and new gamers, it's a win. 

The latest Halo announcement is also a bit of a homecoming. Halo: Combat Evolved was developed by Bungie, but the studio was acquired by Sony in 2022 to bolster the PlayStation division. From Microsoft's perspective, it's a big step backward from the golden rule of platform exclusivity that builds fandom, especially for its flagship in-house franchises such as Halo. But the move was not entirely unexpected. The cracks first started to appear earlier this year when Forza Horizon 5 landed on the PlayStation 5, followed by Gears of War: Reloaded, another Xbox heavy-hitter. 

There are a lot of ways this shocking news can be processed, and I am flummoxed, too, as a long-time PC and Xbox adherent. "We want our games playable across as many screens as possible," Microsoft's gaming chief, Phil Spencer, said in an interview last year. The context was Xbox, PC, and cloud, but in the months that followed, some signature Xbox titles landed on the other side of the ecosystem — aka PlayStation 5. 

Sony also reciprocated by bringing the critically acclaimed Helldivers 2 to Xbox. With Halo: Campaign Evolved, the overlap is as deep as it can get, and with it, the console fanboy battles are going to get unpredictable. For PlayStation 5 stans, this is great news. Three of the biggest Xbox franchises — Halo, Forza, and Gears — now have a firm presence on their Sony console. That's as good a reason as it gets to stick with a PS5, and when seen from that lens, Halo: Campaign Evolved is an alluring reason to pick the PlayStation 5 for anyone still torn between an Xbox or a PlayStation.

The arrival of Halo: Campaign Evolved on PlayStation 5 is a long-awaited dream come true for Team Blue, and a blow for Team Green. For Xbox enthusiasts, it's time to ponder, especially after years of staying loyal to the platform. If one talks about brand identity, Halo is synonymous with Xbox, and its arrival on PlayStation dilutes the exclusivity appeal. But the Xbox division has courted a lot of flak lately.

A string of price hikes for the Xbox Game Pass subscription service and Xbox hardware has already tested fans' patience. Now, it is being reported that the cost of the Xbox dev kit is also going up for developers, as Microsoft chases a hardline 30% profit stance for the Xbox business. According to Bloomberg, this move has already triggered game cancellations. Then there's the sordid history of cancellations. Everwild and the Perfect Dark reboot were canceled earlier this year. The promising Fable Legends also died at Microsoft, a decade after the company acquired Lionhead Studios and shuttered it following the success of the original Fable.

But why not build atop 2021's Halo Infinite? Well, that game is nearly abandoned. Bringing back the charm of Halo: Combat Evolved is as safe (read: formula for a hit) a bet as Microsoft's Xbox division could touch. Will this PlayStation-friendliness stick in the future? I'm skeptical, but I hope this encourages Xbox to make more original IPs. In hindsight, after putting three marquee names on the PlayStation 5, the Xbox division has no other option but to jump into build mode and create great games that keep players stuck to the Xbox ecosystem.