Halo: Campaign Evolved primarily serves as a full remake of the original Halo’s classic campaign mode, but the development team also added a handful of bonus prologue missions. Now, the development team has explained its philosophy for this additional content, and it largely comes down to the bro factor between the Master Chief and Sergeant Johnson.
“As far as the new missions [go], we’re really going for providing more context and backstory for Chief and Johnson’s relationship,” executive producer Damon Conn and creative director Max Szlagor said in an interview with GameSpot at Summer Game Fest. “You see them in [the original Halo] but you don’t get a lot of context for who Johnson is and his history of being on missions with Chief.”
Aside from providing more backstory for Johnson and Chief, the new missions also gave Halo Studios an opportunity to explore different environments, including a Covenant ship and–as you may notice from the brief gameplay trailers released thus far–space battles. These haven’t been a major element of Halo games to date, though they were featured in Halo: Reach back in 2010.
Because of how the Halo timeline plays out, the prologue missions will not take place directly prior to Halo: Combat Evolved’s story. Instead, they’re set one year prior.
“So it sort of neatly helps you to understand some of these relationships and get this broader view into the universe, as well,” the devs said.
The missions will be their own “self-contained story,” but should serve as a bridge into the rest of the game.
“It’s a story about Chief, and it kind of starts out as this smash-and-grab to get some intel, and it becomes something much bigger. And again, you get to explore the relationship between Chief and Johnson, the introduction of the Brutes and Prophets, the relationships between the Spartans and ODSTs–so there are a lot of different elements that kind of layer into there that are all kind of self-contained within that group of missions.”
Though the missions are set prior to Halo: Combat Evolved and can be accessed via the game’s main menu at any time, Halo Studios actually recommends playing them once you’ve already completed the campaign. They’re going to be a little bit harder than the rest of the game, but if you’re up to the challenge, there’s nothing stopping you from playing them immediately.
Halo: Campaign Evolved launches for Xbox Series X|S, PS5, and PC on July 28.