What you need to know
- Many games have content cut from the final product before release, never to be seen by the public or gaming community.
- On Wednesday, 343 Industries announced that it's working to recover some of the content cut from the original Halo: Combat Evolved and Halo 2.
- With the help of community modders and the "Digsite" team, 343i is going to bring this content to Halo: The Master Chief Collection on PC.
- This cut content includes restored vehicles, weapons, player models, NPCs and enemies, maps, and more.
Halo: The Master Chief Collection combines the best of six different Halo titles into one ultimate experience, all available on modern Xbox and PC platforms. However, there's plenty of content that was cut from each of these games before they ever released, which is a common tale for practically every video game ever made. Most of the time, this content never sees the light of the day. For Halo: MCC players, this may not be the case.
On Wednesday, 343 Industries revealed that it's working to restore content cut from Halo: Combat Evolved and Halo 2. This "Cutting Room Floor" would bring this newly restored content to Halo: MCC on PC, and allow modders to further change and update the content to their heart's content. 343i isn't doing this alone, either, as its Digsite Team is working with noted community modders to bring all of it to life.
The opening introduction to the Cutting Room Floor reveals a ton of the cut content that is being restored to The Master Chief Collection in the near future, and the list is extensive. 343i is working with the original source files of Halo: CE and Halo 2, brought over from the days of Bungie, to breathe life into forgotten vehicles, weapons, character models, NPCs and enemies, campaign maps and locations, effects and sounds, and more.
Players will be able to experience lost vehicles like the Kestrel, original Spectre, the infamous Piglet, and many more. There's also a veritable arsenal of forgotten weapons like the needler minigun, alternative plasma pistol, plasma rifle, and SMG variants, the shovel sniper rifle, and beyond. Not everything 343i is working on will find its way into Halo: MCC, but the goal is to restore as much cut content as possible using Halo's official editing kits, and to let the wider modding community get their hands on it as well as general players.
The content that 343i showed off doesn't have a defined release date, yet, but the studio promises it's coming sooner rather than later. In its next update, it'll bring on some of the community modders that are helping to make it happen. It's awesome to see Halo: The Master Chief Collection continue to evolve as one of the best PC games, even after the release of Halo Infinite.
