A huge amount of data relating to the Halo franchise has been leaked online, including developer builds for various games, unreleased content, and more, spanning the 25-plus years Halo has been around for.
As reported by Insider Gaming, the leak was first spotted by dataminer and leaker Visceral, who also revealed that around 90GB of data had been leaked. The leak, according to Visceral, "contains some builds, tools, docs etc from various Halo titles".
Visceral also says that the leak happened because Halo steward 343 Industries (now known as Halo Studios) enlisted the help of community modders to work on restoring cut Halo content from past games in the franchise.
The Halo leak was further confirmed by X user DogbrainLudus, a modder who was part of the aforementioned project, known as "Digsite". He says that neither he nor any other Digsite members who recently departed the project are responsible for the leak.
DogbrainLudus also says he doesn't care how modders use what's in the leak, although "Microsoft might not agree". I think that's probably putting it mildly.
The reason for the leak hasn't been disclosed, although an exchange between Visceral and another user on X suggests that the team wasn't being paid for its work. A third user then claims the Digsite team told Halo Studios it wanted to be paid for the work it was doing and Halo Studios refused.
Of course, Halo Studios itself hasn't confirmed any of that information, so you should take it with a pinch of salt. Naturally, we're also not going to be listing any of the data that's leaked as part of this Halo leak; it's easy enough to find online if you look.
With regards to what's next for Halo, Halo Studios has confirmed that multiple new games in the series are in the works, and that the franchise has switched from the proprietary Slipspace engine to Unreal Engine 5.
We also know that the next game in the Halo series is not "imminent", according to Halo Studios, so it's likely to be quite a while before you get to revisit Master Chief's story again. Stay tuned for more.
