Halo: Campaign Evolved is getting its own four-player version of the series’ staple Firefight mode, for free, “this winter”

Last night, Xbox Game Studios and Halo Studios have announced a free update for the recently-released Halo: Campaign Evolved, which promises to add the four-player co-operative PvE mode, Firefight, to the game.

“For nearly two decades, Firefight has been a Halo favorite, challenging Spartans to team up, hold the line, and survive wave after wave of enemies,” says Halo Studios director of competitive engagement Tahir Hasangjekaj said in a dedicated post on the Xbox website. “The tradition continues this winter as we add the four-player cooperative PvE mode to Halo: Campaign Evolved in a free update.”

Though we don’t have a release date for the update yet, Hasangjekaj does explicitly state “this Winter” as a window, and promises that we’ll hear more information about the update at Halo Fest – due to run from 12th to 13hth December in Seattle, Washington. My money would be on a release around then, therefore.

“We’re kicking things off tonight at Xbox FanFest, where attendees will be the first to jump in and experience Firefight across new maps and armed with plenty of weapons to help even the odds.” It seems there’s already a playable build of the mode, then.

It’s worth noting that this is quite an odd news blast from Xbox, since the last official information we heard about the Halo brand was that the next major Halo game being developed by Activision, as Halo Studios all but closes as part of Microsoft’s Xbox ‘restructuring‘ that saw one key member behind Halo: Campaign Evolved promoted and laid off within the same week. As things stand, we don’t know anything specific about the future of the series, but there are plenty of rumours that the next title will be a reboot developed by Call of Duty’s Sledgehammer Games.

It’s been fairly busy 24 hours for Xbox: as well as this Halo update, we’ve heard from Asha Sharma as she celebrated the 25th anniversary of Xbox by seemingly going all-in on Gen AI. Elsewhere, we got the announcement that Wolfenstein 3 is in development over at MachineGames, headed up by Hugo Martin.