In a game stuffed with unforgettable moments, the one Halo: Reach mission that throws you into the thick of a giant space battle remains a glowing highlight, but it was apparently a battle in itself to even get space combat into the game at all.
Responding to a viral Halo: Reach mod that lets players enter ship-to-ship combat against each other, former Bungie designer Niles Sankey remembers pitching the iconic mission The Long Night of Solace and then struggling to keep it in for launch.
“Might surprise people that we had to fight tooth and nail to keep space combat in Reach,” Sankey tweets. “Higherups at Bungie wanted to cut space combat (which wasn’t unreasonable, since the feature/content requests were significant). In fact, there was originally TWO space combat mission planned in Reach. The second was to happen right before the last mission.”
This second space combat mission was apparently only ever really an “idea on paper,” but it would have had players zoom into space to repair various orbital cannons before returning to the planet surface and calling down death from up high, according to Sankey, who says the section was cut due to “budgets and resource constraints.”
“We added the boardable mac cannon at the end of the” Pillar of Autumn mission, he continues, “and called it a day, and then they let us keep the first space mission and ultimately we made it our E3 gameplay reveal.”
He adds that “the Halo mod community make such incredible content,” and wishes that Microsoft “was able to create official Halo content that was half this cool.”
Space combat hasn’t returned to the series since The Long Night of Solace, though Halo 4 did feature a couple rad flying segments that would fit the bill if they were, you know, set outside of a planet’s atmosphere. This year’s Halo: Campaign Evolved is unlikely to have any ship-to-ship combat either, on account of it being a remake, but there are multiple Halo games in development at the moment, so you never know what might happen.
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