Halo Studios just showed off a new villain it probably won’t get to use.
A blog post from Halo franchise writer Alex Wakeford, published after the launch of Halo: Campaign Evolved, ends with a tease of the Xalanyn, children of Abaddon. They’re an advanced race of immortal beings whose members were imprisoned by the Forerunners. It’s the clearest look yet at where Master Chief’s story was going before the recent announcement that Activision is now the shepherd of the Halo series.
“THE ENDLESS EMERGE,” Wakeford said. “And finally, as is tradition, we’ll leave you with something that hopefully sparks your imagination and lets your canon curiosities run wild with endless questions.”
The sequel that won’t happen
The tease points to Halo 7, or whatever Halo Studios’ now-scrapped next Halo game would have been called, as the place where these mysterious overarching antagonists would have come into focus. That game was reportedly still years away. Now it likely never arrives in that form.
The concept art looks great, and that’s what makes this sting a little. Halo has needed new enemies to chew through for a long time. What it’s more likely to become instead is Xbox’s Call of Duty (and yes, set aside the fact that Call of Duty is already Xbox’s Call of Duty, for the sake of argument).
A blog post written for a future that changed
Most of the post was written before the Xbox reshuffle, back when Halo Studios still thought the series belonged to it. You can tell. Wakeford added a few notes after the fact, and one of them lands with grim timing. After joking that you’d have to wait until next week to learn more about the Sacristan Order, he dropped this: “This joke sure took on new dimensions after last week’s news.”
The post also works as an attempt to canonize a story that’s been told across games, remakes, books and TV. Lore obsessives will want to read the full list of retcons and continuity clarifications for themselves.
One highlight is official art of the Primordial by Sam Wood. Wakeford described it as a creature known by many names, among them the Timeless One, the Primordial and eventually the Gravemind, the antagonist that showed up in Halo 2.
“This twisted progeny of the Precursors was executed by Bornstellar through the use of a timelock on Gyre 11, reducing its form to dust by subjecting it to the passage of millions of years in mere moments,” Wakeford said. “But the Primordial’s experiments had borne fruit. Having infected itself with the Flood, the consciousness of this strange being passed into the parasite’s hive mind where it is awakened whenever the Flood successfully form a compound intelligence.”
Two novels stuck in limbo
The books are in a strange spot too. Troy Denning’s next novel, Halo: Fireteam Noble, is still the plan, at least officially.
“Many have been asking whether this novel will still be releasing,” Wakeford said. “To this we can say that it is absolutely our intent to see this project cross the finish line. Troy has written a fantastic story and a good chunk of the editorial process has been conducted.”
Intent isn’t a release date, though. Halo: Burn the Road Home, written by Halo Studios senior franchise writer Kenneth Peters, is also in the works, and its future is just as uncertain. Nobody has said whether preorders will be refunded if either book doesn’t make it.
The fallout keeps spreading
Halo: Campaign Evolved, Halo Studios’ final game in the series, launched globally on July 28, 2026. One review praised the “gunplay that revolutionized first-person console games” and said that makes it still “worth playing today.” It also served as a testbed for the studio’s move to Unreal Engine after Halo Infinite, built on the proprietary Slipspace Engine, had a middling launch.
Halo isn’t the only casualty. Yesterday, people at Ninja Theory announced layoffs tied to the Xbox reshuffle that shut the studio down. Staff at The Coalition, the developer behind Gears of War: E-Day, are also reportedly bracing for layoffs, even though the studio’s latest game reviewed well.
That leaves the Xalanyn as Halo Studios’ parting gift: immortal beings locked away by the Forerunners, now sitting in a blog post with nowhere left to go.
