We've talked a little bit here at Pure Xbox about mods going viral recently, and one that was getting a lot of attention on social media earlier this month is the Halo Reach: Slipspace Beta - a PvP space combat experience for Halo: Reach as part of Halo: The Master Chief Collection on Steam.
Now, to be fair, this is not something we knew about ahead of time — it just started showing up a lot when YouTuber MintBlitz posted videos about it on Twitter. Their first two videos about the mod pulled in over one million views each, and then this latest one in mid-January racked up over a quarter of a million.
Here's a look at the tweet that was most recently getting attention:
The most interesting thing about this post is how people responded to it! Firstly, former Halo designer Jaime Griesemer revealed they actually pitched something very similar to Microsoft on multiple occasions in the past, but their team didn't hear back. Apparently, Microsoft wanted a VR game at the time, but then never ended up doing one.
Another former Halo designer, Niles Sankey, also shared their experience in making the original pitch / prototype for the Halo: Reach mission "The Long Night of Solace", which involves space combat. It turns out that this element of the game nearly got scrapped entirely, and originally it was supposed to extend across two missions in all.
Their full post is quite long, so here are the main bits:
"Might surprise people that we had to fight tooth and nail to keep space combat in Reach. 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. Players would fly a Sabre into space, land on three disabled orbital cannons, and repair them. Once brought back online, players would return to the planet surface and then use the cannons to repel the covenant army closing in on the PoA. Destroying scarabs, covenant cruisers, etc using a 'large scale target locator' + orbital cannons.
But then the mission was cut in an effort to ultimately cut space combat. It was a bitter pill for me, but budgets and resource constraints are no joke, so I (mostly) understood. Plan B: We added the boardable mac cannon at the end of the PoA mission and called it a day."
For those who are eager for an official PvP space combat experience, you never know if Halo Studios is cooking something up for the future right now — but otherwise, Halo: Reach: Slipspace is seemingly your best option.
The big problem is that it doesn't work on Xbox consoles or the Xbox PC app... it's just for the Steam version of Halo: The Master Chief Collection. In our view, your best bet is to wait for the next Xbox Game Studios publisher sale on Steam to pick it up — and fingers crossed the next Xbox console will be able to support the mod in the future!
If you do have Halo: MCC on Steam, here's a video guide to help you get the mod installed: