Podtacular: The Unofficial Halo Universe Podcast

It's the 20-year anniversary of Halo 2 and with that, the Halo Community and Infinite is celebrating with a new Delta Arena playlist featuring seven Forged Halo 2 maps in matchmaking. Not only did we get new Forge updates along with the Great Journey operation, but a new weapon, the MA5K rifle from the cover of Ghost of Onyx drops in Infinite multiplayer. The LVL 50 LAN hosted by Puckett is also happening during Halo 2's birthday weekend expecting some old names from the Halo competitive scene making a return.

We’re back off the heels of an exciting Halo World Championship seeing a new Champion rise: Space Station Gaming, along with a very exciting first-ever international champion! Among the competitive festivities were of course the Community Stage and booths, but most of all was being among other Halo Fans. Austin and Connor from JumperScape not only joined us for our special from Seattle but hop on this episode to talk about what they’ve been up to and recap the HaloWC 2024 event and announcements for the future of Halo.

It’s our open-mic special from this year’s Halo World Championships talking about this year’s tournament, panels and experiences. We had the pleasure of having JumperScape, OmnicientWolf, Bobby on this year’s live stream with a surprise, hour-long drop from the GOAT, Goldenboy! It’s quite an accomplishment for a competitive series to last 10 years in the industry, twice (the first-time being Halo under Major League Gaming) and we’re excited for the future of Halo and HCS.

The Halo World Championship is only two weeks away, bringing the best Halo talent together from around the world and entertaining fans. Along with Halo Infinite tournaments, there’s Halo 2, Halo 3, and Halo 5: Guardians tournaments happening as well, opening up probably the most varied tournament experience that we’ve ever seen. The community stage has an excellent line up to experience or watch at home if you can’t make it to Seattle for the event. This is our last planned podcast before Worlds, but Dust Storm hopes to see some of you there!

Community tournaments are a dime a dozen these days in the Halo community, giving players the chance to compete outside the official HCS events, but for those of us, more seasoned players, our skills aren’t as sharp, which is where our guest comes in. Sports fan, teacher and Halo streamer, CardinalRedbird, has put together a series of Boomer and Boomer vs. Zoomer tournaments, offering some unique takes on tournament rules and putting to test the old adage of “age and treachery overcomes youth and skill” (spoiler, it hasn’t… yet). Making her podcast debut, we discuss her Halo career and history behind these unique HCS Grassroots events.

Making our way to the Halo World Championship, the latest Operation for Halo Infinite has dropped bringing refreshes to matchmaking including Firefight update featuring some Reach Forged maps and, of course, sandbox tunings and updates to Forge. After we’re done with the news, we don’t just have one, but two books to review: Shadows of Reach and Divine Wind, meaning Dust Storm is now only three books behind the latest release.

Thanks to 343 dropping a decent chunk of news regarding the upcoming operation, we’re changing direction of our originally planned book podcast to discuss what we can expect dropping into Infinite next week. VIP makes its return to the mainline games since Halo 3 and Headhunter from Halo: Reach is coming in hot a few weeks later. Along with weapon and vehicle tunings, Forge is getting an overhaul with new scripting capabilities including triggering the voice of Halo himself, Jeff Steitzer.

This past week was a rather somber week for Halo fans. The Halo TV Show has been cancelled on Paramount+, causing 343 Industries and Xbox to try to find a new home for future seasons. It’s no surprise as it unfortunately did not resonate with Halo fans. Axis Studios, which has worked on numerous animations and cutscenes for the Halo franchise, starting all the way back to Poncho Chief has also shut down. Amid this news, we tackle a recent discussion that’s been making the rounds in the broader Halo community: whether or not the all-but-confirmed Halo remakes should be done, and if so, to what extent. If you want to contribute to future discussion topics, make sure you hop in our Discord server.

Seems to be the same song and dance with both Dust Storm and Godzilla T, life events keep cropping up and time between recording sessions grows. Life just deals the cards like that, but hey, there’s a bit of Halo news with a new Operations Pass and a couple of new modes rotating through Halo Infinite matchmaking. For the lore folks, the name of the operation hints at Anvil Station with some interesting customizations to support it.

Our apologies for not having the podcast for a month. We’ve had a series of live events come up and get in the way of more recent recording opportunities and we took one of the weeks to play the Survive the Undead playlist. There’s a whole lot of news that we didn’t get to this in this episode, and Dust had to cut it short. Ideally, we’ll pick up the rest of the news next week. There are some exciting things like Match Composer in Halo Infinite, Halo: Combat Evolved all but confirmed for a remake in Unreal Engine and much more!

Halo Infinite lands CU32, erm… Banished Honor brining more game balances and fixes but introduces the new Spartan Points system integrated with the newest Operation. The Plasma Pistol gets its classic zap effect back and the latest Forge additions are sure to make community content keep flooding in. Meanwhile, Dust Storm continues to listen to audio books, and we have the bittersweet Point of Light to discuss.

Season 2 of the Halo TV show has concluded and, while it took a couple of delays to get here, we give our rundown of the season: thoughts on the story, production, action, ties to the main universe, and of course, what we could expect from a third season. All the while, the next content update is slated to hit Halo Infinite next week among a little drop of content this week.

This week we play a little catch up after being off for a couple of weeks. While the Halo TV show has concluded, we’re taking this episode to discuss up through episode four. A bit of a shorter one, but we’ll wrap up the rest of the TV show in the next episode.

Better late than never as we delve into Season 2 of the Halo TV show taking a look at the first episode. Making the initial connections to the game lore, we start to see the development of the events of Reach with the silver lining. Since GT was out last week, we got to play some Custom Games for Fraggin’ Friday last week, which went off. Thanks for joining us!

While we missed last week due to Dust Storm being sick, an interesting topic came up in the Halo Community. A former 343 Industries developer shared on Twitter that 20 to 30 ideas for Halo games were pitched and turned down by Microsoft over the last 12 years, begging the questions, “What kinds of games would the Halo community love to see Halo explore across other genres or stories in the Halo Universe?” and “Why were so many projects turned down when Microsoft has so many studios with various expertise that could expand the Halo franchise?” We take some time to explore these questions and catch up on the latest Halo news.

It’s a lore-filled week as the Halo TV Show’s Season 2 has kicked off on Paramount+, we have another Halo Chronicle and Halo: Epitaph releasing in a couple weeks. Dust Storm is solo this week covering the rest of the Halo News with an unexpected MCC patch, more community articles on Waypoint and the upcoming first HCS open of the 2024 season.

To kick off the new year, 343 Industries hosted their first Spartan Chatter of 2024 updating u s on what’s coming in the next content update. Moving away from the season cadence, Halo Infinite will now have 4 to 6-week operations to deliver content more frequently as it’s ready. The Spirit of Fire Operations lands January 30th, bringing updates to Forge, playlists refreshes and a new map Illusion.

Welcome to a new year, Spartans! This year is shaping up to be quite a year, leading off on a great streak of content on Halo Infinite, the next season of Halo Infinite competition and the Halo TV Series, and so much community content still blowing our minds. Sadly, it looks like we are at the end of the road for MCC development, but community mods are thriving, not to mention our podcast hosts have finally completed Cursed Halo.

Halo Infinite’s Season 5 is here and with it, new maps and modes and already into the mid-season update with the return of Firefight! After an extended break and Thanksgiving holiday in the states, we couldn’t be more excited with the continued content roll-out. As we enter the holidays, we’re thankful for everyone who listens, joins our game nights on Fridays and joining us live on Saturdays for our new podcast recording time. We look forward to playing with you all on Halo!

This week, we talk a bit more in depth on the Extraction game mode and the new maps, Prism and Forbidden introduced in Season 5 of Halo Infinite multiplayer. We’ve had some time to get plenty of games and share our thoughts on the continued content delivery that continues to bring people back to Halo and new players exploring the scene. The next operation, Combined Arms is our first foray into the new events and battle pass structure introduced this season and Halo 3 Refueled is on its way as well.