Depending on how much you have played the first Halo, one of Halo: Campaign Evolved’s biggest changes may fly – or run – under the radar. I’m talking about sprinting: while Master Chief only had one pace in 2001’s Halo: Combat Evolved, its upcoming remake will take cues from later Halo games and let the Spartan sprint.
It may not seem like it, but being able to run is a foundational change. Having played two levels from Halo: Campaign Evolved on Heroic difficulty, there were plenty of times where being able to sprint saved my life, from outrunning grenade blasts to reaching cover with a scrap of health left.
Silent running
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Speaking to GamesRadar+ at Summer Game Fest 2026, creative director Max Szlagor says the team at Halo Studios has done “a lot of work” to ensure being able to sprint doesn’t change the game in unintended ways. “There are some encounters that are quite dangerous if you try to get past them,” he adds. I can vouch for that: I tried to sprint past the Covenant’s in The Silent Cartographer’s climactic escape sequence, with multiple attempts ending with me being hounded out of position and killed.
“Every encounter’s hand-crafted, and we’ve thought about that space for all of the sandbox, the co-op experience, things like that,” says Szlagor. “It’s really just about making sure we dial in the mood, the intent, the feel – we really want to make sure it’s there.”
Szlagor also points to vehicles now being destructible. “You could lose your Warthog, or your tank, at various points in time. And some of these spaces are quite large, so you want to be able to traverse [quickly],” he explains. “It’s very natural to want to get in and play as you might have played a modern Halo title, so that’s really the inspiration.”
Sprinting seems to have been implemented with newer fans in mind, but executive producer Damon Conn stresses that recapturing the original tone of Halo: Combat Evolved has been a guiding light to the team. “You will have the same feeling of dread when you meet the Flood at certain parts of the game, and sprint isn’t going to give you any flexibility – other than having maybe a few more moves you can make,” he warns. “But you are absolutely going to come to terms with the enemy that is there, and it will be spooky, but if you want to enable [challenge modifier] Skulls, you can go back to the way it was originally.”
Paired with Halo: Campaign Evolved’s other retroactively-added features – including weapons from later games and the ability to hijack vehicles – it feels like the remake is taking a cautious approach to revisiting the 2001 original. That scope speaks to Halo Studios’ broader ambition – to get back in touch with Halo as it looks towards its next entry – but Conn says the team also wanted to be “truthful” to its source. “We’re not trying to necessarily replace what Bungie did,” he says. “We’re just trying to build something that sits beside it.”
“We didn’t set out with this game to modernize for modernization’s sake. We did a lot of intentional gameplay adjustments, or tuning, or development that actually sets us up with a great foundation for features [going forward],” he adds. “It’s a bridge from the past to the future.”
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