If you’re a Halo fan, you’re familiar with the work of Joseph Staten, even if you may not know his name. Staten wrote most of the Halo games in the original trilogy, and served as the cinematics director on Halo: Combat Evolved, Halo 2, and Halo 3. He also wrote Halo: Contact Harvest, a novel detailing humanity’s first contact with the Covenant, and was the creative director on Halo 3: ODST, a role he’s held on several other titles at Microsoft since.
Given reports of Halo Infinite‘s troubled development, it’s not huge surprise that Microsoft brought Staten in to help after the game was delayed last year. Staten now seems to be the Head of Creative at 343, so what he’s working on should be a big deal to Halo fans. What’s he working on right now? We can’t be sure, but given a recent image he posted to Twitter, we have reason to believe it might be a new trailer. The image shows “sequence v7” through “sequence v14,” which probably refers to a series of animation sequences that might be edited together to make up a new trailer. If it is a new trailer, it will be the first since Halo Infinite’s campaign showing last summer, which was criticized for its graphics and went on to spawn the now-infamous Craig the Brute meme.
All of this is speculation, of course. Staten didn’t confirm what the sequences were for, though he did ask folks to guess how many there would be total in poll, with 117, a nod to the Master Chief, John-117, emerging as the clear winner. Given Staten’s past history as a cinematics director, however, and that he was teasing what he was working on, it seems likely to be a trailer or an in-game cinematic. It would make more sense to tease the former than the latter, but we won’t for for sure until we see something new from Halo Infinite, which is scheduled to release later this year.