Halo Studios has reportedly cancelled a multiplayer project called Ekur, in a move that seems to align with the wide-ranging Xbox cuts announced last week.

Halo reporter Rebs Gaming originated the story on YouTube, saying they’d heard from multiple employees at Halo Studios that Project Ekur was no longer in development. The claim was backed up this afternoon by well-Microsoft-connected Windows Central reporter Jez Corden, who said the information was “100 percent true”.

A week earlier, however, Rebs Gaming had declared Project Ekur – “or at least part of it” – would be the next multiplayer Halo game, based on information from someone who’d worked with Halo Studios, plus a separate “someone else”. Nevertheless, a “recent development” changed this outcome and prompted the newer claim that the project is dead.

Nowhere does Rebs Gaming mention the Xbox cuts as a reason why this has happened. The only possible explanation cited is “major development problems” with Halo 1 remake Halo: Campaign Evolved, which apparently sucked people away. “Sometime after that, Ekur was cancelled,” said Rebs Gaming, giving no further detail.

Project Ekur was reportedly prototyped by Certain Affinity, a studio Xbox has worked with numerous times in the past. Certain Affinity built multiplayer maps for Halo 2, and worked on a handful of Halo projects, up to and including Halo: The Master Chief Collection in 2014.

Certain Affinity reportedly got the go-ahead from Halo Studios to develop Project Ekur after an Unreal-powered battle royale Halo experiment, called Tatanka, didn’t work out. Project Ekur would carry on exploring Unreal – coincidentally the engine Campaign Evolved is built on – and use Tatanka’s map alongside Halo Infinite’s Slipspace map.

The Project Ekur prototype faced a green-light verdict in September 2023, Rebs Gaming said, and succeeded, after which an extraction shooter idea was toyed with before a “super big-team-battle idea” was settled on instead. Halo 5 Warzone was cited as a touchstone for the project, and Project Ekur reportedly had playable Spartans and Elites, and full character customisation.

It’s not clear at what point – if at all – Certain Affinity handed the project over to Halo Studios, but dataminers and other Halo scrutinisers found evidence of the game existing on the studio’s servers relatively recently.

With Project Ekur reportedly cancelled, a question is left dangling about whether there’ll be any competitive multiplayer modes to accompany Halo: Campaign Evolved at any point. That game has co-op, remember, but nothing else.

Halo: Campaign Evolved is out in a couple of weeks, and despite divisive first impressions, does actually seem to be rather good. “I went into Halo: Campaign Evolved thinking it didn’t need to exist,” wrote Dom in Eurogamer’s Halo: Campaign Evolved preview recently, “but after playing two levels I want full remakes of the original trilogy and Reach.”