In today"s Halo community update blog post, 343 Industries confirmed that a familiar face from the Halo franchise"s Bungie days, Joseph Staten, is returning to help with Halo Infinite. The Halo veteran has worked on every Bungie-developed entry in the series back in the day and has also been involved with several of Microsoft"s recent first-party titles.
Staten will be taking the project lead role for the Halo Infinite campaign, though he will not be replacing any existing talent working on the project. "Joseph will be focused on supporting the campaign team’s existing, talented, creative leaders and ensuring they have everything they need to create an awesome Halo game," said 343.
Staten has been involved in writing, directing cutscenes, and voicework (Grunts) for all of Bungie Halo games, and has also written two Halo novels, Contact Harvest and Shadow of Intent. Following Bungie"s split from Microsoft in 2007, he returned to Microsoft in 2014 and went on to work on first-party games such as ReCore, Crackdown 3, and Tell Me Why.
However, it doesn"t sound as if his new position at 343 Industries will be a long-term one, as the update states his return is only "for a bit," perhaps to help give one last push towards launching the delayed title which was originally arriving alongside the Xbox Series X this holiday.
Moreover, Halo: The Master Chief Collection"s Head of Publishing Pierre Hintze is also being brought over to the Halo Infinite team. However, his work will be focused on the free-to-play multiplayer portion.
The community update reiterated that there are no plans to push the Halo Infinite launch further back from 2021, and that the Xbox One version is not being dropped, dispelling previous rumors.