343i looking into adding 40 or 60 players in Halo MCC Big Team Battle

343 Industries is doing early preliminary investigations on boosting Halo MCC's big team battle player counts past 16 players.

Since MCC launched in 2014, 343i has been reinventing classic Halo games in a multitude of ways like cross-play, unlockables, and mod support, and it's not finished just yet. The developer is currently looking into boosting Halo's ultra-nostalgic big team battle game mode and increasing the max player count beyond 8v8. How big could it go? Maybe 20v20 or 30v30.

"How epic is big team battle? You know, another thing...We're doing some investigations on increasing player counts above 16," 343i producer Sean Swidersky said in a recent Xbox Plays stream.

"I'm not going to spoil too much, but you know, Halo is epic, and if we can add more people which we can, but to optimize performance on other consoles...if we can add that kind of stuff and go higher than 16 players in these classic games and get up to 40 or 60...It would be wild

"128-player big team battle? That would be nuts."

Battlefield 2042 recently turned heads by announcing massively ambitious 128-player PVP chaos across a slew of new maps, all powered by a next-gen Frostbite engine. While Halo MCC can't compete on a physics level, increasing the playercount would significantly spike engagement.

It's interesting that 343i is tackling something this big as it plans to release Halo Infinite as a free-to-play multiplayer game this holiday. The developers are clearly committed to multiple Halo experiences both new and old.

Just don't expect this kind of expansion any time soon. Swidersky warns this idea is still in early stages at the studio.

"We're kicking off just investigation work on it and there's a lot of cool stuff there."