 343 Industries wanted a complete remake of the original game by the tenth anniversary of Halo 's release , giving Saber just over a year to complete the project . The gameplay was to remain unchanged ; while the original game had imbalanced elements , 343 Industries decided to preserve the game experience players remembered while introducing young fans to the game for perhaps the first time . The visuals , meanwhile , would be updated along with added features like campaign skulls . Iones recalled that experimentation with the game was limited — redoing <unk> character animations was off @-@ limits because redoing them could introduce gameplay bugs , and design choices like game balance had already been determined . Likewise , porting the PC version of the game back to the Xbox to add features would have constrained the amount of visual improvements Saber could make , as well as require significant time training artists to use the same production pipelines that were used for Combat Evolved . Saber decided to use the original engine for the gameplay and its own for the visuals , despite the compatibility problems this solution presented . Development began under the codename Spark . The game was completed and released to manufacturing ( " going gold " ) on October 15 , 2011 . 
