Halo: First Rain Officially Sets The Stage For Halo 7

Published Aug 16, 2026, 10:00 AM EDT

James is a gaming writer from London who has spent thousands of hours exploring titles from every genre. Though he has a particular affinity for multiplayer titles like World of Warcraft, Destiny 2 and League of Legends, he has also put thousands of hours into single-player experiences, from deep RPGs to epic PC strategies. When he's not playing or writing, he can usually be found supporting his beloved Brentford FC.

The Halo lore has come a very long way since the relatively simple struggle between the humans and Covenant in the first game, and it's now an expanded universe in its own right. The subsequent games have obviously driven that in a big way, but there are plenty of other mediums where releases actually change the story significantly.

Novelizations are the most obvious example of that, and over the years, we have had a ton of interesting releases that do a lot more for the IP than they get credit for. Now, the latest of those is in the hands of fans, and it could have hugely significant consequences for whatever the developer is planning for the next main game in the series.

In case you don't keep up with the wider releases attached to the games, Halo: Waypoint Chronicles Volume 1 released a few months back, collating over 30 short stories from the Halo universe into one handy compendium. As part of that 10 brand-new tales have been introduced to readers for the first time, and one in particular could have extremely wide-reaching consequences for the next game in the series.

Those of you who played Halo 5 and Infinite will know that AI is now at the center of the narrative, after Cortana went off the rails for a while and created her own faction known as the Created. After she was effectively defeated at the end of Infinite, it might have seemed as though that element of the narrative was done.

Not so, though, as new story First Rain makes it clear that surviving Created factions are still operating in 2560. Not only that, but Sloan, the AI from Halo 5, has decided that AI would be better served if it had a physical form, and so he sets about creating a reality where human biology and artificial intelligence become one entity.

That creates a new and terrifying faction known as the Executors, who were originally teased back in the Infinite era. This sets the new faction up perfectly to serve as the main antagonists of the next game in the series, with the player having to stop them drawing further numbers from human colonies to continue producing hybrids.

They're certainly putting a lot of effort into establishing the new faction if they aren't planning to use them beyond the books, so it's a fairly safe bet that they'll play a major role in whatever the next game in the Halo series decides to do.