Leftover Halo 4 Features Found Lurking In Game Code

We all know that a game changes very frequently during the development process – some features get fully implemented and make it to the finished product, while others are only partially developed and ultimately get left on the cutting room floor. It's no different with Halo 4, and today we're finding out that there were a couple particularly cool armor abilities 343 Industries had to do away with before shipping the game. They were discovered by the folks at TheHaloCouncil, who did a little bit of digging in Halo 4's code and filmed a video showing off these armor abilities that almost were.

Say hello to the Hacker and Teleport armor abilities, which you can see in action with the video posted below. Teleport is pretty self-explanatory, as it lets you jump a short distance almost instantly. As you can imagine, having an armor ability like that would be great for closing the gap quickly so you can get in and perform an assassination before the other player has a chance to react.

The Hacker ability is definitely the coolest of the two, as it allows you to disable the armor abilities of other players. See someone sneaking around with active camouflage on? Use the Hacker to disable their cloak and expose them to the world. The Hacker ability seems like it would go a long way in evening the odds against nearly every other armor ability out there, which might just be why we didn't see it in the final game.

While the host of the video speculates that these armor abilities might be released in future Halo 4 DLC, a Microsoft representative told Kotaku that these are merely "legacy items" and the studio doesn't have any plans to implement more armor abilities in the future. While that's a bummer, it was nice to catch a glimpse of canned features despite the fact that we'll probably never get to use them in regular gameplay.