Halo Infinite Renames Insensitive Juneteeth Emblem Palette After Criticism

Halo is without a doubt one of the biggest franchises in the gaming world. It has a large fanbase and has been popular for more than 20 years now and is the main exclusive for Xbox. But, even some mega-successful series fall into difficult times.

Halo Infinite is the most recent game in the Halo series and came out just last year. Unlike previous games in the series Infinite was met with a mixed reception due to the lack of content. Even though the gameplay received praise the overall product did not meet the players’ expectations.

The situation got so bad that at one point the Halo: The Master Chief Collection had more viewers on Twitch than Halo Infinite. 343 Industries has been trying to put more content into Halo infinite to appease the fans but it hasn’t been going great. Now, they are in the middle of another controversy.

A new emblem was put into Halo Infinite to celebrate Juneteeth but a color palette for this had a weird name. This controversial palette had the name “Bonobo” which is coincidentally the name of an ape species. Considering how Juneteeth celebrates emancipation from slavery, this was unfortunate to see.

Players obviously took notice of this and brought this to the attention of the developers. Almost 250,000 people saw the image of this palette on Imgur. You can clearly see the very inappropriate name of this Halo Infinite palette in the screenshot before it was removed.

343 Industries did take swift response to this problem and quickly made the changes necessary. We can still use the color palette on the emblem but it now has a different name. “Freedom” is the new name for the color palette in Halo Infinite and it is much more appropriate than the previous one.

Someone from the Halo infinite team did reply to a tweet that confirmed the change and gave an explanation. Apparently, the original name for the palette was a name for an internal toolset. They didn’t mean to use this name for this type of content and it was a mistake.

The palette was incorrectly named and we immediately renamed it via an update. (2/2)

— John Junyszek (@Unyshek) June 14, 2022

You can no longer see this color palette name with racist undertones in Halo Infinite. A new update has given the emblem a new name now and, although the fans don’t buy the explanation, at least they changed it quickly. Still, its very sad to see something like this happen in 2022, especially during a holiday celebrating a victory against racism.