This Is It Commanders: Sgt. Johnson and the Covenant Are Coming to Halo Flashpoint
Anthony SalazarThe Great Journey begins.
Promotional Image by: Mantic Games
Mantic has dropped a new trailer teasing their next expansion reveal for Friday, October 9th. The trailer features everyone's favorite cigar chomping Marine, Sgt. Avery Johnson, alongside a heavy allusion to the Covenant joining the game via the video's final shot. Pre orders go live the same day as the full announcement, and you can bet the Black Harriers will be covering all the juicy info on the newest faction, its units, new keywords, and more.
Preview Image by: Mantic Games
A lot of players have been waiting for a third faction to spice things up, and while we had originally speculated the Flood as the next contender, it looks like the Prophets of High Charity are the ones dropping Covenant forces onto the battlefield instead.
Plenty of fans love fighting the original alien bad guy alliance, so I think a lot of Flashpoint players are going to be ecstatic to see these different species enter the fray. While the Covenant will likely feature more Elites and possibly different variations of Grunts, Jackals, or Brutes, this also presents a stellar opportunity to bring in the Yanme'e (Drones), Huragok (Engineers), and the Lekgolo (Hunters). All species that would genuinely change up the dynamic and presence on the battlefield.
Mantic has clearly been listening closely to the fanbase and is delivering on exactly what player voices have been calling for.
High Charity, as seen in “Halo 2: Anniversary”, Source: Halopedia
Regardless, the imagery is pretty clear. The Covenant, in full force, is coming, and painters are going to have a field day getting their hands on Human Covenant War era models, making them look sharp and faithful to the classic nostalgia hitting games that started this whole thing.
With Johnson coming aboard for the UNSC (we speculate he'll likely be a single model release, similar to Master Chief), Flashpoint commanders everywhere can finally field every generation of Spartan on the table at once.
This year has already seen a ton of amazing releases, from the recent Zeta Halo wave introducing the new Marines, Banished Reinforcements, and Spartan Killers, to Noble Team, new Big Team Battle modes, 4 player supported games, and tournament and organized play support. Rounding out 2026 with a brand new faction up for pre order is a stellar bomb drop, and an explosive, exciting way to close out the year. Mantic doesn't seem to be slowing down one bit on the Flashpoint train, and we're genuinely looking forward to hearing more about the Covenant's addition. Hopefully Friday's drop also includes more information on the new Campaign Evolved board game they're expected to release soon.
Halo 3: ODST Pre Order Trailer, Source: Xbox
So that's where things stand. Johnson's boots are hitting the ground, the Covenant looks all but confirmed, and Flashpoint is closing out an already stacked year with what might be its biggest announcement yet. We'll have full coverage the moment Friday's reveal drops, units, keywords, pricing, all of it. Until then, don't forget to check out our in-house painting contest here on the website, the “Avant Garde Open”, and we'll see you all Friday!
Source: White Rabbit Trails
If any of that went over your head, or you just want the deeper lore behind Johnson and the Covenant, for any Flashpoint players who haven't actually played the video games, keep reading below.
Avery Johnson isn't technically a Spartan in the way most people picture when they hear the word, but his history runs deeper than most casual fans realize. Before the Spartan-II program ever existed, Johnson was a candidate in Project ORION, a classified Naval Special Warfare initiative meant to create enhanced soldiers to handle the Insurrection, a human on human civil conflict happening well before the Covenant ever showed up. Johnson wasn't a soldier recruited purely for combat either. He served as a Marine throughout his career, and ORION was simply one chapter of enhancement layered onto that service, not a separate identity replacing it.
Avery Johnson a subject of the ORION Project, Source: Halopedia
The augmentations Johnson received through ORION were far less refined than what the Spartan-II program would later produce, think early prototype rather than finished product, but they were still enough to push him well past baseline human limits. ORION was eventually shut down due to cost and a string of complications among its remaining test subjects, and its survivors, Johnson included, were quietly folded back into regular military service. It wasn't until years later that ORION was retroactively classified as the Spartan-I program, making Johnson part of Halo's very first attempt at building a super soldier, decades before Master Chief ever existed.
Spartan II’s undergoing their first mission, Source: Halo: Collateral Damage (2018), by Dark Horse Comics
That timeline actually lines up perfectly with how the Spartan program evolved overall, and it's worth laying it out simply for anyone newer to the lore. Spartan-I, Project ORION, came first and focused on volunteer adults, Johnson among them, with comparatively modest results. Spartan-II came next, the program behind Master Chief and Jorge, built instead around children conscripted at a young age and given far more extensive, far more invasive augmentations, resulting in the legendary soldiers most fans picture first. Spartan-III followed, the program behind Noble Team, designed specifically to be cheaper and more expendable than Spartan-II, trading some individual durability for the ability to field soldiers in much greater numbers. And finally Spartan-IV, the modern era program built around adult volunteers using the MJOLNIR armor advancements of the time, representing the generation most current Flashpoint players are already fielding on the table (we at the Harriers remain very biased in support of the Deadeye, if that wasn't already obvious).
Yanme’e (Drones) In Halo 3, Source: Reddit
The Covenant were the original threat that kicked off the entire Halo franchise (and kicked our asses in the legendary campaign runs), a theocratic alliance of alien species united under a shared, and ultimately false, religious belief that activating the Halo installations would trigger a divine transcendence called the Great Journey. In reality, firing the rings would've wiped out all sentient life in the galaxy to starve out the Flood, a fact the ruling Prophet caste either didn't know or deliberately hid from the species serving beneath them. The Covenant fought humanity in a brutal, decades long war that very nearly ended with humanity's extinction, and that conflict forms the entire backbone of the original trilogy.
Silhouettes of Different Covenant Species, Source :Unknown
Among the more unusual members of that alliance are the Lekgolo, commonly known as Hunters, who aren't actually a single creature at all. They're a colony of small eel like organisms that bond together into one massive armored form, giving them absurd durability and a devastating fuel rod cannon to match. Then there are the Yanme'e, known as Drones, an insectoid species capable of flight that mostly served in support and swarm roles, using sheer numbers and mobility to make up for weaker individual durability. Round that out with the Huragok, called Engineers, a biomechanical species created by the Covenant themselves to maintain and build their technology, weapons, ships, and provide battlefield support, and you've got a genuinely varied roster unlike anything currently on the Flashpoint table.
A Huragok (Engineer) From Halo: Reach, Source: Halo Alpha
For anyone wondering how the Covenant differs from the Banished players have already been fighting, the distinction actually matters a lot. The Banished started as a splinter faction made up largely of disillusioned Jiralhanae and other Covenant remnants who rejected the Prophets' leadership entirely after the Great Schism tore the original alliance apart. They're mercenary and opportunistic by nature, built around a much more decentralized, warlord driven structure under leaders like Atriox. The Covenant, by contrast, represents the original, far more organized, deeply religious hierarchy, with strict caste structures and that unifying, if ultimately hollow, Great Journey ideology holding everything together. Same general alien aesthetic in places, but a completely different internal culture and chain of command driving them. We’re very excited to see how Mantic will implement these things into the game.
Here’s to Fridays reveal, and all the new additions!
