GamesRadar+ got the chance to visit the museum earlier this month, and today we’d like to take you on a tour. So join me, as we walk the path of Spartans.

Halo: Combat Evolved

The Halo museum is organized semi-chronologically, with the original Halo and all of its assorted memorabilia collected into one, neat case. An inauspicious start to the tour, especially compared to the zaniness you’ll see later.

Halo: Anniversary

The first project from 343 Industries was a remake of the original Combat Evolved, and was widely hailed as the proper way to handle a reworking of classic gameplay. This version still runs on the old engine (meaning the physics and bugs are just as you remember ’em), and even lets you swap between the new and old graphical styles on the fly. It’s a celebration of the Halo franchise’s beginnings, and something 343 is clearly proud of.

Halo 2

Halo 2 paved the way not just for Master Chief and co., but Xbox Live as well. Here, you can start to see the beginnings of Halo as a serious multiplayer game. 

Halo 3

While the first two games in the trilogy certainly have their fans, it was Halo 3 that broke records and took the brand from video games to a multimedia empire. And yes, that is a Mountain Dew. Hey, cross-promotional sugar water is part of history too. 

Halo 3: ODST

A side-story that unfolds during the events of Halo 3, Halo 3: ODST focused on the Orbital Drop Shock Troopers (ODST) that fought off the Covenant left on Earth when Chief jumped into hyperspace with a Prophet’s fleet. The Brute costume you see was used in this fabulous, surprisingly heartfelt commercia (opens in new tab)l.

Halo: Reach

The final game from Bungie but the first chronologically, Halo: Reach is one hell of a bang to end on. Rather than tell another tale of the invincible Master Chief, this prequel cast you as a member of Noble Team, a squad of Spartans that were picked off one-by-one until even you fell to the Covenant horde. And while you won’t see it close up, the Elite costume you see here was employed in the emotional “Deliver Hope” commercial (opens in new tab).

Halo: Forward Unto Dawn

While the dreams of a Hollywood feature film set in the Halo universe may be forever dashed, at least fans got some semblance of live-action Master Chief with the Halo 4 prequel/tie-in, Forward Unto Dawn. Cool trivia about the suit: it was worn by actor Daniel Cudmore, who measures in at an intimidating 6’6″. Cudmore is also known for playing Colossus in the X-Men films (that’s the movies with “X-Men” in the title, not Deadpool). 

Halo 4

343’s first original contribution to Halo was met with split opinions. Some were hesitant to see veteran studio Bungie leave the series, while others embraced a more Call of Duty-inspired design philosophy. The new Master Chief suit is still sometimes worn for charity events and special occasions.

Halo: The Master Chief Collection

While part of 343 Industries worked to get Halo 5 into pre-production, other portions of the studio were diligently remastering Halo 2 in the same vein as Halo: Anniversary, and then packaging it together with the three other games in which Master Chief starred. The result was The Master Chief Collection, which was rock-solid… as long as you didn’t try the multiplayer, which was broken for weeks after release.

Halo: Nightfall

Another live-action film project, this one produced by legendary filmmaker Ridley Scott. Nightfall introduced us to Agent Locke, who would go on to be a major part of Halo 5: Guardians. More grounded and gritty than the smooth sci-fi look of previous Halo projects, Nightfall also starred Mike Coulter, who went on to be Luke Cage in the Marvel Netflix series… uh, Luke Cage. 

Halo 5: Guardians

The first proper Halo game on Xbox One (no, we’re not counting The Master Chief Collection), Halo 5 had a lot to live up to. Whether it succeeded is still debated, but you can’t deny the ridiculous amount of marketing that led up to it. 

Halo: Spartan Assault and Halo: Spartan Strike

Spartan Assault and Spartan Strike took the Halo universe mobile, transforming the FPS into an isometric, tactical run-and-gun game. Assault would eventually come to PC and Xbox One, while Strike remains on mobile and PC, no console release.

Halo toys, books, and collectibles

As I said, Halo is far more than a game series now. Action figures and collectibles run the gamut from small and kid-friendly to big, expensive statuettes. 

Halo Legends

Much like The Animatrix, Halo Legends is an anthology collection of animated films set in the Halo universe. Some are better than others, but the art is undeniably beautiful. 

Halo weaponry

Whether these were used as props in commercials or part of costumes, these guns are the real deal. That DMR is heavy. 

Halo endorsements

Did you know Master Chief has had his face (well, his helmet) plastered onto the underside of skateboards, snowboards, and NASCAR cars? Neither did I. But we know now. 

Saying goodbye

As we leave the lobby of 343 Industries, a life-size statue of Master Chief lets us know that he’ll be here to watch over everything, and keep us safe. Godspeed, Chief. 

Seen something newsworthy? Tell us (opens in new tab)!

The post Theres a real-life Halo museum at 343 industries and its full of cool stuff – take a look appeared first on Game News.

The Firefight mode coming to Halo 5 is called “Warzone Firefight,” and developer 343 Industries is being tight-lipped about how it’ll play. All the studio is willing to say for now is that it’s happening, and you can get a sneak peek at the end of this trailer:

In a touching tribute (opens in new tab) to a fan’s two young daughters who passed away last month, 343 has also taken the time to implement a new emblem and a starry memorial. The emblem is part of the Spartans Never Walk Alone pack – free to all players as part of this month’s update – and is the first animated emblem in Halo 5. Meanwhile, look up at the sky on the new Arena map, Torque, and you might see the girls’ names, Trinity and Lena, shining back.

Seen something newsworthy? Tell us!

The post Firefight is finally coming to Halo 5, come get a sneak peek appeared first on Game News.

Since HoloLens is augmented reality and not virtual reality, it’s not like Mani is experiencing the world of Halo as though he were actually there. Instead, what you’re seeing is the Xbox One streaming Halo 5 to a Windows 10 PC, which is subsequently streaming to the HoloLens. Since HoloLens lets you “pin” an app window in physical space, Mani has apparently pinned the Xbox app to his home’s wall, letting him play without a television.

I’m impressed – the technology is still too new to expect holograms of Spartans running around the living room, but the fact that a game like Halo 5 can be streamed to a PC and then to another device with no hiccup in framerate or drop in visual quality is impressive. There seems to be a delay of about one second (which would make games with a lot of action nigh unplayable), but HoloLens is still in active development after all. Hopefully there’s time to improve.

But enough about me, what about you? Does this make you excited for HoloLens, does it turn you off the idea, or are you pretty much the same as you ever were?

Seen something newsworthy? Tell us!

The post Check out Halo 5 played using Microsofts HoloLens augmented reality appeared first on Game News.

“I’d love to go do a xenoarcheological expedition to the original Halo ring,” O’Connor said, setting up an example. “You know, take some scientists down, drive around, catch samples, do some detective work, maybe there’s a mystery. And it wouldn’t require shooting. It’s the universe and environment that can still be exciting, even without action. So that’s one of the things I’d love to see us invest more in.”

It might sound sacrilegious to talk about a Halo game with no shooting, but stranger things have happened. We live in a world where Minecraft has a narrative-driven episodic series (opens in new tab) starring Patton Oswalt, after all. But I’m curious: what do you think? Would you play a Halo game lacking in pew-pew?

Seen something newsworthy? Tell us!

The post Halo boss would love to see a Halo game without shooting – would you? appeared first on Game News.

While this may seem like Digital Foundry coming down harshly on developer 343 Industries, they (and we, as evidenced by our Halo 5 campaign review (opens in new tab)) are actually rather impressed by the game’s ability to rev up to 60 fps, and the dynamic resolution scaling used to maintain it. Shadows may fade in and out of existence and higher-resolution models can “pop” into the scenery, but the framerate almost never budges.

The game looks great no matter how you slice it, this video just gives us a glimpse at how much work really does go into keeping things running smooth. Of course, whether that trade-off is worth it is up to you.

Seen something newsworthy? Tell us!

The post Halo 5 sacrifices more than splitscreen for 60 fps, but framerate is rock solid appeared first on Game News.

The action in Guardians is split between two teams, who each have their own, intertwined story arcs. There’s Blue Team, lead by Master Chief, and Fireteam Osiris which belongs to Locke. At some point early in the game we see Chief and Blue Team go rogue, with little or no clue as to why, and Locke is tasked with discovering the truth behind this apparent defection. It takes place over three worlds too, home to humanity, the Covenant, and the Forerunners – making this the most varied Halo ever.

Ok, those are the story facts. Let’s talk about the action, which feels like a big departure from the older Halos – even taking a step further in the direction number 4 headed. For starters it feels so much faster and more lethal than other games: think of it as a cross between old Halo, COD, and Titanfall. The end result isn’t a bad game, but it takes some acclimatising to. Yes, there are ironsights on weapons now, and the gravity seems to have been dialled down to remove that more floaty feel of the original games.

Weapons are more noisy and mechanical now, sounding more like traditional guns than the sci-fi fare of previous games. There’s a real punch to the new Assault Rifle, and a fresh rifle called the Hydra launcher is like a beefy grenade launcher that locks onto enemies before rapidly spitting explosive projectiles in their direction. Chief has learned some extra moves too, and can smash enemies from above with a ground-pound, and shoulder-charge through flimsy pieces of cover to access fleshy foes on the other side.

The biggest changes come with co-op, though. Everything is more guided while remaining semi-open for exploration. So, in the demo level there are two options for attacking a certain area of Covenant forces – go high, or go low. Chief orders his team to take the low route, while he cruises the area above, picking off snipers and eventually smashing down to the lower level with an enormous ground pound.

You can now give orders to your team mates (the AI ones – feel free to shout at any human buddies as you would normally), asking them to attack specific targets or move to different points on the battlefield. Get sloppy and die, and you can call one of them over to revive you. You are given additional warnings when you’re close to death, like a little bar that sits on top of your shield-display, indicating when your shield will actually recharge. Generally speaking, there are more enemies per encounter in Halo 5, so you do need those extra Spartans and assists to help fight them off. Depending on the difficulty level you play, your AI pals will stay alive and bleed out at different rates – so on Legendary, you won’t have a lot of time to save them.

Co-op is drop in, drop out, so there’s no need to hang around in lobbies waiting for friends. That’s the beauty of a campaign that fully supports co-op play. Again, though, it’s part of the reason this doesn’t really feel like a traditional Halo. There’s loads of battle chatter, and it no longer feels like you’re a super-soldier tackling impossible odds and winning. And that used to be the heart and soul of the Halo story. Like it or not, though, this is where the series is headed, and the actual snippets I’ve seen are chaotic fun.

There’s no doubt that 343 is fully in charge of the Halo series now, and that Halo 5 is that studio’s game. Almost all traces of the combat Bungie built is gone. But I suspect that – even if Bungie had stayed with Halo – it’d make roughly the same game. Guardians belongs in the same generation as Titanfall and Destiny (opens in new tab), it’s got the epic scale of a Batman or a Metal Gear Solid 5 (opens in new tab), and it’s got a meaty campaign that recognises the fact that players demand much more value for money from their games. It’s got two flavours of multiplayer – Warzone and Arena – and a long plan for free DLC along the way.

All the pieces are here. But is the soul of the series? Will this just be a virtual Frankenstein’s monster, made up of the choicest cuts of other games? We’ll find out for sure in October, but right now it’s very clear: this isn’t your Father’s Halo, nor should it be treated that way.

The post Guardians isnt a traditional Halo game, but thats just fine appeared first on Game News.

Coming in to E3, there were already concerns amongst some Halo fans that 343 Industries was steering the series into becoming more like Activision’s Call of Duty series. This feeling stemmed from some of the divisive changes introduced during last December’s Halo 5 multiplayer beta, such as the introduction of things such as Smart-linking which is, in effect, Call of Duty’s Aim Down Sights (ADS).

A chat I had with Josh Holmes, Halo 5 Studio head, last February did much to quell these suspicions for me; he talked long and openly about how his team is making physical alterations to the maps playable in the beta, as he felt some of them were too wide open with too many points of entry. Which is an interesting observation to make, as wide-open maps with multiple entry points are one of Call of Duty’s calling cards.

“The main difference between Halo and Call of Duty is that in Halo, when you’re shot, you have the ability to turn around and fight back” Holmes explained to me at the time for Official Xbox Magazine. “We want to give players better ability to control a zone, and that means not giving them more entrance points than can be reasonably controlled”.

Those are all the right words, but perception can be a tricky thing to shift. And the Halo 5: Guardians campaign gameplayer trailer ‘Battle of Sunaion’, which kickstarted Microsoft’s E3 Conference, was to that perception what cold water is to an electrical fire.

The trailer sees Agent Locke and Fireteam Osiris scuttle through the titular alien city, as part of their ongoing search for The Master Chief, who’s done a runner. I won’t give you a blow for blow account of the trailer, as you can watch the thing in its entirety here, but it doesn’t take a trained eye to spot that things are a little…off.

It isn’t the fact that the level design is basically one big linear corridor that concerns me – Halo might be at its best when it blows the level design wide open, but even the best entries in the series allow themselves to be slaves to the narrative once in a while. What should be a wider concern is what the demo mistakes for drama – a spaceship exploding in the distance, a pathway crumbling beneath Locke’s feet, a seemingly impassible Promethean warship that is bypassed not by cunning but by flaccidly giving the orders to one of your teammates to lay down fire. Basically you’re trained to have your eyes fixed anywhere but on the action. It’s the same set of parlour tricks we’ve come to associate with Call of Duty, and frankly speaking that’s not what I’m looking for in a Halo game.

For clarity’s sake, I should point out that I like Call of Duty. But it does what it does so well, and what it does is so limited in scope, that I really have no desire to see other studios do a bad cover version of it, when their talents lie in making other, different things.

‘So you can appreciate why the Halo 5 trailer made me do a scream in my mouth. Particularly as the ethos of Call of Duty and Halo are so intrinsically different. The former likes to build excitement through theatrics, carefully-managed set-pieces and Hollywood bombast. Halo favours a more emergent, cerebral sandbox style of play, where the theatrics come not from fireworks but from the gunplay itself.

It’s not just one thing that makes a Halo game a Halo game – it’s everything – the finely-balanced spread of weapons, vehicles and enemy types, and how the interplay between these things allows the designers to remix the action simply by plugging in and out different toys from their extensive toybox.

There’s a famous quote from Jamie Griesemer, a designer who worked on the first three Halo games, that describes Halo as ’30 seconds of fun, over and over again’. But taken out of context, Griesemer’s quote doesn’t really get across what he was getting at. Really if you think about it, all you do in your average Halo campaign mission is lurch from skirmish to skirmish – the same 30 seconds of fun, if you will – but no two sections ever feel the same, such is the wealth of options Halo has at its disposal to throw at the player, and such are the tactical options the wide-open playing spaces give the player to throw back at the game.

The campaign trailer displays little of this. New Promethean soldiers and warships whet the appetite – the more toys for the toybox, the merrier – but the context they are placed in certainly does not. Take the Doom trailer we mentioned in passing at the beginning as a comparable; the gore might not be to everyone’s tastes, but, it is unmistakably coded as a Doom game – from the meaty shotguns, to the fast, whirling combat, to the art style, to the brief BFG cameo, it is everything you could reasonably expect a modern Doom game to be.

So is the Battle of Sunaion representative of the entire campaign? Is Call of Duty influencing Halo 5’s design more than we’d like? I asked exactly that question to Chris Lee, Lead Producer:

“I would say for the E3 keynote demo that some of the destruction and chaos that was going on in the mission was intended to be indicative of a specific design principle where we want to create more options and more flexibility for the player when they play through the spaces.

“With the tracking system, the player can be dropped into much larger playing spaces with multiple different ways of acheving the objective with your squad. Throughout the campaign, as you progress, you’ll actually get more and more of these larger spaces that we were only able to build when we moved to dedicated servers on Xbox One. You didn’t really get to see that in the demo, but that is definitely something you’ll see”.

Promising – as with Josh Holmes, all the noises coming out of 343 Industries are the right ones – but the proof is in the playing. And that is where my hands-on with Warzone, Halo 5’s epic-scale, 12 v 12 multiplayer mode, did much to make me a believer. It’s difficult, of course, to extrapolate too much about a campaign mode from its tag-along multiplayer, but that’s not taking into account what Warzone’s mission objective is – in 343’s own words, it’s an attempt to smush everything that is good about Halo into one, catch-all multiplayer mode.

That means player v. player, but it also means player v. AI. It means that every toy in the toybox gets to comes out to play. Only this time you get the keys to the box; points earned during combat can be traded in at requisition stations for weapons and vehicles of your own choosing.

343 Industries still gets to play designer, of course – enemy waves are carefully stage-managed, even if they don’t necessarily run by clockwork. But by giving players the agency to work towards their weapons of choice, they create a battlefield which has a very natural, very exciting sense of escalation. And it’s all staged in a vast environment, filled with with small pockets of carefully-crafted design that allow the same exhilarating sense of tactical freedom that Bungie’s works provide at their best.

So actually, if you shared my concerns about the Halo trailer – and a cursory glance at social media reminds me that, mercifully, I haven’t just made it all up in my head – then be soothed by the news that both the words 343 Industries speaks, and the clever, sandbox-oriented design of Warzone, sing of a studio that’s fully in tune with Halo’s unique rhythm, having hit the occasional bum note with Halo 4.

I could be wrong, of course, and the sandbox stuff could be restricted to its Warzone ghetto while the single-player mode goes full Captain Price in Halo’s quest to remain ‘culturally relevant’. But I no longer fear that’s the case at all. Delving deeper into Halo 5’s design served as a timely reminder that at E3, with dozens of loud, bright trailers bouncing around the cauldron, competing for eyes and ears, seeing isn’t always believing – for better and for worse.

The post Halo 5 preserves the series spirit of freedom, despite that misleading E3 demo appeared first on Game News.

“Players earn REQ Points after each multiplayer match in Arena and Warzone and redeem the points to acquire REQ Packs. There are 3 tiers of base REQ packs that can be purchased: Gold, Silver and Bronze, and requisition cards are categorized into five tiers of rarity: Common, Uncommon, Rare, Super Rare and Legendary.

Each level of REQ Pack determines the quality of the REQs inside; for example, a Gold REQ Pack has a chance of including Legendary requisitions, while a Bronze REQ Pack does not. Higher leveled REQ Packs require more REQ Points.

Regarding the rarity of REQs themselves, players will receive Common REQs the most often and Legendary REQs the least often. One example of what players will earn are weapons – the Needler is considered an Uncommon weapon, whereas the Sniper Rifle is considered a Rare weapon. An upgraded Sniper Rifle variant would be considered Super Rare, and a Mythic Weapon, such as the Prophet’s Bane, is considered a Legendary REQ.”

Microsoft also clarified that Warzone matches restrict REQ usage via an in-match leveling system and energy management system, designed in a way to prevent pay-to-win. In short, you won’t be able to call out the big guns (and vehicles) until your team levels up. So no starting with an army of Scorpion tanks – for better or worse.

Original story: Halo 5: Guardians will support microtransaction purposes for players who want to customize the aesthetics of their Spartan avatar in multiplayer, 343 studio head Josh Holmes has confirmed on the Halo Waypoint blog. The way it works is somewhat convoluted, so let’s break it down:

New to Halo 5 are REQ Packs – a small collection of random in-game goodies you can purchase using REQ Points, which are earned by participating in multiplayer matches, leveling up Spartan Rank and completing commendation challenges. Inside a REQ Pack are things like armor pieces, skins, animations, and perhaps most importantly, weapons and vehicles. While REQ Packs can be purchased using the in-game currency of REQ Points, Holmes has revealed they can also be purchased using real-world money.

Here’s where things get a bit sticky: while Holmes made sure to point out that only cosmetic changes will be allowed in Halo 5’s 4v4 Arena multiplayer, no restrictions were mentioned for the newly-announced, 24-player Warzone mode. It also was not clear if premium REQ Packs – i.e. those paid for with real money – will contain only cosmetic items or if players will be able to purchase power upgrades using cash. Holmes wrote that the ability to purchase REQ Packs is “for convenience,” and that a portion of the proceeds will go toward the Halo Championship Series prize pool.

I’ve reached out to learn more and hopefully get some clarification on the limits and restrictions of premium REQ Packs, but for now one thing is certain: Halo 5 will have microtransactions in some form. Take that how you will.

For more announcements, hop over to our hub for all the E3 2015 coverage.

The post Halo 5 lets you pay real money for fancy armor and new guns appeared first on Game News.

Hunt the Truth Episode 00 – Primer

Today saw the naugural episode of Hunt the Truth, a 12-part weekly podcast series presented by the fictional Benjamin Giraud, a war journalist (played, weirdly, by Keegan-Michael Key of Key and Peele) searching for the truth behind the conspiracy that surrounds Master Chief in his upcoming fifth outing. Basically, it seems like Serial, but with lasers.

The introductory episode, ‘Primer’, has Giraud explaining that he’s looking to tell the “ugly” story of Master Chief’s history. It also introduces what seems to be the keyword behind Halo 5’s new campaign, “Traitor”.

Interestingly, Giraud is not a new character – 343 has confirmed that he’s the Photographer in the Halo graphic novel story ‘Second Sunrise Over New Mombasa’. In that story, he is an operative for the Office of Naval Intelligence, or ONI.

Given that we already know Halo 5’s single player component will feature Agent Locke, an ONI agent on the hunt for an AWOL Chief, it seems John-117’s either done something very naughty, or is being fitted up for crimes he didn’t commit. Considering ONI is responsible for counter-espionage and propaganda in the Halo universe, we’re fairly sure it’s the latter.

‘Primer’ doesn’t reveal much more than the framework of the series to come – which will run weekly until E3 – but it’s enough to whet our appetite for the intrigue to come.

Teaser Trailer – Bullet

Today, we found ourselves faced with ‘Bullet’, the most teasing of teaser trailers. At full speed, it simply features a familiar-looking sniper rifle ejecting a bullet and smashing Master Chief’s iconic helmet.

But a nifty slowdown slider let’s you look a little closer. In frame-by-frame view, the bullet is revealed to show a string of words pertinent to Chief’s history and, it seems, his future: ‘Son’, ‘Abductee’, ‘Victim’, ‘Orphan’, ‘Recruit’, Soldier’, ‘Warrior’, ‘Ally’, ‘Hero’, ‘Savior’ and ‘Traitor’.

Nothing more hidden has been spotted in amongst the debris at time of writing, although we wouldn’t rule it out. Let us know if you’ve spotted anything.

The Map

The most curious find of the campaign so far is a map or star chart, which has appeared in the background of most of the Hunt the Truth promotional material. You can see a chunk on the Tumblr page, but Reddit user AssaultCommand has cobbled together a more complete picture from various pieces:

As for what the map actually signifies, that’s currently unknown, but suffice it to say that this is the kind of unfinished business an ARG community will fixate on until we have answers.

Live-Action Story Trailer

Microsoft has officially announced that this Sunday, 29th March, will see the release of the first story trailer for the game, a live-action affair. Don’t be surprised to see Mike Colter, who portrayed Agent Locke in the Halo: Nightfall video series, pop up again – he’s reprising the role in motion capture for the game, too.

You’ll be able to watch the trailer on the day at http://www.xbox.com/halo5, and we’ll have it sitting here waiting for you ASAP, too.

We’ll be updating this story every time new information is released or discover, so make sure to check back frequently for new Halo 5: Guardians updates.

The post Halo 5 #HUNTtheTRUTH appeared first on Game News.

OXM spent a day playing the Halo 5 multiplayer beta, which will be launched on 29 December and run until 18 January, and in the opening presentation Holmes and creative director Tim Longo ruined our carefully prepared questions. Almost every single aspect of Halo 4 that troubled fans is gone. Halo 5 runs on dedicated servers, there are no more Ordnance drops, armour abilities are out, loadouts are gone, flinching has flinched, fixed weapon spawns are back, hello to a sexy 60FPS and – sweet Cortana! – the whole thing’s built around a skill-based ranking system.

We’ve got the skinny on all of it, but the first and most obvious question is why? After all, in an industry built on constant forward momentum it’s unusual to see such a high-profile FPS hark back to classic multiplayer roots – and, perhaps, something of an admission that Halo 4 just had too much stuff going on. “A big part of it is just putting all players on an equal footing,” says Holmes. “Making sure there’s an equal playing field. Tim [Longo]’s been very passionate about making sure every player has the same set of abilities that they can employ and use as tools on the battlefield.”

“Yeah, we’ve been really focused on keeping the skill gap pure, so it’s learning about how to use all these toys,” says Longo. “We kind of talk about it like peeling an onion’s layers over time, so you might take a chance and start trying to learn how to use ground pound, then you go on to add this and you add that. But everyone has that suite of abilities and then it’s just how you use it to increase your skills. That kind of return to form is the whole point of arena multiplayer.”

We’ve much more from Holmes and Longo, but first let’s get to the juicy details and… ground pound? It’s-a me, Master Chief? Perish the thought. Halo 4 was great, but it added a huge amount to multiplayer in the form of loadouts and armour abilities, which Halo 5 deals with by giving everything to everybody – up to a point. The Spartans you’ll control in multiplayer have new Mjolnir armour suits that incorporate tweaked versions of the very best abilities from earlier Halos, but activate depending on what you’re doing.

So for example if you’re in a firefight and push the analogue stick in a direction plus B, you’ll activate a thruster-powered evasive dodge – which can also be triggered in midair to squeeze out a little more distance.

If you’re sprinting forwards and press melee, you’ll perform the ‘Spartan charge’ – a forward shoulder-ram that we used on more than one occasion to send enemies flying over the side of levels. Zoom in on your target while jumping and thrusters will automatically activate to give your Spartan a little more hangtime – which balances the powerful surprise factor by also making you something of a sitting duck.

Then there’s that ground pound. Halo 5’s most obviously delicious new ability, this is activated when you’re in the air and click in on the right stick, which brings up a large red targeting reticule on the floor below and sets off a warning audio cue (which can be heard by other players). Release the right stick, or charge it to the max, and your Spartan zooms down from above like death itself, landing fist-down with a spine-shattering oomph that obliterates anything in the way. It’s high risk and high reward, but the sheer damage and the small-but-devastating impact makes it an irresistible new toy to play with.

This isn’t it by a battle rifle long shot. Halo 5 gives you many new options in combat, but it also makes Spartans much more manoeuvrable in general and balances these increased abilities out with tactical downsides. Infinite sprint is now the default for all players, but sprinting now stops the shield from recharging – so if someone’s losing a fight and high-tails it, you can chase them down in the knowledge they’ve sacrificed their shield timer. The recharge time on shields also feels quicker than in Halo 4 (although Holmes claimed he couldn’t exactly remember if this was true, thanks to it changing so much over development). If you’re sprinting and click the right stick, you go into a slide and stop in a crouched position – useful for both entering combat and dashing into cover.

By far the biggest change is the addition of clambering – if a Spartan’s jumping for a ledge, you can now press jump a second time to grab on and climb up in double-time. This is not new to the FPS genre but it is new to Halo, and the implications for map design are enormous. The most obvious impact is in packed arenas, which are filled with platforms alongside and within the more normal thoroughfares. One of the maps we played was a new version of Halo 2’s Midship, now called Truth, and the ramps at either side lend themselves wonderfully well to this new style of movement. The change to Halo’s feel isn’t as fundamental as you’d think it might be, because what clambering does is simply get you somewhere quicker and with fewer of those awful failed jumps where your stomach hits the platform edge.

So why did 343 move away from customisable armour abilities towards a one-Spartan-to-rule-them-all design? “We decided to really focus the abilities around what it means to be a Spartan,” says Holmes. “That’s the inspiration, thinking about what it would be like to be this super-powerful walking tank on the battlefield with all of this tech at your disposal. So some of those are abilities you’ve seen in Halo 4, like thrusters, but from that kind of ‘Spartan fantasy’ we’re creating a single cohesive set of abilities.”

Saying ‘what does it mean to be a Spartan?’ is a good tagline, of course, but what does it actually mean in the context of designing a competitive multiplayer experience? What comes first : the cool move or the cool design idea? Holmes responds with a question. “So you remember how the Chief in Halo 3 kind of slams down? I mean, man, I wish I could do something like that, come flying down from space and ‘wham!’ in the middle of a match.” So do we, Josh (and a few of you lot, too).

“Really, it’s about delivering those big moments but in a balanced way,” adds Longo. “So something like ground pound is hard to execute, but if you get it there’s a big payoff. You just expect Spartans to be able to do some really cool stuff, so you wanna deliver that but then balance it for multiplayer.”

The Halo 5 beta will have seven maps in total, though at this early stage we were only able to play the life out of three. The first is instantly familiar: Halo 2’s classic Midship, a symmetrical, purple-hued interior with ‘bases’ at opposite ends, a giant light-bridge across the centre, and curved walkways around each edge – here, it’s been renamed Truth and the main addition is clamber points dotted at convenient points around that make it easier to get where you’re going faster.

The most important thing about Halo 5 is that it simply feels great to move – the new traversal options give you a wider range of approaches to any part of the level, and using them requires no real adjustment or, after a minute or two, even conscious thought. It’s like you’ve always been able to clamber, and going back to Halo 4 afterwards felt weirdly restrictive. What’s really nice about Halo 5 is that it keeps the faster pace of Halo 4, but strips back all of the extraneous elements to focus exclusively on evenly matched Spartans battling over control points and power weapons.

In fact, if there’s one thing that stands out – apart from the fact the animations, textures and incidental level details add up to an amazing-looking game – it’s that the multiplayer maps seem to have found that rhythm from the earlier games, where timed weapon and vehicle spawns would see enemy teams converge and duke it out. Power weapons spawn at regular intervals, which is communicated both with an icon on the HUD and in-game chatter that tells you when the spawn is getting close – the latter part of a new automatic VO system that communicates enemy positions within teams without players needing to talk.

“I think map control is so important to map flow, particularly in a competitive experience, and so having those power positions on the map that you have to fight over just creates a really good flow within the combat,” says Holmes. “The other thing we wanted to focus on within the map design is the Spartan abilities, for example locations where different abilities are more useful – so there are clamber routes as well as elevated positions where you might want to line up a ground pound. The flipside is that if you’re below that spot, you know through experience that you may be vulnerable to an enemy above you. We’re really focusing on those elements of map design.”

Halo 4’s Ordnance drops and loadouts had moved away from this idea of the map guiding player movement, so while there were still choke points and the like there was no impulse to make cross-map trips to pick up a newly spawning sniper rifle. “We want everything to be intentional for the player,” says Longo. “So when you go for a certain spot on the map, there’s an intention to do that rather than there being a random quality. Everything’s been thought through about how these maps flow, so when a weapon position is chosen the players know where that is, when it’s coming and that enemy players are going to be hitting it at around the same time.” And there’s no randomisation of power weapons? “Yep, no randomisation.”

Hold us close, Chief, because this is everything we’ve dreamed of. The second map available, Empire, is set atop a skyscraper under siege – which is why you can Spartan charge your enemies off the sides for kicks. Overall the map is slightly bigger than Truth but it’s also a much more enclosed space – all corridors, pillars, doorways and elevation spots. On Truth the power weapon was the sword right in the middle, but here two sniper rifles spawn at opposite ends of the map at exactly the same time – which in our games led to either a giant bunfight over one of the spots, or both teams separating briefly, securing their sniper, and then going back on the hunt.

OXM’s skills were as sharp as ever, so our very first game saw a spectacular kill frenzy with the sword – important not because it shows we’re awesome, but because it shows how much muscle memory was working right from the get-go. Halo 5 adds so many improvements, particularly when it comes to manoeuvring around levels, that the most surprising thing is it feels like a Halo game at the core. Particularly notable is the return of mid- to long-range BR and DMR battles and a fresh emphasis on the assault rifle as the starting weapon, but other minor tweaks like increased grenade damage and a reduced time before shield recharging feel like a return to classic principles. In other words, that incredible Halo 2 and 3 feel.

“Halo 2 is kind of a defining multiplayer experience on console and, for me, one of the defining arena shooters of all time,” says Holmes. “So to be able to bring that back and have the classic roots coming through in this experience is awesome.”

A theme of our time with Holmes and Longo, however, is that this arena mode is just one part – albeit clearly a very important one – of where 343 wants to take the game. “Right now what we’re showing is just the arena portion,” says Holmes. “We have a much larger experience for multiplayer which we’ll talk about closer to launch, but for now it’s all about 4v4 arena.”

To us, this suggests something like a split between an Infinity Slayer mode, as in Halo 4, where you get all of the toys to play with, and then a much more focused competitive multiplayer component designed around balance and a level playing field. “I think that’s the cool thing about having the arena mode dedicated to the competitive experience,” says Longo. “Because we can actually decide what weapons are used and then be very focused about it. But arena is the tip of the iceberg, so there’ll be other modes with more weapons. We can be really specific – that’s the beauty of arena – and it’s not meshed-together as it has been in the past, where you end up with a kind of half-and-half.”

Which leads to the biggest question of all, for nerdy Halo junkies like OXM anyway – is skill-based ranking in matchmaking back? Is it ever. “We have two systems,” says Longo. “We have levelling up for things like the armour unlocks and cosmetic things in the arena mode, and then CSR [Competitive Skill Rating] is there for your skill. And that can go up and down based on your performance, so that’s designed to show what your ‘real’ skill level is – so you can attain iron, bronze, silver, gold, onyx, semi-pro and pro. You move up and down that chain.”

The ‘pro’ ranking, in particular, will individually rank the top 200 players in the world – surely a dream for every serious Halo player (were it so easy). Though it never seemed this way at the time, with hindsight you can look back on Halo 4 and see it as something of an experimental entry in the series – testing out new elements both in-game and structurally, while adapting the best of the competition. For many players it worked, and for some (including us) it moved a little too far from that classic Halo formula.

OXM went to play Halo 5 with a bunch of questions based around the elements of Halo 4 that the fans were most vocal about disliking. In the first ten minutes, each one of those questions was answered by the game itself – every element that players found problematic in Halo 4 has been addressed and either rolled back or improved upon. Halo 5 certainly shows that 343 Industries is listening to fans. More than anything else, it shows that the core multiplayer experience of Halo is absolutely classic – and coming back with a vengeance.

The post The Chief is going back to his roots in Halo 5 appeared first on Game News.