Halo 5 Guardians
After more than a week’s worth of high quality campaign and multiplayer gameplay, we can reassure you Halo 5: Guardians is the best Halo yet. With the game’s latest installment hitting shelves on October 27, we had the opportunity to delve into Master Chief’s newest chapter with Halo Franchise Director at 343 Studios Frank O’Connor.
The Halo franchise has always offered a variety of ways to experience the universe, but it’s evident Halo 5: Guardians is the first time they’ve managed to include everything fans have ever wanted into the game without any compromise. In short, it’s the Halo people have always dreamed of. From the moment you begin the campaign you really feel like you’re experiencing what has the potential to be “the beginning of the greatest hunt in gaming history.” Despite being a continuation in an ongoing saga, Halo 5: Guardians is very much the beginning of something much, much bigger.
“We’re always careful to try to make a game that has easy access points for new players, especially when its on a new hardware system—because we can’t guarantee people have had an Xbox before, let alone played Halo,” Frank explained.
“So we made sure it works as a standalone story and works as a good entry point, but when the end credits roll at the end of the game I think even our most loyal fans are going to have a pretty radically different perspective on where things go from here. It really is the beginning of something really important in the universe, without spoiling it.”
This time around, Campaign has a really different flavor. There’s lots of stuff to unlock and discover in terms of secrets, but it’s built around this foundation of co-op. “That in itself has really changed how were able to design maps,” Frank said of the new co-operative system. “Because you always have this guarantee of at least three other spartans helping you, we’re able to make our levels much more capacious, much larger, and with more routes for exploration. I think that’s something people are going to appreciate obviously the first time they play, but when they go back and play it on subsequent playthroughs they’re going to discover more and more secret stuff.”
In addition, the co-operative mode also allowed 343 Industries to tell a true ensemble story. “There’s two teams of four—so that’s eight real characters—and we’re actually able to properly invest in those characters, and you’ll learn a fair amount about all eight characters by the time you reach the end of the game.”
With Halo 5: Guardians the story is told from two different perspectives, with opposing protagonists. The Master Chief and the other members of Blue Team are some of the few remaining members of the SPARTAN-II program. Veterans of the Human-Covenant war, they’ve known one another since childhood and trust one another on a deep level.
Meanwhile, Spartan Locke and Fireteam Osiris are a newly minted squad of Spartan-IVs assembled by the UNSC and tasked with tracking down the Master Chief when he and Blue Team go AWOL early on in the game. Throughout the course of the campaign the action shifts between these two teams, and only by playing back and forth between the two teams is the complete story told.
If you’re playing co-op you can have up to four real players in the match at any time, and it’s drop-in and drop-out. So, if you start off with four real players—you and three of your buddies—and somebody has to go get dinner, they can just leave the game and their character is automatically taken over by a “very smart” AI.
