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The next Halo game will be out this October, Microsoft announced tonight in a trailer that aired during The Walking Dead.
You can watch the trailer, which is live-action and unfortunately has no actual gameplay, above. Halo 5: Guardians will be released on October 27 for Xbox One.
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I am looking forward to where the story goes, but I miss the days where gameplay was used to advertise games. it’s the cool thing to have live action trailers no matter what your game is. I mean sure it’s cool to see Kate Upton in a bath, but it says nothing about your game.
Couldn’t agree more. Pre-rendered or live action…not for me.
This is an excellent trailer, but it doesn’t make me excited for Halo 5. It just makes me want a Halo movie.
Just finished Halo 4 last night/early this morning, looking forward to seeing where 5 goes with the story. I think Halo is an amazing love story, probably one of the best I have seen
The love story between a sad lonely 40yr old virgin and a RealDoll is better than Twilight
Part of me wants to see where the story goes, but I found the environments and characters so bland in Halo 4 (Cortana/Chief excepted) that I really do not think I can be bothered playing it to find out.
Same. I really didnt like the new enemies they brought into Halo 4. I didnt find them very interesting or fun to fight.
After Halo 4 go play through Spartan Ops. After that, go read the Halo: Escalation comics…or just read them over at http://halopedia.org/Halo:_Escalation to find out what happens next as it bridges part of the gap between Halo 4 and Halo 5.
Damn – the trailer looks cool, but it’s Halo and I’m not getting sucked into buying another one
I’ll be waiting quite a while to see if it is the same clusterfuck that the MCC was, if not, then maybe…maybe…
There’s actually another trailer from Master Chief’s perspective: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9rd8FWUCCZk
Ok…I’m confused.
Are we going to have two playable characters again (a la Halo 2 Arbiter?)
Yes. Master CHief is still the main character, but there will be another playable character.
It’s Agent Locke.
I have to agree, I didn’t enjoy Halo 4 at all. I didn’t play Master Chief Collection, but I heard it was pretty bad.
Yeah Halo 4 was the worst Halo game by a long shot. Stung even more that all the critics gushed over it. That game singlehandedly undid a decade of good will accrued by Bungie and has severely tarnished the brand for me. Went from one of my favourite franchises to something I actively disdain now.
The strength of my negative feelings is actually really surprising to me, considering I am generally very pragmatic in my criticisms of games. That’s how badly they messed up.
343i, is that you?
Ignoring your incredibly hostile approach, i’ll try to list some of my biggest issues.
The story makes the decision of revealing and letting you interact with the Forerunners in no uncertain terms. This removes any mystique this race (and a key aspect of the games universe) had, and removes a lot of the “wonder” from the setting and story. It takes a relatively sensible handling of the universe established by Bungie and fills it with deus ex machina and science magic (in regards to the librarian speeding up Chief’s evolution to resist the science magic of the Didact). The “love story” between Cortana and Chief was handled decently enough, but many of these themes and ideas were already explored in Halo 3, with Cortana phasing into the screen and being all crazy and also needing to be saved / being separated from Master Chief also being key to the plot.
The problem is, Halo never really had a “big bad guy”. It was always about the conflicts between races and the fates of these parties in a larger sense. Making it all about the motivations of a single antagonist, one who never really makes those motivations known further than vague cartoon villainy, flies in the face of the narrative thrust of the series.
Think about previous antagonists in the game. There’s Guilty Spark, his programming was the reason for his conflict with you, this was made clear, he was there to complete his programming. The covenant leaders, they had delusions of religion that blinded them, even though their goals were negative, theirs beliefs were clearly established and thus their motivations seemed convincing. With The Didact we have a crazed loose cannon with the intent to kill humanity and digitise them for… some reason?
Then there’s the enemies, the Prometheans were not a fun enemy to fight against. At all. With the covenant, they are colourful and exciting to fight against. They are capable but not frustrating. With a Hunter, for example, their impenetrable armour can be circumvented. But almost all the promethean enemies, they are fast-moving bullet sponges with one weak point and strong exterior armour all over. This turns firefights into frustrating affairs where you’re more than likely to run out of ammo every time before the enemies can be killed. They are just a frustration rather than an engaging challenge like The Covenant. With their similar appearance, they are less visually interesting than the covenant before them as well.
And on the topic of running out of ammo, this game essentially forces you to use the promethean weapons. However these are completely devoid of the character of the covenant weaponry, or the comparative realism of the UNSC weapons. We can relate to the human weapons, we pick them up, we know how they work. The Covenant weapons have strange, bulbous shapes, and bright colours. They fire bright energy and have interesting properties. They feel like a real alternative tactic to using human weapons. They are fun to use, and have strong feedback in their use (bright colours, strange shapes, interesting results).
The promethean weapons on the other hand all look very similar, and they are all essentially future-tech re-skins of human weapons. You have the shotgun and the assault rifle and the sniper rifle and the rocket launcher. The light rifle and the binary rifle look almost identical aside from some coloured lights. Even the projectiles from these weapons are boring and straightforward. They lack the familiarity of the UNSC weapons, and the strange, otherworldliness of the Covenant’s. They are in a worthless middle-ground. There’s nothing these guns add to the game, and more than that, they actively remove opportunity to utilise much better weapons already existing in the universe.
Then there’s the levels, too many of which either reuse ideas we’ve already seen, or remove you from the strengths of the games mechanics too many times. Worst offenders are definitely the ghost level early in where you must speed through an erupting environment without engaging anyone or stopping to enjoy said environment. The first level you get to control the mech, where you’re basically in a shooting gallery shooting down a corridor killing everything around you. The mech ignores the vital pros/cons approach of the series’ previous vehicles for a nonstop killing machine. I can barely remember later levels in the game, because they left little impression on me in the way of memorable experiences.
Halo succeeds because it gives you sandboxes to utilise the main pillars of its mechanics (shooting, melee, grenades, vehicles) in concert. Halo 4 repeatedly funnels you through corridors or set-pieces that actively reject this pre-established set-up. Which is fine if you’ve got good reason for doing so or have a better idea, but rejecting the core attraction of a franchise is a risky move and one 343i didn’t have the skill to pull off.
That’s not to mention the multiplayer, which aped at the industry “leader” Call Of Duty in such a blatant way that it was swiftly rejected by the entire community within a matter of weeks. Halo’s strength is its difference from such games, and the fact that 343i couldn’t see that is very concerning. Even they recognised the multiplayer as a failure in the complete overhaul of the multiplayer for the Halo 5 beta.
You’re awesome (legit).
The big question: will it even work?
As a customer I feel very disrespected, and I didn’t even buy MCC.
Halo 5 Beta worked beautifully. And while this is obviously not an excuse for how the MCC was released, 343 actually had very little to do with the actual production of the MCC. I have very little doubt that Halo 5 will work at launch, but who knows.
edit: Hm. This was meant to be a reply to @shadow.
Yet you try and tell everyone else that… And you’ll get downvoted for god knows how far.
How exactly did 343 have very little to do with the actual production of the Master Chief Collection?
Certain Affinity developed the multiplayer, Saber Interactive developed Halo 2 Anniversary, Ruffian Games developed the Halo 3 and 4 ports, and United Front Games worked on the UI to merge all the games together.
Oh so what did 343i actually do then?? So I guess it’s mainly Certain Affinity’s fault then?
I’m not really sure what they did to be honest. They probably organised the whole thing and brought it all together on some level. It’s Microsoft servers so they probably have something to do with the matchmaking side of things but I don’t really know if all the MCC problems were a server problem or a coding problem. All I know is that most of their resources have been going towards Halo 5, which was quick to matchmake and lag-free, so I’m not too worried about it for now.
I haven’t played the Halo 5 beta, heard good things though. But based on Halo 4’s multiplayer showing i’m definitely worried about it. I know they’ve changed it up, but their inability to update the magic of Halo’s multiplayer when most of the hard work was already done is concerning.
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