Unfinished: Halo 5: Guardians 09/23/2015

Very strong opening from Brad and Drew

will wait for reviews but yeah... this looks really, really nice.

I have not read the books in a long time and the only one I remember is Kelly. Didn't she end up getting badly hurt and Dr. Halsey has Kelly on her ship? That is the last I remember of her but don't recall what happened after that.

I haven't read some of the latest books, but I thought a few of Blue team was with some of the Spartan 3's stuck inside some weird alien inner planet thing in Ghosts of Onyx? and Halsey kidnapped kelly cuz she needed a body guard for some plan or something.

I should catch up

I would have agreed with you in the first months of the game's release. Halo 5 looks mighty fine though. thanks for the footage, Drew!

For a guy who hasn't been interested in Halo in YEARS...this looks really great.

Over time, the more they have dived deeper into making Chief's HUD look like a you have a helmet on, the more I love it. That stuff looks so cool, gives me the great feeling I had the first time I saw Samus's visor display in Metroid Prime.

Is this an alternate universe of Destiny where they actually wrote a story?

One of the draws of Halo for me has been the feeling of being this lone wolf exploring alien worlds. Something that this trailer for Halo:CE encapsulates pretty well.

That feeling's decreased with Halo 3 and 4, and the introduction of the squad mechanics in five seem to take it away altogether. Don't get me wrong I'm still excited to play Guardians, but with the squad stuff and the removal of split-screen multiplayer I doubt that this game will leave much of an impact on me. Hopefully it will.

This is really making me want an XB1...

This is why I'm worried, how much will people who doesn't read the book och comic book get out of this. All of this makes sense to me, all the questions GB have in this video has been answered in other media. And the book and games usually doesn't conflict, it was only during Fall of reach and Halo Reach, there was some stuff that didn't add up during that period. Master Chief was never the last Spartan, they just thought so because all the stuff that went down at Reach but Spartans did survive and/or wasn't there at all. And I'm kinda surprised Drew hasn't read any of the books.

There is a reason 343 put the crosshair in the middle of the screen instead of the now traditional Bungie idea of putting it lower, because having it lower is a stupid idea, sorry Bungie but it is a stupid idea.

Haven't watched any of the Halo 5 videos aside from multiplayer stuff. I want to go into the campaign totally clean, but the comments here are encouraging!

@samba_p: This is the same problem they had with the Didact and Halo 4 and the devs still seem refuse to address the fact that not everybody read the books and the comics.

This site really needs a Facebook style "LIKE" button for comments like this one.

Kudos friend. :)

I LOVE how both Jeff and Drew ignored Brad Beatles pun.... that's right, don't give him the satisfaction!!!!

did anyone say 'Spartatars' already?

Having Halo 1-5, ODST, Reach as well as a probable Halo 6 on a single console makes the Xbone kinda attractive. Kinda.

Boy the second envrionment they showed!!! So large, multiple levels, so many way to approach the fight! Just that one scene reminded me why i love Halo games and man does this one look great.

Also that 3rd clip! Halo might be the Tron game we've all been waiting for.

4 player online co-op? I can't believe they ripped off Black Ops 3! :V

Brad acknowledges that in the video mentioning that Halo 4 was a technical achievement on the 360, they're only really negative on the story of 4 which too be honest was not handled well, relying way too much on expanded universe knowledge.

Exactly, I got many friends who don't follow the lore that can understand R, 1-3's storylines while not really being able to describe much of 4's minus some obvious beats.

I can't wait to get my hands on the digital copy of Halo 5. I'm gonna rub that console all over my body! Yes!

Great video, Drew!

"Just for the Halo of it" - I see what you did there. Nice. Nice one.

You could say they...."no sold"...it? Eh?

Putting in Blue Team is really gonna confuse people because while the books (which blue team comes from) says that other Spartans lived, the games have always pushed the whole "The Last Spartan" angle. Its gonna be like Halo 4 all over again where you will only get whats happening if you read a book.

Still waiting for Halo: Asgardians

The guns in Halo never clicked for me but these look and sound great.

I noticed that some of the character animations ran at a lower "framerate" than 60, which gave the enemies that sort of "Jason and the Argonauts" animation vibe (stop-motion). They're probably only doing it for performance reasons, but it looked cool to me.

Is Laura Bailey going to be this years Troy Baker or Nolan North? She seems to be in everything these days.

I never really liked Halo and found the reverence for it's "combat puzzle" mechanics absurd but this looks really good. Sadly the first time Halo looks really appealing to me is when I don't actually own the console to play it on.

Drew is the Master Chief

Same.

Same here, sadly I'm a super broke.

I always thought it was lame that the "other 3" Spartans were part of canon and technically part of Halo 1-3.

@16shells: looooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooool

Are those enemy animations dropping frames at a short distance?
That has happened in games over very long distances before, but 10-15 meters?

Looks cool. I still need to play Halo 3 and 4, so I probably wont get to it this year.

The books actually do address how the other Spartans survived, and unbelievably still maintain canon with the games. It's addressed in the first and third books which came out in the early 2000s, and their meeting back up with the Chief is set up a cliffhanger from "Ghosts of Oynx" way back in 2006 (I stopped reading them there, but the rest were worked on by Karen Traviss and Bungie to ensure they all mesh).

Of course, they realized most of their audience weren't going to read the rest of the books/comics to connect the overarching story so they addressed the Spartans living in logs/a mission in Halo: Reach. Wisely, someone realized that wouldn't be enough so their CG TV show/episodic missions Halo: Inifinity/Spartan Ops pretty much covers all that and sets up this new nonsense. If you don't have the time to go back and play those in 4, here's all the expensive ass episodes in a full movie:

Looks really nice. Not nice enough for me to play an FPS on a control pad in 2015, but good to see a console game looking sharp and running at 60.

This looks really really good. Can't Wait.

@eggheaded: man, the actual spartan ops were such an major disappointment but damn those cut scenes were good.

Its depressing that people still get excited when a console game runs at 60fps. This should be standardized.

Gotta say, I'm disappointed in the presentation, considering the previous standard was Jeff's Killzone 3 "Quick Look".

It's always awkward when Keith David activates his cloaking armor while people are interviewing him. Like dude, we can't see you now! Duh!

Republic Commando you say???

@drewbert The other Spartan 2 members (Fred, Kelly, Linda etc.) survived Reach in an underground bunker, with Halsey. Nothing the Halo:Reach game means that had to be retconned.

They then escaped and ended up in a Dyson Sphere during the events of Halo 1, 2 & 3 with Halsey and some others (Spartan 3's IIRC, the ones that didn't have all the genetic engineering, just the armour and harsh training from a young age).

They got out of there and at that point I guess is the end of Halo 4, where Halsey is being interviewed by the ONI guy.

There's a decent short summary on Kelly's wiki page: http://halo.wikia.com/wiki/Kelly-087#cite_note-14

John,Kelly, Linda, Fred...I get the feeling the Spartans are part of the Scooby-Doo gang. ;)

The game director for Halo 5 is Tim Longo. He also directed another squad command-based FPS called... Star Wars: Republic Commando. Drew wasn't just whistling dixie.

I'm just thrilled that 343 Industries are surfacing more of the fiction. There is plenty of really solid scifi in the Halo novels, particularly the ship combat in Eric Nylund's original three novels.

Fred, Kelly and Linda (Blue Team) have been a part of Halo fiction since The Fall of Reach was published a couple days before Halo: Combat Evolved came out. Technically, they've been established from the very beginning of the franchise, but a very small percentage of players would know about them, since Bungie almost completely ignored and underused vast swathes of their material.

Bungie became so precious and coy with their fiction that I often wondered if they even wanted anyone to know all these cool aspects. Halo has a thoroughly developed universe, but it needs to be in the games and accessible, not hidden away in their story-bible and exclusively explored in books and marketing material. I really enjoy the novels for digging into fine details of particular conflicts or ancillary characters, but the larger events and conflicts need to be better presented to someone just playing the game.

The origin of the SPARTANs as an instrument of the UNSC meant to stomp out human colony insurrection ( or their fight for independence from Earth) is a fascinatingly grim and complicated aspect that has been greatly under-sold, as just one example of established elements of the fiction that Bungie largely left in the dark. The web series Forward Unto Dawn did a good job developing that, but again that was more than ten years after the franchise started.

Rant aside, it's good to see them finally using more of the tools at their disposal.

This looks really sharp. I'm stopped watching it halfway through because I want to be surprised when I play it myself.

This looks real real nice. Pretty excited. Also interesting @brad said he was getting a Republic Commando vibe, apparently one of the higher up dudes working on Halo worked on that game and he's dealing with the squad stuff.

This is a good looking game, but still looks mildly scaled down compared to the older multiplayer beta videos. In them you could see the characters casting shadows on their guns, not just the environments, and that's a cool detail I can't recall any other games than F.E.A.R doing previously, and that detail seemed to be gone here, there were several points where it looked like it should've happened but didn't.

I guess I wouldn't fault this game for not doing it, since so few other games do, but it's a little sad considering older builds had that neat little detail.