Updated: Halo 5: Guardians takes Master Chief and his pursuer down a very strange path
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Master Chief just isn’t himself in Halo 5: Guardians. And now that I’ve played the whole single-player campaign, I’m not really sure I like that. The chief has always been a bit of a rogue and a loner. But in the story of Halo 5, Master Chief goes absent without leave (AWOL), and his United Nations Space Command superiors accuse him of outright treason. This leads to a plot that gets over-complicated and unbelievable.
That’s a shame, as Halo 5 is the biggest game that Microsoft has coming this fall and it’s part of a series that has sold more than 65 million copies and generated $4.6 billion in revenue. This exclusive Microsoft game is going to be the main reason why gamers will choose the Xbox One over the Sony PlayStation 4 (see our interview with Xbox chief Phil Spencer about that).
This story has some plot spoilers, but I’ve tried to keep that at a minimum. I have played multiplayer and added a review score. –Dean Takahashi
343 Industries has been a very good custodian of the Halo series since it took over from series creator Bungie, which went on to create Destiny. And 343 and Microsoft have a chance to sell a lot more copies with Halo 5: Guardians, a first-person shooter which debuts on October 27 on the Xbox One game console. Halo fans have been waiting for a new Master Chief game since Halo 4 came out in 2012 on the Xbox 360. 343 Industries has tried very hard to deliver something different.
But there is such a thing as trying too hard to make it seem original, and that results in a flawed single-player campaign like with Halo 2. While the story seems absurd, Halo 5 has the familiar, challenging first-person shooter gameplay that fans have come to know and love. That, as well as new multiplayer twists, could be its saving grace.
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Above: The Blue team in Halo 5: Guardians
Image Credit: Microsoft
Master Chief is back, but he’s sharing the stage with Jameson Locke, the hero of the online video series Halo: Nightfall. Since that story, Locke (formerly an agent in the Office of Naval Intelligence) has become a Spartan IV supersoldier with the accompanying strength augmentations. Spartan Locke leads the mission to find Master Chief and discover why his fellow Spartan has disobeyed his orders. During that mission, Locke has to come to terms with the fact that he is hunting down humanity’s greatest hero.
In its own trailers, Microsoft set up an exaggerated confrontation between Locke and the chief. In two of the final pre-launch TV commercials, 343 revealed that humanity’s leaders would rather allow the masses to believe that Master Chief has died rather than reveal his treachery.
This is pretty severe, as the chief always goes his own way, but he never strays this far off the reservation.
You start out playing as Locke, who leads a squad of his own Spartans. The opening cinematic is quite spectacular, though the gameplay that it leads to is a fairly routine mission, only with four Spartans instead of just the usual one. Locke leads Team Osiris to find one of humanity’s great scientists, Catherine Halsey, creator of the Spartan program. She is being held by the Covenant, and even appears to be collaborating with them.
In the second mission, you play as Master Chief, the leader of a squad called Blue Team. Each team can consist of four human players in co-op mode, or with one human player and three artificial intelligence (A.I.) characters who help you out in each mission. That means that the combat with the enemies is a lot harder than it used to be, so that the game will still be challenging for up to four human players. You will, for instance, routinely run into Hunters, the most difficult enemies to defeat.
When you are wounded, the battle doesn’t end. Your team members can revive you, allowing for a quick resumption of the action.
The story alternates between the different points of view of Locke and Master Chief, until the inevitable clash comes about. The challenge for the storytellers is that they really have to convince you that this betrayal is real and that somebody that you have really liked in the past has become evil or misguided. We’re led to believe that the Master Chief has been led astray by someone he encounters from his past.
The familiar gameplay isn’t broken
The problems in the single-player story may not matter. Many players have come to accept the quirky plot twists of past games, and some never crack open the campaign and go straight to multiplayer. Those players aren’t going to be disappointed, since the multiplayer combat has some new features that make it a first-rate experience.
I’ve always liked how everything comes together in a Halo experience.
Every game has great pulse-pounding music that gets you into the spirit of the combat. It usually has a compelling story about the Master Chief and Cortana (the A.I. character who died at the end of Halo 4’s single-player campaign story) and the esports-like multiplayer, where pro gamers can thrive.
You still have to switch things up moment to moment, shooting out your opponent’s armor and then closing in for a melee strike in order to save precious ammo. You have to switch between sticky or bouncy grenades, depending on the target. And you have to jump, dash, and flank as your enemy returns fire from multiple directions. That kind of fast-action, demanding gameplay is what keeps me coming back.
The gameplay is accompanied by awesome cinematics, like in the beginning of the game as Locke lands among a ton of Covenant enemies. Add to that the new gameplay features with the Spartan Abilities (see below) and you get something innovative too.
Multiplayer is more challenging and fun than past games
Above: Halo 5: Guardians’ Warzone mode.
Image Credit: Microsoft
Halo 5: Guardians has a completely revamped multiplayer system. You can fight in vast matches against both A.I. and other human players in a 12-versus-12 Warzone matches. This mode is my favorite addition to the game, as it makes you feel like you’re in the midst of massive battles. Even if you are not extremely skillful, you can contribute to the fight. That’s because the mode has a requisition system. With this system, you earn points as you progress in the combat. You can use those points to acquire better weapons and vehicles, such as a Scorpion Tank. And with a tank like that, even a “noob,” or new player, can contribute to the battle in a big way.
This mode wasn’t possible on the Xbox 360, and it is where the Xbox One shines. Microsoft brings its Compute Cloud into play by enhancing the available processing power in your Xbox One by doing more of the A.I. processing in the cloud. That’s why the mode can support a lot more characters in the battle at once.
The Arena mode is something altogether different. Designed for the esports pro gamers, you can fight four-on-four tournament-style matches where the object is to capture a flag or take out the enemy team. This is where you see the experts shine. Skilled players can use new Spartan abilities in a way that gives them an advantage over weaker players. I can see how this will go over well with esports fans, but I think it’s also fun for players who like quick and dirty matches.
In an arena match, you can be catapulted toward the middle, and then you can stalk your enemies. You can make a lot of noise shooting from afar or sneak around in stealth. There’s usually a hidden weapon on the level, such as a battle rifle. The first team to kill off the other four enemies wins. Arena mode is all about highly skilled, precision combat. Both the Warzone and Arena make you feel like you are contributing to something bigger than your own survival.
Enhanced Spartan abilities
Above: In Halo 5: Guardians, you can jump in the air and change directions using stabilizers.
Image Credit: Microsoft
343 has also spiced up the gameplay with better Spartan abilities. Rather than choose your armor or assault profiles, now you can pull off new tricks. You can do a Spartan Charge that allows you to crash through barriers or kill enemies. If you mistime it, you are vulnerable to enemy attacks. But if you hit a Spartan in the back, you can kill the soldier with one blow.
You can also climb up walls for the first time, giving you more vertical options for attacks with an ability called “clamber.” And you can drop down on enemies from above, assassinating them in a very satisfying way using “ground pound.”
These new abilities make for very different kinds of combat options. In multiplayer, the abilities give skilled players another way to differentiate themselves from those of us who can barely get any kills in a multiplayer match. And in single player, you can use the abilities to score kills with more style, livening up the challenge of beating A.
I. characters.
And with “stabilizers,” you can jump into the air and then thrust in any direction (after pressing the left trigger) to extend your jump distances or stay in the air longer. You can hang in the air for a couple of seconds, allowing you to avoid grenade explosioins, sort of like a player doing a delayed jump shot in basketball.
The new Spartan Abilities include “Spartan Charge,” which you can initiate why running at full speed. If you press the melee button (right stick click), you’ll use your thrusters to move at a high speed in a certain direction, ramming any enemies in front of you. It’s simple to learn, and it will severely wound or kill any enemy in your way. But if you mistime it, you’ll make yourself vulnerable to fire and counter maneuvers. If you hit a Spartan from the back, you’ll kill the Spartan with one blow. If you hit from the front or side, you’ll take down the Spartan’s shields.
Overall, the Spartan abilities accomplish two things. They bring something new.
And they reward the skillful player.
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The Lack Of Master Chief Was The Least Of Halo 5’s Campaign Problems
By
Stephen Totilo
Comments (170)
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Video game sequels often fix the problems of their predecessors thanks to, among other things, the iterative advancements of technology. That’s on top of the fact that making creative work in the gaming medium is still an exercise in being an artistic pioneer. So you at least hope that the people making sequels know what their last game did wrong. This was a week to wonder if the folks making Halo did.
A few days ago, quotes from Frank O’Connor, one of the top creative people at Halo studio 343 Industries, caromed around the gaming internet after running in the magazine GamesTM.
O’Connor was explaining what went awry with the story in 2015’s Halo 5 and, as ricocheted by Eurogamer and bounced once more here, told the magazine:
“We took some digs for storytelling in Halo 5, but they were absolutely merited… We very much realized that people wanted Master Chief’s story of Halo 5.
“We definitely marketed [Halo 5] in a way that we hoped was going to bring surprise, but for some fans and certainly fans of Master Chief, it was a huge disappointment because they wanted more Chief. And that has been a big learning…
“The volume of ‘give us more Chief’ at the end of Halo 5 was significant and so I think if anything he’s slightly more important now than he has ever been, certainly to our franchise.”
You might not be able to tell from those quotes, but Master Chief was actually in Halo 5. You play as him in a few of the game’s 15 missions—certainly not as many as in Halo 4, but more than you played as him in the nearly 100% Chief-free Halo Reach, which had a better campaign than Halo 5.
(Halo Reach was developed by Bungie, the creators and original developers of Halo.)
You play most of Halo 5 as Spartan Locke, the guy featured in the promo art up top and retrofitted into the Halo saga via some new cutscenes added to Halo 2 when that game was remastered for Xbox One. Locke’s quest is dull and the big confrontation between Chief and Locke amounts to a mid-game cutscene, rather than the epic climax that we were expecting.
Memory fades the faults of older games, but if I can quote one of my favorite experts, here’s what I wrote about Halo 5 back when I’d just played through it:
Advertisements for the game have played up the drama of Locke hunting down a rogue Master Chief, but their rivalry is undercooked, their confrontation anticlimactic. The theme of a possibly rogue Master Chief was used far more effectively in the first season of the Halo 5 promotional podcast Hunt The Truth, which has a separate plot from the game.
Just look at this Halo 5 commercial. It must be for a really cool game, huh?
Marketing sometimes gets ahead of a game, and the game that is being over-hyped usually pays the prices. Purchasers of Assassin’s Creed III know this, too (and this is coming from someone who likes that game!). But had 343 delivered the game the Halo 5 ads teased—Chief running for his life, maybe turned bad, Locke facing him down in an epic clash of super-soldiers—then 343 reps probably wouldn’t be doing interviews in 2017 where they needed to explain what went wrong.
I’d normally just shrug my shoulders at something like this and move on, but O’Connor’s comments about addressing Halo 5’s campaign issues by going more heavily with Chief in the future didn’t just suggest a misdiagnosis of a surprisingly flawed game but pointed to the continued hazard of sameness that so many of Microsoft’s franchises are having, where the Halos and Gears of Wars and Forzas feel like so much of the same thing year after year and the spark of the new just isn’t shining enough.
Now, I like where Forza is going, at least when it comes to the really fun Horizon series. And deviating from a series’ main direction is not always the right prescription. See the chilly reception to the Xbox 360’s Gears of War Judgment. But in a year where we’ve seen the Zelda series reinvent itself successfully and in the face of a talented heretofore-single-franchise studio like Guerrilla Games finding new life with Horizon Zero Dawn (after years of nothing but Killzone), something about 343 dusting themselves off and committing to making a new Halo that really, really focuses on Master Chief inspires me with less confidence than it normally would.
Halo game campaigns don’t matter all that much, of course. The multiplayer is what keeps Halo’s heart pumping and I can’t speak to that. That’s probably where they can really make improvements for Halo 6.
As for whether O’Connor’s comments reflected an accurate understanding of what went awry with Halo 5’s campaign, I asked Microsoft PR if I was missing anything.
Here’s a 343 spokesperson responding and demonstrating, thankfully, that he and the rest of 343 recognize that there were other flaws worth addressing, too:
“In our recent interview with GamesTM, we offered a couple of examples of learnings and feedback we’ve received from the community in response to “Halo 5: Guardians” – such as a desire for a greater focus on the Master Chief, the perceived disconnect between some of our marketing and in-game story or the effect splitscreen’s omission had on our fans. These are clearly not our only learnings, and as with every game in the series, the lessons we learned – good and bad, are manifold, nuanced and elements we’re looking forward to wrangling, addressing and improving upon in our next major release.”
It’ll also help if Halo 6 doesn’t repeat Warden Eternal boss fights a bunch of times.
Guardians — Oleg Pashkevich on DTF
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It’s no secret that many players weren’t thrilled with the history of Halo 5.
Many things necessary for understanding what was happening, for some unknown reason, were revealed anywhere, but not in the game itself. The story of Halo 5 ends on a huge cliffhanger, but thanks to the story of Bad Blood, we can find out what happened immediately after the events of the game and “smooth the corners” of the awkward ending a little.
After Cortana’s retreat from Genesis, the Forerunner planet, the Osiris team rescued the Blues, led by the Master Chief of the Cryptum. The Spartans had to continue fighting the Prometheans until there was some way to get off the planet. With the help of Linda, who was fluent in reconnaissance and orientation skills, the survivors managed to find the Pelican, which was sucked onto the planet along with the Guardian. On this Pelican, the Spartan team flew away from Genesis, slipping through an open portal to Sanghelios (the home world of the Sangheili race, of which the Arbiter was a representative)
Locke believed that the only sensible solution would be to try to contact the UNSC flagship Infinity, which remained in orbit until the Osiris crew left for Genesis.
As they emerged from a portal near Sunaion, the Spartans saw that the city, which had recently been the site of a fierce battle between the armies of the Arbiter and the Covenant, seemed to have died out. There was no one on the streets and in the sky above the settlement.
The heroes decided that the first thing to do was to find the Arbiter and the other survivors — they might know what happened to Infinity. Finding a burning fire on one of the rocks, the Spartans went there. As soon as the Pelican sat down, a few surviving elites in full combat gear emerged from the tent next to the fire, accompanied by Dr. Halsey. What was their surprise when two legendary Spartans came out of the ship to meet them, leaving differences in the past. This is the scene we see in the ending of Halo 5.
It took you long enough…
Dr. Halsey
After the Master Chief introduced the Arbiter to the Blue Team, Halsey revealed that she was able to assemble the transmitter from scraps and scraps left over from the battle.
Infinity agreed to send a ship for the survivors the next day, and so the Spartans had to spend the night waiting for the evacuation in the company of the elites. The Master Chief and the Arbiter, remembering the past days of joint battles, went hunting. After that, the people and elites celebrated together the end of the Covenant Civil War, the events of which we glimpsed in Halo 5.
It turned out that one of the Guardians returned to Sanghelios after the departure of the Osiris team and became a kind of «guardian» of the planet. It was he who neutralized the Arbiter’s entire fleet and sent Sanghelios into «lockdown». Spartan Palmer suggested that Cortana could already take control of the entire solar system in this way.
The next morning, Palmer, Halsey, BLU, and the Osiris departed Sanghelios on a Pelican sent from the Infinity, bidding farewell to the Arbiter and his elites. As it turned out later, the Master Chief and the Arbiter spent the night reminiscing about their joint battles and all the horror they had to go through shoulder to shoulder.
That is why, when parting, the Arbiter, in his usual manner, said something important:
When we first met, we were enemies. I am now confident that we can face this new threat together as allies and friends.
Arbiter
This is where the fateful meeting of the old partners ended. And we can only hope that the Arbiter will return in Halo Infinite and, perhaps, play a more significant role there than in the fifth part.
Halo 5: Guardians — Master Chief vs Agent Lok XOne
Halo 5: Guardians
Halo 5: Guardians — Master Chief vs. Agent Lok
The American corporation Microsoft announced that one of the most
Upcoming Xbox One Home Console Exclusives — Halo 5:
Guardians will go on sale October 27th. In honor of
such a significant event, the Xbox team released two
videos that show the confrontation from two different sides
the legendary Master Chief and the young Spartan Lok from Space
United Nations Command.
nine0003
In the first video, the Spartan Lok questions the merits and
Master Chief’s true motives, blaming him for the destruction that
suffered by the Halo universe:
« The whole world honors the conquering hero (looks away
monument to Chifu). Let’s remember him as our protector, not
the one who left us “this” (with movements of the hand, points to
ruined remains). Let’s remember who our savior is, and
not a traitor. May his name remain forever. («Like yours» sounds
Chif’s weak voice in the background, «but not yours,» Lock answers him). Glory
conquering hero. The one who was supposed to save us all. But now
I must do this. Save us all from you (Lok directs the muzzle
pistol towards Chief) «.
In the second video, the Master Chief delivers a monologue about the real
the price of heroism, standing over the defeated Spartan Lok:
« This.
Did you add this? Have you been searching for so long? After all,
what have you done, risked… Was it worth anything? You
completed his mission, the Spartan Lok. Mine just started .”
Which trailer is the true story? It’s to come
solve for Halo fans this fall.
« Epic drama unfolds in Halo 5: Guardians» –
said Bonnie Ross, head of 343 Industries. « Players who
never questioned their ideas about heroes,
events and mysteries of Halo, will be amazed by the scale of the
combat in Halo 5: Guardians. We look forward to the moment when
be able to bring the game to Xbox fans around the world for the first time at
E3 this June ‘.
will finally take off the «mask». it’s time to spin the plot
around the personality of the eminent savior
Voland ,
no, it’s like in Batman
don’t be so predictable, the mask is his real face
October 27 — circled in red.
