Halo 5: Guardians
Halo 5: Guardians is a 2015 first-person shooter game developed by 343 Industries and published by Microsoft Studios for the Xbox One. Set in the 26th century, the plot follows two fireteams of human supersoldiers: Blue Team, led by Master Chief, and Fireteam Osiris, led by Spartan Locke. When Blue Team goes absent without leave to track down the artificial intelligence construct Cortana, Master Chief's loyalty is called into question and Fireteam Osiris is sent to retrieve him. Players fight enemies with an armament of different weaponry and vehicles in story-based and multiplayer modes, including a larger-format 24-person mode called Warzone.
343 Industries started to plan Halo 5 shortly after the release of its predecessor, Halo 4. In late 2012, the team set goals for the game, including larger campaign and multiplayer areas. Different departments worked collaboratively to build off each others' work for the campaign mode. The move to the Xbox One console allowed the development of the Warzone mode alongside traditional multiplayer modes, part of 343 Industries' focus on allowing for different play styles. Its game engine dynamically adjusts its resolution to maintain a frame rate of 60 frames per second; the focus on performance meant that offline capabilities or local networking were not included.
Microsoft announced the game at E3 2013. The game sold five million units within three months and is the fifth-best selling game for the Xbox One. Upon release, Halo 5 received positive reviews from critics, with praise directed at its gameplay, visuals, level design and multiplayer modes. However, the game's single-player campaign met divided responses, with criticism directed at its story, writing, and ending. A sequel, Halo Infinite, was released on December 8, 2021.
Gameplay
Halo 5: Guardians is a first-person shooter game. Players assume the role of powerful "Spartan" supersoldiers with a host of abilities, and use on a combination of guns, grenades, and melee attacks in story-based campaign and multiplayer modes. Players can sprint indefinitely, as opposed to the sprint limits in previous games in the series, though their damage-absorbing shield will not recharge in multiplayer; at top speed, the player character can slide across the ground or charge into an enemy. A thruster pack allows for a speed boost or lateral movements, and players can clamber up ledges to reach higher ground. Every weapon can be aimed while zoomed in, similar to iron sights; sustaining fire will knock players out of the zoomed view. By zooming while airborne, players briefly hover; while aloft, players can target the ground for an area-of-effect attack. The game features new weapons, as well as returning ones with tweaked mechanics.The game's campaign mode casts the player in the roles of two protagonists, the Master Chief and Jameson Locke. Each character is accompanied by a persistent fireteam of non-player character Spartans—Blue Team for Chief, and Fireteam Osiris for Locke—who are present at all times. During cooperative play, other human players assume control of these Spartans, who each have different loadouts and attributes. Players can direct computer-controlled fireteam members via the d-pad to perform actions such as picking up a weapon, getting into a vehicle, or prioritizing a selected enemy. If a Spartan takes too much damage, they enter an incapacitated state, and can be revived by another fireteam member before dying. The game's difficulty scales to compensate for the number of human players.
Xbox Live multiplayer features a variety of competitive and cooperative game modes. Established four-versus-four arena modes like deathmatch or capture the flag return. New to Halo 5 is Warzone, a 24-player game mode that pit two teams against each other. In addition to fighting the enemy team, players can earn points by capturing locations on the map or defeating computer-controlled enemies; the game ends either when one team destroys the other team's home base, or they earn 1000 points. Players earn requisition points over the course of a match, which can be used to summon weapons, vehicles or powerups into the map based on rewards the player has earned from requisition packs. These packs can be earned in-game via a progression system, or else bought with real-world currency. In ranked play, players complete a series of placement matches to determine their skill rank ratings, which can go up or down based on winning or losing games.
Halo 5 features a level editor called Forge, where players can create their own multiplayer maps. The mode has a new control scheme compared to Halo 4, and new capabilities including scripting tools that can be applied to game objects. Unlike previous first-person shooters in the Halo franchise, Halo 5 does not feature any offline multiplayer capabilities, like split-screen cooperative campaign and multiplayer modes, and has no local networking options. The game was supported via the Halo Waypoint website with player statistics tracking and additional features such as Spartan Companies, where players could band together in groups of up to 100 players and work on completing in-game challenges to unlock cosmetic rewards.
Synopsis
Setting and characters
Halo 5: Guardians takes place in the year 2558, eight months after the events of Halo 4. The game follows two fireteams of supersoldiers of the United Nations Space Command. Blue Team is led by Master Chief Petty Officer John-117 and is composed of his fellow Spartan-II supersoldiers: Linda-058, an elite sniper; Kelly-087, a scout; and Frederic-104, a hand-to-hand combat specialist. The members of Blue Team are among the last Spartan-IIs left alive. Fireteam Osiris is formed from Spartan-IVs, a newer generation of Spartans. Osiris is led by Jameson Locke, a former assassin and tracker of the Office of Naval Intelligence. The other members of Fireteam Osiris are Holly Tanaka, a combat technician, engineer, and survivor of a Covenant attack on her planet; Olympia Vale, a political liaison and signals intelligence agent who can speak many alien dialects; and Edward Buck, a veteran trooper who was a main character in Halo 3: ODST.Supporting characters include the UNSC ship Infinitys commanding officer, Captain Thomas Lasky; Spartan-IV commander Sarah Palmer; Roland, Infinitys shipboard artificial intelligence ; and Catherine Halsey, a scientist who created the SPARTAN-II program. Other returning characters include the Arbiter Thel 'Vadam, who leads the Sangheili species against a Covenant faction led by Jul 'Mdama. Cortana, Master Chief's AI companion who was presumed dead after the events of Halo 4, also returns.
Plot
Fireteam Osiris is deployed to the planet Kamchatka to retrieve Halsey amidst a battle between Jul 'Mdama's Covenant and Forerunner Prometheans. The team kills 'Mdama and retrieves Halsey, who claims to have information on a series of devastating attacks on several human worlds. Elsewhere, Master Chief leads Blue Team on a mission to secure a derelict research station; the arrival of a Covenant fleet prompts Blue Team to scuttle the station instead. Master Chief receives a cryptic message from Cortana, directing him to Meridian, a human colony world. Master Chief is ordered to return to Infinity, but he and Blue Team disobey orders and set out after Cortana.Captain Lasky declares Blue Team absent without leave; Halsey believes that Cortana's survival through the use of Forerunner technology makes her unpredictable and untrustworthy. Fireteam Osiris is sent to Meridian to bring back Blue Team. On the planet, they find the colonists under attack by Promethean forces. Following Blue Team's trail, they encounter the Warden Eternal, a Promethean serving as Cortana's enforcer. After temporarily defeating the Warden, Osiris catches up to Blue Team, ordering them to stand down. Chief bests Locke in hand-to-hand combat and Blue Team boards a Guardian, a colossal Forerunner construct built as planetary enforcers. Osiris barely escape the colony's collapse as the Guardian emerges from underground and teleports away to the Forerunner planet Genesis, where John and Cortana reunite. Cortana says that her terminal condition was cured by the same Forerunner technology that had saved her.
Osiris is deployed to the Sangheili homeworld of Sanghelios, where they plan to use the Guardian buried there to follow Blue Team. Sanghelios is embroiled in a civil war between the Arbiter's forces and the remains of 'Mdama's army; Osiris helps Arbiter assault the Covenant's last stronghold and board the Guardian before it disappears.
On Genesis, Osiris encounters the planet's caretaker, the AI 031 Exuberant Witness, who allies with them to stop Cortana. Osiris catches up to Blue Team, who reveal that Cortana is planning on using the Guardians to achieve galactic peace through forcible disarmament. Master Chief, aware of the devastation that Cortana's plan will cause, attempts to convince Cortana to stand down. She refuses and confines Blue Team in a Forerunner prison to prevent them from interfering with her plan. Osiris manages to transfer control of Genesis back to Exuberant, who frees Blue Team before Cortana leaves the planet. AIs across the galaxy begin swearing allegiance to Cortana and her plans. Cortana locates Infinity and prepares to disable it, but Lasky has the ship retreat until they can develop a way to combat Cortana. With Blue Team recovered, Osiris returns to Sanghelios to reunite the Spartans with the injured Commander Palmer, Arbiter, and Halsey.
In a post-credits scene, unlocked via completing the campaign on the Legendary difficulty, a Forerunner Halo installation powers up while Cortana hums.
Development
Before Halo 4s release in November 2012, 343 Industries creative director Josh Holmes began looking for his replacement for the next Halo title. Tim Longo joined as creative director in late 2012, with Halo 5 a few months into preproduction. General manager Bonnie Ross recalled that after Halo 4 the team spent a lot of time discussing where they wanted to take the Halo series, reflecting on feedback from fans about what they did and did not like. Longo and game leads David Berger and Chris Lee laid out the studio's vision for the next game from a creative and technical standpoint, setting key goals to focus on: utilizing the Xbox One's hardware and Microsoft's cloud infrastructure for larger campaign and multiplayer spaces, deeper player investment systems, and a 60 frames per second frame rate.Longo considered moving from 30 to 60 FPS quadrupled the amount of development work required, especially as the team also wanted the larger scale to environments. To maintain a 60 FPS frame rate, Halo 5s engine dynamically lowers the resolution at which the game is rendered during graphically intensive scenes, which are then upscaled back to the game's native resolution of 1080p. To help achieve this, 343 Industries made extensive use of Havok software. Eagerness to take advantage of the hardware sometimes came with drawbacks; the art team built fully animated cacti that responded to gunfire and blanketed the campaign maps with the succulents. Ultimately, they proved to be the largest single technical problem in the game and had to be removed. The focus on performance meant that split-screen play, which had been in all previous Halo games, was dropped.
Holmes stated that the development team wanted Halo 5s multiplayer to provide gameplay variety and support different play styles. In the game's Arena mode, 343 Industries decided to exclude a loadout system so they could encourage the concept of a level playing field that was present in earlier Halo games. The mode was inspired by older multiplayer shooters such as Quake. The Warzone game mode was originally conceived in 2012 with a small demo set up as a four-versus-four player match with AI controlled enemies defending an objective; the studio had wanted to implement such a mode with Halo 4 on the Xbox 360 but was unable to achieve their vision on the hardware.