No sooner is the retrospective Halo: The Master Chief Collection out than the future of the series is upon us. The multiplayer beta for Halo 5: Guardians has arrived: swifter, bolder, Kevlar-ier. We're lucky enough to have early access - the public version launches on the 29th - but if you don't want to wait we have all the details for you in our beta diary: new modes, new maps, new, radically different Spartan abilities and gameplay mechanics. Think of it like a belated Advent calendar, but behind every door is searing hot death by plasma grenade.

Beyond those (extensive) details, you'll find everything we know about Halo 5 overall, so carry on through, and keep checking back at this article in the months to come. We'll be updating it each and every time new Halo 5 info lands, so consider it your one-stop shop for all of your Chiefly needs.

We could talk about how the lofty intro screen recalls that operatic opening score of Halo: Combat Evolved, but that would be using-the-Covenant Carbine crazy. Let’s get straight to the gunnery. The first map we’re thrown into is Empire: an industrial tumble of platforms, vantage points and corridors. Aside from the pre-match scan of the area, there’s no time to stop and admire your surroundings.

It’s a wonderful kind of chaos, but still utterly familiar to anyone who’s played the series; bristling with fresh ideas, all promising Halo’s familiar game of rocket, paper, scissors. We’ll explore the new abilities in a bit, but right now you need to know that it immediately feels natural. As soon we discovered how the buttons have shifted - a rite of passage necessary in every new Halo - we were boosting away from grenades and scoping the map for ledges to pull off the brand-new power slam: the single most satisfying addition to the series since the whumping rocket launcher melee attack.

As different as this feels, the first match goes surprisingly well. Our attempts to ground-pound are laughably inept, but this is as it should be: it's a one-hit instakill, so it needs to be difficult. We're starting off with the Assault Rifle - which feels tighter and more lethal than ever before - and the Magnum. Blasto, God of Guns, bless the Magnum. All the shooters now have ADS (no, we're not calling it Smart Scope) but zooming with ol' Maggsy still feels sharp, poppy and delicious.

It's harder to nail those headshots, though. Enemies are faster and more mobile, so your best bet is to pick people off as they slow down to clamber over scenery. That said, there are already people doing sickeningly talented things with the Sniper Rifle - the standard power weapon on Empire. The pace of Halo 5 means that bedding down and waiting for Spartan heads to peek out is less of an option, but in the right hands it's monstrous.

The next stage we try is Truth - a remake of Midship from Halo 2. It's the same familiar doughnut of doom, but infinite sprinting alters everything. Instead of bloody bottlenecks peppered with plasma grenades, it's a frantic chase. It's harder than ever to hold an area, because you're effortlessly outflanked, thanks to Truth's warren of tunnels and back doors. Thankfully, anyone foolishly using the grav-lifts is still meat for the beast: a pleasingly recognisable throwback.

The power weapon here is the Prophets' Bane: apparently the Arbiter’s personal energy sword. All we know is that it’s too bloody bright. Seriously, it’s like carrying around the severed head of a celestial being. And, as anyone who's ever carried an incandescent glowing pate will know, this massively impairs your vision. We got around this by sprinting around in an endless loop of sword-swinging murder, taking full advantage of our now-endless stamina. It works both ways: the boost ability can keep you out of lunging range so you can chip away from afar. Ah, that magnificent Halo balance. Lovely.

There’s constant patter throughout each match, as the Spartans react to everything with in-game chit-chat. That may sound annoying, but it’s not. Instead, it’s a great way of keeping a handle on what’s happening, especially if you’re with a tight-lipped team. As well as practical stuff, such as calling out enemy positions, it adds a bit of colour when you save a teammate from nearly-death.

Some folk will find the whooping, bro-fisting camaraderie distasteful. It’s admittedly very different from the gruff stoicism of John-117, but it matches the new environment. It will never replace organised teamwork with actual human voices, but it removes the need for expositional busywork.

Areas on the maps have their own names, much like the rejigged maps from the Master Chief Collection. Again, it’s a purist’s nightmare, but there’s a practical purpose for it. At the risk of sounding like the curmudgeonly videogame relics we are (“get off my 16-bit lawn!”, etc), we had names for every location in Halo 3. Names which often made no sense, and were utterly impenetrable to outsiders; often a combination of colours, locations and varieties of cheese. No, really.

That isn’t a problem now. If there’s guy with rockets hiding in one of Halo’s inevitable blind spots, you’ll be able to effortlessly inform your teammates where he is. The flow of information is a little overwhelming at first - especially when combined with the aforementioned war-chuntering - but the pace of the game makes it essential. After a few months of this, Old Halo is likely to feel very sparse indeed.

The swiftness significantly alters the team game. Staying together is tougher unless you communicate. Aside from limited use of the jetpack, going up in Halo was previously a mix of grav lifts and cunning jumps. There’s now a real verticality to the game - press release guffspeak for your ability to climb stuff - so teams can quickly get split up. It’s also harder to hold a defensive position, but there are rich opportunities for deception and subterfuge. We were repeatedly awarded the patronising, well-done-for-trying ‘Distraction’ medal, carried over from Halo 4: we’d love to say it was intentional, but that would be a massive un-fact.

The early access period is over now, and the beta will resume on 29 December. It says loads that those few days seem like an agonising wait - much like being apart from a new lover, albeit one who’s seven feet tall and can punch trucks. For the first time in recent years, it feels like there’s much more to learn about a Halo game; that fact alone is an exciting prospect.

We dive back into the beta after a few days off. Initially, it’s disappointing. The same two maps return, and inevitable server issues slow things down to a Scorpion tank grind. Then something wonderful happens: we get two new maps - Eden and Regret - and a brand new mode, Breakout. While the new maps are essentially remixes of what we’ve seen already, there’s enough difference to make things exciting again. This is Halo, after all; a game where the gentlest geographical tweaks make a massive difference.

As well as new maps and modes, we get our first glimpse of some new weapons: the destructive Hydra, a rapid-fire rocket launcher; and a re-jigged version LightRifle from Halo 4. Suddenly, life is exciting again. The needles have fallen off our Christmas tree, everyone has gone back to work and only the toffees remain in our selection box, but none of that matters because Halo.

Let’s talk about the maps. It’s a disservice to call Eden a remix of Empire (however technically correct). The addition of a catwalk above the centre of the level makes this a substantially different beast. Power weapons are the sniper and power sword, and both feel less like game-changers than they did on the previous beta maps. Eden also has the LightRifle, which suddenly feels lethal; delicate and piercing like the Beam Rifle from Halo 3, but with a unique feel of its own.

Regret is less remarkable, but it serves as a frantic palate-cleanser after ranged combat of Eden. It’s here we get our first glimpse of the Hydra. With its ability to lock onto infantry and airburst projectiles, it sits somewhere between Reach’s grenade launcher and the Covenant Plasma Launcher. Two direct hits are enough to take a Spartan down. The map itself feels like a flatter version of Truth, with more tunnels to explore and increased opportunities for ambushing players as they sprint by. It’s not certainly bad, but do we need another version of Midship? Probably not.

Next, we come to Breakout. Before we describe what it is, you should know this: it’s absolutely bloody brilliant. You start each round with one life and reduced shield. (Technically you have regenerating health and no shield, but it’s practically the same thing.) Teams of four compete to be the first to win five rounds. It’s set in a shiny, interstellar version of Hang ‘Em High; precarious platforms overlook a graveyard of blocky cover. You can expect numerous places to hide, frequent choke points and massive scope for sneaky manoeuvring. Weapons are limited to the Magnum and the (still disgustingly overpowered) SMG, but other medium-tier weapons such as the BR are littered around the map.

Somehow, the tweaked life gauge and stern focus on teamwork make this the most Halo-y thing in the beta. The prospect of playing with three trusted, communicative friends is hugely exciting. There’s tons of scope for double (even triple) bluffing. In one match, we got locked in a skirmish for a particular area. The same thing happened again in the following round. When the opposing team hunkered down for a repeat performance in the third round, we sprinted around the back of the map and force-fed them an outflank sandwich. It was positively delicious. If the jarring pace of Slayer makes you yearn for the elegant tactical simplicity of earlier Halo, Breakout has you covered.

No sooner is the retrospective Halo: The Master Chief Collection out than the future of the series is upon us. The multiplayer beta for Halo 5: Guardians is set to land in December, and if you own the MCC, you can get access to it. That's exciting. But you know what's even more exciting? We've already played it, and can tell you exactly what you can be expecting when you enter the new world of Xbox One Spartan shooting. New modes, new maps, new, radically different Spartan abilities and gameplay mechanics... It's all here, so click on and get prepped.

Beyond those (extensive) details, you'll find everything we know about Halo 5 overall, so carry on through, and keep checking back at this article in the months to come. We'll be updating it each and every time new Halo 5 info lands, so consider it your one-stop shop for all of your Chiefly needs.

The newest Halo on Xbox One finally has a name. Halo 5: Guardians will be the next chapter in the hallowed saga of Master Chief, as announced this morning by 343 Industries. And though nothing has been shown of the actual gameplay just yet, we've got a slew of new information about the next leap forward for the Halo franchise, which is coming in 2015--though you'll get a taste of it in beta form by the end of the year .

Of course, this windfall of new details raises a ton of questions we have that, for now, remain unanswered. Looking to brush up on everything Halo 5-related? Here's everything we know, and some crucial things we don't.

Not only does that mean that you have three full weeks of Halo 5 early access multiplayer ahead, it means that you have it coming pretty damn soon, and over the Christmas holidays. It’s almost like they planned it that way.

Between today’s release of The Master Chief Collection, and the Halo 5 beta starting in December, not only does that make for a very Halo Christmas indeed, but it means that for a short period, you’ll actually (sort of) have access to the complete, numbered series, including the one that isn’t out yet, all at the same time.

343 is picking up Bungie’s community-focused lead with the Halo 5 beta, and making it an interactive experience for the majority of its running time. While the first week, from December the 29th to January the 5th, will introduce you to the new game modes and gameplay systems, weeks two and three will be thrown out to a player vote.

The shape of the beta, the modes, maps and Lord knows what else, will all be at the behest of the players. And speaking of those new gameplay systems and modes…

Literally the first thing you’ll notice about Halo 5 multiplayer is the match intros. In Slayer and Team Slayer at least, each map is now introduced with a multi-angled camera fly-by showcasing the key areas of the arena. Holding points and key skirmish areas are all shown off, but perhaps even more crucial is the tweak to the way power-weapon drops are highlighted.

So far, Halo 5 seems to be going back to the earlier games’ method of depositing map-specific power-weapons after a designated period of time, unlike Halo 4’s approach of using more randomised Ordinance Drops. Not only are power-weapon locations shown off before the match, but in-game they have a drop-timer visibly attached, which turns into an on-screen navigation blip once they land. The race for the big guns just got a bit more accessible, and probably a whole lot more frantic.

Here’s where the big changes start. Halo 5’s multiplayer picks up where Halo 4’s left off, by way of an increased focus on speed and aggression. But where the previous game’s augmented Spartan abilities were a case of choosing from an unlockable bank, Halo 5 gives everyone a full roster of brand new tools to use straight out of the box.

Everyone now has unlimited sprint, but it comes with a price. Your shield won’t recharge until you stop running, meaning that there are serious tactical decisions to be made when under fire. Tied to sprinting, all Spartans can now slide, by hitting duck while moving apace. That’s great for evading fire, but also a really powerful tool when it comes to getting into cover quickly. It’s vital in the new Breakout mode we’ve played, but more on that in a little bit. You can now mantle up onto otherwise unreachable platforms, opening up the scope for much taller maps, as well as hidden routes and alternative paths.

And there’s more. Four additional default Spartan abilities make full use of your Mjolnir armour’s jets. Tapping B with any directional input now activates a rapid side-dodge, Titanfall-style, to weave around incoming fire and set up fast, close-range flanking. Jump into the air and scope your gun - every weapon now has ADS - and you’ll hover briefly in mid-air, before floating down slowly. Great for getting the jump on unwary targets, but be wary of how exposed you’ll be left in heavy fire areas.

Even more extravagantly, you now have two separate, powered-up melee attacks, capable of scoring an instant kill in the right circumstances. Get up to full speed and hit the melee button, and you’ll use a rocket-powered dash-punch to clobber the merry hell out of anyone in front of you. Get high into the air and hold crouch, and you’ll activate a ground-based reticule with which to aim a devastating ground-pound. Charge ii for a second or two, and boom. Two-dimensional Spartan all over your boots. But while both attacks are undeniably meaty, in practice, so far at least, they don’t feel overpowered. The dash requires a bit of built-up speed to activate reliably, and the pound, just like the airborne ADS, leaves the attacker horribly exposed while winding up.

The trusty old BR has been an iconic Halo staple since the second game. It has though, gone through a few subtle tweaks and iterations over the years. How does Halo 5’s version stack up to its illustrious ancestors? Based on our experience so far, it feels like a monster.

Put it this way: For the first few blasts, we thought that 343 had reduced its burst fire to a single shot. Not so. It turns out that the traditional three-shot spray is now so fast that we’d mistaken it for only one round during the early, bamboozling festival of carnage. It’s too early to analyse the minutiae of fire delay, accuracy and stopping power, but both for the latter categories, we’d be tempted to venture ‘a lot’. Once we found its spawn spots on Halo 5’s maps (which seem to be locked in and consistent), it rapidly became our default weapon of choice. A total death-finger.

One of the fanbase’s biggest problem s with Halo 4’s changes to multiplayer was the lack of descoping. That is to say, the process of knocking out an enemy player’s zoomed view by shooting them while being targeted. There’s a strong argument for the mechanic’s importance. Without it, longer-range weapons such as the BR and sniper rifle become overpowered, and on certain maps the joy of Halo’s close-range, cat-and-mouse game dissolves.

Well descoping is back in Halo 5. It’s back, and it works. That’s about all there is to say at the moment. But, er, hey, good news, right?

The Halo 5 beta introduces a campaign-style chatter function for multiplayer, which gives you real-time updates on the battle directly from the Spartans involved, independent of the words of your living, breathing teammates. While that sounds annoying at first blush, the simulated team-talk is actually sparse enough that there's never an issue. It's also extremely helpful, giving you meaningful feedback so you can quickly figure out how to tackle tense situations. It's great at letting you know that the enemy is flanking you or that a grenade is sailing towards your head, and does so well before most human companions would even notice.

This feature helps to organize what can become a very chaotic combat scenario, but the new squad chatter should also be a great boon to the solo multiplayer challenger. Playing MP without friends always puts you at a disadvantage due to the lack of helpful team communication, but with the game now simulating that stuff, the experience should be a whole lot smoother.

There’s at least one new game mode in Halo 5’s multiplayer. We know because we’ve played it. It’s called Breakout, and it’s very much a more demanding evolution of the old SWAT mode. It’s also bloody brilliant. Two 4v4 squads fight on small, tight maps, built around focused sight-lines and sharp requirement on the use of cover. Overall wins are based on a best-of-multiple-rounds system, but there are no lives. Once you go down, you’re out until the next go-around.

That little tweak leads to some of the most intense, satisfying, and air-punchingly heroic Halo we’ve ever played, not to mention some of the most authentically strategic. Within seconds we were playing proper, old-school, tactical Halo, giving map locations nicknames, speaking in garbled, pseudo-military shorthand, communicating every move, and using the post-death spectator-cam to both guide our surviving players with strategic info and whoop like drunken sports crowds when our last man snatched a killer, underdog victory. A round can last seconds, or a final stand-off can run for agonising, nerve-shredding, blissfully tense minutes. But however it goes, Breakout is consistently a big damn hoot.

Halo 5’s XP system will be active in the beta. It’s not yet clear if progress will follow through into Halo 5 proper (our guess would be ‘no’), but some of the bonuses accrued through it will.

We know at least that there will be beta-exclusive armour sets to be had. Other stuff? At a guess, we’d say beta emblems will probably turn up too, at the very least. But either way, this is going to be the place to get all the Halo hipster equipment you need in order to be authentically elite and ‘in it before it was big’ come the game’s 2015 launch.

We’ve played three of the seven beta maps so far. All are good for different modes, and all are very different. Truth is a remake of Halo 2’s Midship, a small, two-levelled circular arena with a central raised platform and snaking, twisting paths around the outside. It’s great for free-for-all Slayer, though we’d prefer to give it a go with a shorter-range, custom weapon-set than that available at our preview day, to reduce the random factor and keep things a bit tighter.

Empire is a new map, set in a large warehouse/industrial complex, with a wide, open-air balcony at one end. Largely flat and open in the middle, with a plethora of small cover opportunities, its raised peripheral areas and small, overlooking rooms make it a great choice for medium-range Team Slayer, providing ample opportunities for open firefights and close-defensive play. And finally, there’s Crossfire, used for playing Breakout. Very different in terms of its bold, primary-coloured, geometric stylings, it’s nevertheless a classic slice of strategically-minded, asymmetric design. The archetypal Halo ‘little room’ on one side provides a fantastic choke point and opportunity for base-defence. The box-littered middle section is a minefield of ultra-tight skirmish opportunities, while the raised platforms and opposite-side bridge mix up the verticality for risk-and-reward vantage points and ground-pounds aplenty.

And now, moving onto Halo 5 in general...

You might already have figured this out, but 343 Industries, the Microsoft-owned studio behind Halo: CE Anniversary and Halo 4, is continuing to develop for the franchise with Halo 5: Guardians. With two blockbuster entries in the series under its belt, it's safe to assume that the developers at 343 know what they're doing.

It also helps to have shaped the previous entry in the franchise, which put much more emphasis on building Master Chief as a relatable character. This came to a head in the ending of Halo 4--and Halo 5: Guardians will be about Master Chief getting through his identity crisis. "He's questioning everything: His past, his purpose, what's he fighting for, why he's fighting," says 343 studio head Bonnie Ross. "This is about [Master Chief's] journey. It's about his past, and about his future".

In Halo 5's single piece of key art (or "visual IP," as 343 called it), an unfamiliar soldier was standing proudly behind the Halo 5: Guardians logo. At first, we thought that the silhouette and proportions of this Spartan looked distinctly female. Some thought it was Cortana or Sarah Palmer, but according to a by Josh Holmes, Executive Producer on Halo, that's not the case. "For everyone speculating about the mysterious Spartan in Halo 5: Guardians, he’s not Palmer (or Cortana!). He’s a NEW character. :)"

We now know that the new character is Naval Intelligence agent Jameson Locke, star of the upcoming Halo: Nightfall live-action series. He gets an in-game introduction in The Master Chief Collection's Halo 2: Anniversary, via a new opening cutscene which depicts him talking to The Arbiter years after the events of the second game. For some reason, he's hunting down the Chief. Whether as a target or as a potential ally remains to be seen.

As one of Microsoft's biggest exclusives, a new Halo game presents a huge opportunity to showcase everything that the Xbox One hardware is really capable of. To facilitate that, 343 has built an entirely new engine for Halo 5: Guardians. Graphics, audio, rendering, you name it--it's all being redone to make the most of the Xbox One architecture.

"It's not necessarily about layering on content--it's about actually changing the ecosystem that the Xbox is part of," said 343's Frank O'Connor. With its new engine, Halo 5: Guardians has been built to utilize Microsoft's latest tech in methods that could pave the way for other developers. In O'Connor's words, "Even if you never buy a Halo game on Xbox One, you're going to benefit from some of the things that we're putting on that technology."

It's one thing to say you're going to be building a next-gen engine, but it's another thing entirely to show it, and 343 hasn't done that yet. And, honestly, we haven't the slightest idea of how good it'll look, at least in terns of fidelity. We can make a decent stab at what it'll look like in terms of art design--Halo 4 was a slightly more stylized take on the shooter, and we'd expect Halo 5: Guardians to continue in that direction--but style is only part of the formula.

It's easy to assume it'll just be a fancier-looking version of Halo 4 with more particles. But there hasn't yet been an FPS built specifically to take advantage of the Xbox One's power on a new, next-gen engine, so it might end up surprising us. Just picture Ryse: Son of Rome's graphical fidelity, except with Chief blasting Prometheans with plasma rifles.

Bungie and 343 have gotten pretty creative with their wave-based modes in recent years. Halo 3: ODST and Halo: Reach both included the inventive Firefight, which did a great job of providing randomized, repeatable encounters you could play with friends. Halo 4's Spartan Ops continued that trend by adding a story and regular updates. But there hasn't been a peep as to whether or not these modes will continue in Halo 5.

If we had to guess (and, let's face it, we do), we'd say that some version of Spartan Ops will be included. The mode was a huge success before, and it'd be easy to tie it into whatever other media plans Microsoft has for the Halo franchise. Imagine if the weekly Halo video series comes with weekly missions that weave into the story--how cool would that be?

E3 brought news of , a set of games that includes Halo 1, 2, 3, 4, all playable on the Xbox One. But Microsoft also made it clear that the game will be a stepping stone into the future of Halo. Not only will the classic games tie-in to Nightfall, the original TV series hosted on Xbox One, but the November game will be followed up with the Halo 5: Guardians beta.

This continues the tradition of Microsoft attaching Halo betas to its major releases, though this time it's directly tied to another Halo game. So, if over 100 classic Halo multiplayer maps isn't enough for you, by the end of the year you'll be testing out the first maps for the first truly next-gen Halo adventure.

Note that we said "Master Chief's story." No mention of the Covenant. Because we reckon that's done. In many respects--art style, characterization and narrative in particular--Halo 4 was a transitional game; a safe, intermediary work intended to move the series on from the original trilogy and towards the real start of 343' Halo. By the end of the game the Covenant stragglers are dealt with, the immediate threat is subdued, and Master Chief is back home on Earth, ready for his next deployment. Everything is rebooted to a relative status quo, and thus, Halo 5 is free to do its own thing.

So don't expect Halo 5 to be just another continuation of the 6-games-long story so far. Expect the core Halo shooting to be wrapped up in a new narrative direction, with a new setting and a new tone. The focus on desert environments in the released promotional assets so far--rather than the usual verdant countryside and high-tech facilities--certainly implies a major geographical shift. Don't be at all surprised to see that affect the over-arching game design as well.

Remember the one from last year? A hooded figure walks through the desert and is attacked by a giant robot. A gust of wind catches the hood and reveals that the mysterious character is Master Chief, with a broken visor and a ratty robe. What led up to that event? Is he wearing anything under the robe? How did his visor break? Like, seriously, how did it break--the guy has fallen from space without taking much damage; it'd take a pretty mean hit to crack that glass.

There's a chance that, like some other Halo teasers in the past, the video was more of an acknowledgement that more Halo is coming, rather than a specific reference to an actual part of the next Halo game. Microsoft Game Studios VP Phil Spencer once called the video "a thought piece by the studio," so we'll likely have to wait a while before we know if any of that concept ends up becoming a reality.

When the new Halo was teased at E3 2013, the announced release date for Master Chief's next epic undertaking was 2014. Plans change--and with them, release dates. Halo 5: Guardians is slated for a Fall 2015 release on Xbox One.

Don't get too upset: History has shown that each of the main entries in the Halo franchise took three years to develop, so it only makes sense that Halo 5 would get the same time in the oven after 2012's Halo 4. Plus, you'd rather have a polished final product than something that got rushed out the door to hit an arbitrary release date, wouldn't you?

Halo 5's 2015 release date aligns with the debut of the Halo TV show, which famously involves one . But at the moment, it's unclear if the show and the new game will share any connection beyond occupying the same sci-fi universe.

Getting gamers to care about the interaction between a big-budget release and a TV show has historically been a tough sell (see: Defiance), so perhaps 343 will opt to keep the two mediums separate. The show is still in pre-production stages, so we're bound to find out more as it starts to take shape and fuel the Halo hype machine.

We expect that it won't be too long until more campaign information is revealed. Odds are that within a month or two we'll know some of the details surrounding the story, the characters, and more. Either way, keep your eyes peeled, and check back on this page to get the most up-to-date info on Halo 5 available.

Interested in reading more top-quality internet? Want to keep things on a Halo thread? Check our our .

No sooner is the retrospective Halo: The Master Chief Collection out than the future of the series is upon us. The multiplayer beta for Halo 5: Guardians has arrived: swifter, bolder, Kevlar-ier. We're lucky enough to have early access - the public version launches on the 29th - but if you don't want to wait we have all the details for you in our beta diary: new modes, new maps, new, radically different Spartan abilities and gameplay mechanics. Think of it like a belated Advent calendar, but behind every door is searing hot death by plasma grenade.

Beyond those (extensive) details, you'll find everything we know about Halo 5 overall, so carry on through, and keep checking back at this article in the months to come. We'll be updating it each and every time new Halo 5 info lands, so consider it your one-stop shop for all of your Chiefly needs.

We could talk about how the lofty intro screen recalls that operatic opening score of Halo: Combat Evolved, but that would be using-the-Covenant Carbine crazy. Let’s get straight to the gunnery. The first map we’re thrown into is Empire: an industrial tumble of platforms, vantage points and corridors. Aside from the pre-match scan of the area, there’s no time to stop and admire your surroundings.

It’s a wonderful kind of chaos, but still utterly familiar to anyone who’s played the series; bristling with fresh ideas, all promising Halo’s familiar game of rocket, paper, scissors. We’ll explore the new abilities in a bit, but right now you need to know that it immediately feels natural. As soon we discovered how the buttons have shifted - a rite of passage necessary in every new Halo - we were boosting away from grenades and scoping the map for ledges to pull off the brand-new power slam: the single most satisfying addition to the series since the whumping rocket launcher melee attack.

As different as this feels, the first match goes surprisingly well. Our attempts to ground-pound are laughably inept, but this is as it should be: it's a one-hit instakill, so it needs to be difficult. We're starting off with the Assault Rifle - which feels tighter and more lethal than ever before - and the Magnum. Blasto, God of Guns, bless the Magnum. All the shooters now have ADS (no, we're not calling it Smart Scope) but zooming with ol' Maggsy still feels sharp, poppy and delicious.

It's harder to nail those headshots, though. Enemies are faster and more mobile, so your best bet is to pick people off as they slow down to clamber over scenery. That said, there are already people doing sickeningly talented things with the Sniper Rifle - the standard power weapon on Empire. The pace of Halo 5 means that bedding down and waiting for Spartan heads to peek out is less of an option, but in the right hands it's monstrous.

The next stage we try is Truth - a remake of Midship from Halo 2. It's the same familiar doughnut of doom, but infinite sprinting alters everything. Instead of bloody bottlenecks peppered with plasma grenades, it's a frantic chase. It's harder than ever to hold an area, because you're effortlessly outflanked, thanks to Truth's warren of tunnels and back doors. Thankfully, anyone foolishly using the grav-lifts is still meat for the beast: a pleasingly recognisable throwback.

The power weapon here is the Prophets' Bane: apparently the Arbiter’s personal energy sword. All we know is that it’s too bloody bright. Seriously, it’s like carrying around the severed head of a celestial being. And, as anyone who's ever carried an incandescent glowing pate will know, this massively impairs your vision. We got around this by sprinting around in an endless loop of sword-swinging murder, taking full advantage of our now-endless stamina. It works both ways: the boost ability can keep you out of lunging range so you can chip away from afar. Ah, that magnificent Halo balance. Lovely.

There’s constant patter throughout each match, as the Spartans react to everything with in-game chit-chat. That may sound annoying, but it’s not. Instead, it’s a great way of keeping a handle on what’s happening, especially if you’re with a tight-lipped team. As well as practical stuff, such as calling out enemy positions, it adds a bit of colour when you save a teammate from nearly-death.

Some folk will find the whooping, bro-fisting camaraderie distasteful. It’s admittedly very different from the gruff stoicism of John-117, but it matches the new environment. It will never replace organised teamwork with actual human voices, but it removes the need for expositional busywork.

Areas on the maps have their own names, much like the rejigged maps from the Master Chief Collection. Again, it’s a purist’s nightmare, but there’s a practical purpose for it. At the risk of sounding like the curmudgeonly videogame relics we are (“get off my 16-bit lawn!”, etc), we had names for every location in Halo 3. Names which often made no sense, and were utterly impenetrable to outsiders; often a combination of colours, locations and varieties of cheese. No, really.

That isn’t a problem now. If there’s guy with rockets hiding in one of Halo’s inevitable blind spots, you’ll be able to effortlessly inform your teammates where he is. The flow of information is a little overwhelming at first - especially when combined with the aforementioned war-chuntering - but the pace of the game makes it essential. After a few months of this, Old Halo is likely to feel very sparse indeed.

The swiftness significantly alters the team game. Staying together is tougher unless you communicate. Aside from limited use of the jetpack, going up in Halo was previously a mix of grav lifts and cunning jumps. There’s now a real verticality to the game - press release guffspeak for your ability to climb stuff - so teams can quickly get split up. It’s also harder to hold a defensive position, but there are rich opportunities for deception and subterfuge. We were repeatedly awarded the patronising, well-done-for-trying ‘Distraction’ medal, carried over from Halo 4: we’d love to say it was intentional, but that would be a massive un-fact.

The early access period is over now, and the beta will resume on 29 December. It says loads that those few days seem like an agonising wait - much like being apart from a new lover, albeit one who’s seven feet tall and can punch trucks. For the first time in recent years, it feels like there’s much more to learn about a Halo game; that fact alone is an exciting prospect.

No sooner is the retrospective Halo: The Master Chief Collection out than the future of the series is upon us. The multiplayer beta for Halo 5: Guardians is set to land in December, and if you own the MCC, you can get access to it. That's exciting. But you know what's even more exciting? We've already played it, and can tell you exactly what you can be expecting when you enter the new world of Xbox One Spartan shooting. New modes, new maps, new, radically different Spartan abilities and gameplay mechanics... It's all here, so click on and get prepped.

Beyond those (extensive) details, you'll find everything we know about Halo 5 overall, so carry on through, and keep checking back at this article in the months to come. We'll be updating it each and every time new Halo 5 info lands, so consider it your one-stop shop for all of your Chiefly needs.

The newest Halo on Xbox One finally has a name. Halo 5: Guardians will be the next chapter in the hallowed saga of Master Chief, as announced this morning by 343 Industries. And though nothing has been shown of the actual gameplay just yet, we've got a slew of new information about the next leap forward for the Halo franchise, which is coming in 2015--though you'll get a taste of it in beta form by the end of the year .

Of course, this windfall of new details raises a ton of questions we have that, for now, remain unanswered. Looking to brush up on everything Halo 5-related? Here's everything we know, and some crucial things we don't.

Not only does that mean that you have three full weeks of Halo 5 early access multiplayer ahead, it means that you have it coming pretty damn soon, and over the Christmas holidays. It’s almost like they planned it that way.

Between today’s release of The Master Chief Collection, and the Halo 5 beta starting in December, not only does that make for a very Halo Christmas indeed, but it means that for a short period, you’ll actually (sort of) have access to the complete, numbered series, including the one that isn’t out yet, all at the same time.

343 is picking up Bungie’s community-focused lead with the Halo 5 beta, and making it an interactive experience for the majority of its running time. While the first week, from December the 29th to January the 5th, will introduce you to the new game modes and gameplay systems, weeks two and three will be thrown out to a player vote.

The shape of the beta, the modes, maps and Lord knows what else, will all be at the behest of the players. And speaking of those new gameplay systems and modes…

Literally the first thing you’ll notice about Halo 5 multiplayer is the match intros. In Slayer and Team Slayer at least, each map is now introduced with a multi-angled camera fly-by showcasing the key areas of the arena. Holding points and key skirmish areas are all shown off, but perhaps even more crucial is the tweak to the way power-weapon drops are highlighted.

So far, Halo 5 seems to be going back to the earlier games’ method of depositing map-specific power-weapons after a designated period of time, unlike Halo 4’s approach of using more randomised Ordinance Drops. Not only are power-weapon locations shown off before the match, but in-game they have a drop-timer visibly attached, which turns into an on-screen navigation blip once they land. The race for the big guns just got a bit more accessible, and probably a whole lot more frantic.

Here’s where the big changes start. Halo 5’s multiplayer picks up where Halo 4’s left off, by way of an increased focus on speed and aggression. But where the previous game’s augmented Spartan abilities were a case of choosing from an unlockable bank, Halo 5 gives everyone a full roster of brand new tools to use straight out of the box.

Everyone now has unlimited sprint, but it comes with a price. Your shield won’t recharge until you stop running, meaning that there are serious tactical decisions to be made when under fire. Tied to sprinting, all Spartans can now slide, by hitting duck while moving apace. That’s great for evading fire, but also a really powerful tool when it comes to getting into cover quickly. It’s vital in the new Breakout mode we’ve played, but more on that in a little bit. You can now mantle up onto otherwise unreachable platforms, opening up the scope for much taller maps, as well as hidden routes and alternative paths.

And there’s more. Four additional default Spartan abilities make full use of your Mjolnir armour’s jets. Tapping B with any directional input now activates a rapid side-dodge, Titanfall-style, to weave around incoming fire and set up fast, close-range flanking. Jump into the air and scope your gun - every weapon now has ADS - and you’ll hover briefly in mid-air, before floating down slowly. Great for getting the jump on unwary targets, but be wary of how exposed you’ll be left in heavy fire areas.

Even more extravagantly, you now have two separate, powered-up melee attacks, capable of scoring an instant kill in the right circumstances. Get up to full speed and hit the melee button, and you’ll use a rocket-powered dash-punch to clobber the merry hell out of anyone in front of you. Get high into the air and hold crouch, and you’ll activate a ground-based reticule with which to aim a devastating ground-pound. Charge ii for a second or two, and boom. Two-dimensional Spartan all over your boots. But while both attacks are undeniably meaty, in practice, so far at least, they don’t feel overpowered. The dash requires a bit of built-up speed to activate reliably, and the pound, just like the airborne ADS, leaves the attacker horribly exposed while winding up.

The trusty old BR has been an iconic Halo staple since the second game. It has though, gone through a few subtle tweaks and iterations over the years. How does Halo 5’s version stack up to its illustrious ancestors? Based on our experience so far, it feels like a monster.

Put it this way: For the first few blasts, we thought that 343 had reduced its burst fire to a single shot. Not so. It turns out that the traditional three-shot spray is now so fast that we’d mistaken it for only one round during the early, bamboozling festival of carnage. It’s too early to analyse the minutiae of fire delay, accuracy and stopping power, but both for the latter categories, we’d be tempted to venture ‘a lot’. Once we found its spawn spots on Halo 5’s maps (which seem to be locked in and consistent), it rapidly became our default weapon of choice. A total death-finger.

One of the fanbase’s biggest problem s with Halo 4’s changes to multiplayer was the lack of descoping. That is to say, the process of knocking out an enemy player’s zoomed view by shooting them while being targeted. There’s a strong argument for the mechanic’s importance. Without it, longer-range weapons such as the BR and sniper rifle become overpowered, and on certain maps the joy of Halo’s close-range, cat-and-mouse game dissolves.

Well descoping is back in Halo 5. It’s back, and it works. That’s about all there is to say at the moment. But, er, hey, good news, right?

The Halo 5 beta introduces a campaign-style chatter function for multiplayer, which gives you real-time updates on the battle directly from the Spartans involved, independent of the words of your living, breathing teammates. While that sounds annoying at first blush, the simulated team-talk is actually sparse enough that there's never an issue. It's also extremely helpful, giving you meaningful feedback so you can quickly figure out how to tackle tense situations. It's great at letting you know that the enemy is flanking you or that a grenade is sailing towards your head, and does so well before most human companions would even notice.

This feature helps to organize what can become a very chaotic combat scenario, but the new squad chatter should also be a great boon to the solo multiplayer challenger. Playing MP without friends always puts you at a disadvantage due to the lack of helpful team communication, but with the game now simulating that stuff, the experience should be a whole lot smoother.

There’s at least one new game mode in Halo 5’s multiplayer. We know because we’ve played it. It’s called Breakout, and it’s very much a more demanding evolution of the old SWAT mode. It’s also bloody brilliant. Two 4v4 squads fight on small, tight maps, built around focused sight-lines and sharp requirement on the use of cover. Overall wins are based on a best-of-multiple-rounds system, but there are no lives. Once you go down, you’re out until the next go-around.

That little tweak leads to some of the most intense, satisfying, and air-punchingly heroic Halo we’ve ever played, not to mention some of the most authentically strategic. Within seconds we were playing proper, old-school, tactical Halo, giving map locations nicknames, speaking in garbled, pseudo-military shorthand, communicating every move, and using the post-death spectator-cam to both guide our surviving players with strategic info and whoop like drunken sports crowds when our last man snatched a killer, underdog victory. A round can last seconds, or a final stand-off can run for agonising, nerve-shredding, blissfully tense minutes. But however it goes, Breakout is consistently a big damn hoot.

Halo 5’s XP system will be active in the beta. It’s not yet clear if progress will follow through into Halo 5 proper (our guess would be ‘no’), but some of the bonuses accrued through it will.

We know at least that there will be beta-exclusive armour sets to be had. Other stuff? At a guess, we’d say beta emblems will probably turn up too, at the very least. But either way, this is going to be the place to get all the Halo hipster equipment you need in order to be authentically elite and ‘in it before it was big’ come the game’s 2015 launch.

We’ve played three of the seven beta maps so far. All are good for different modes, and all are very different. Truth is a remake of Halo 2’s Midship, a small, two-levelled circular arena with a central raised platform and snaking, twisting paths around the outside. It’s great for free-for-all Slayer, though we’d prefer to give it a go with a shorter-range, custom weapon-set than that available at our preview day, to reduce the random factor and keep things a bit tighter.

Empire is a new map, set in a large warehouse/industrial complex, with a wide, open-air balcony at one end. Largely flat and open in the middle, with a plethora of small cover opportunities, its raised peripheral areas and small, overlooking rooms make it a great choice for medium-range Team Slayer, providing ample opportunities for open firefights and close-defensive play. And finally, there’s Crossfire, used for playing Breakout. Very different in terms of its bold, primary-coloured, geometric stylings, it’s nevertheless a classic slice of strategically-minded, asymmetric design. The archetypal Halo ‘little room’ on one side provides a fantastic choke point and opportunity for base-defence. The box-littered middle section is a minefield of ultra-tight skirmish opportunities, while the raised platforms and opposite-side bridge mix up the verticality for risk-and-reward vantage points and ground-pounds aplenty.

And now, moving onto Halo 5 in general...

You might already have figured this out, but 343 Industries, the Microsoft-owned studio behind Halo: CE Anniversary and Halo 4, is continuing to develop for the franchise with Halo 5: Guardians. With two blockbuster entries in the series under its belt, it's safe to assume that the developers at 343 know what they're doing.

It also helps to have shaped the previous entry in the franchise, which put much more emphasis on building Master Chief as a relatable character. This came to a head in the ending of Halo 4--and Halo 5: Guardians will be about Master Chief getting through his identity crisis. "He's questioning everything: His past, his purpose, what's he fighting for, why he's fighting," says 343 studio head Bonnie Ross. "This is about [Master Chief's] journey. It's about his past, and about his future".

In Halo 5's single piece of key art (or "visual IP," as 343 called it), an unfamiliar soldier was standing proudly behind the Halo 5: Guardians logo. At first, we thought that the silhouette and proportions of this Spartan looked distinctly female. Some thought it was Cortana or Sarah Palmer, but according to a by Josh Holmes, Executive Producer on Halo, that's not the case. "For everyone speculating about the mysterious Spartan in Halo 5: Guardians, he’s not Palmer (or Cortana!). He’s a NEW character. :)"

We now know that the new character is Naval Intelligence agent Jameson Locke, star of the upcoming Halo: Nightfall live-action series. He gets an in-game introduction in The Master Chief Collection's Halo 2: Anniversary, via a new opening cutscene which depicts him talking to The Arbiter years after the events of the second game. For some reason, he's hunting down the Chief. Whether as a target or as a potential ally remains to be seen.

As one of Microsoft's biggest exclusives, a new Halo game presents a huge opportunity to showcase everything that the Xbox One hardware is really capable of. To facilitate that, 343 has built an entirely new engine for Halo 5: Guardians. Graphics, audio, rendering, you name it--it's all being redone to make the most of the Xbox One architecture.

"It's not necessarily about layering on content--it's about actually changing the ecosystem that the Xbox is part of," said 343's Frank O'Connor. With its new engine, Halo 5: Guardians has been built to utilize Microsoft's latest tech in methods that could pave the way for other developers. In O'Connor's words, "Even if you never buy a Halo game on Xbox One, you're going to benefit from some of the things that we're putting on that technology."

It's one thing to say you're going to be building a next-gen engine, but it's another thing entirely to show it, and 343 hasn't done that yet. And, honestly, we haven't the slightest idea of how good it'll look, at least in terns of fidelity. We can make a decent stab at what it'll look like in terms of art design--Halo 4 was a slightly more stylized take on the shooter, and we'd expect Halo 5: Guardians to continue in that direction--but style is only part of the formula.

It's easy to assume it'll just be a fancier-looking version of Halo 4 with more particles. But there hasn't yet been an FPS built specifically to take advantage of the Xbox One's power on a new, next-gen engine, so it might end up surprising us. Just picture Ryse: Son of Rome's graphical fidelity, except with Chief blasting Prometheans with plasma rifles.

Bungie and 343 have gotten pretty creative with their wave-based modes in recent years. Halo 3: ODST and Halo: Reach both included the inventive Firefight, which did a great job of providing randomized, repeatable encounters you could play with friends. Halo 4's Spartan Ops continued that trend by adding a story and regular updates. But there hasn't been a peep as to whether or not these modes will continue in Halo 5.

If we had to guess (and, let's face it, we do), we'd say that some version of Spartan Ops will be included. The mode was a huge success before, and it'd be easy to tie it into whatever other media plans Microsoft has for the Halo franchise. Imagine if the weekly Halo video series comes with weekly missions that weave into the story--how cool would that be?

E3 brought news of , a set of games that includes Halo 1, 2, 3, 4, all playable on the Xbox One. But Microsoft also made it clear that the game will be a stepping stone into the future of Halo. Not only will the classic games tie-in to Nightfall, the original TV series hosted on Xbox One, but the November game will be followed up with the Halo 5: Guardians beta.

This continues the tradition of Microsoft attaching Halo betas to its major releases, though this time it's directly tied to another Halo game. So, if over 100 classic Halo multiplayer maps isn't enough for you, by the end of the year you'll be testing out the first maps for the first truly next-gen Halo adventure.

Note that we said "Master Chief's story." No mention of the Covenant. Because we reckon that's done. In many respects--art style, characterization and narrative in particular--Halo 4 was a transitional game; a safe, intermediary work intended to move the series on from the original trilogy and towards the real start of 343' Halo. By the end of the game the Covenant stragglers are dealt with, the immediate threat is subdued, and Master Chief is back home on Earth, ready for his next deployment. Everything is rebooted to a relative status quo, and thus, Halo 5 is free to do its own thing.

So don't expect Halo 5 to be just another continuation of the 6-games-long story so far. Expect the core Halo shooting to be wrapped up in a new narrative direction, with a new setting and a new tone. The focus on desert environments in the released promotional assets so far--rather than the usual verdant countryside and high-tech facilities--certainly implies a major geographical shift. Don't be at all surprised to see that affect the over-arching game design as well.

Remember the one from last year? A hooded figure walks through the desert and is attacked by a giant robot. A gust of wind catches the hood and reveals that the mysterious character is Master Chief, with a broken visor and a ratty robe. What led up to that event? Is he wearing anything under the robe? How did his visor break? Like, seriously, how did it break--the guy has fallen from space without taking much damage; it'd take a pretty mean hit to crack that glass.

There's a chance that, like some other Halo teasers in the past, the video was more of an acknowledgement that more Halo is coming, rather than a specific reference to an actual part of the next Halo game. Microsoft Game Studios VP Phil Spencer once called the video "a thought piece by the studio," so we'll likely have to wait a while before we know if any of that concept ends up becoming a reality.

When the new Halo was teased at E3 2013, the announced release date for Master Chief's next epic undertaking was 2014. Plans change--and with them, release dates. Halo 5: Guardians is slated for a Fall 2015 release on Xbox One.

Don't get too upset: History has shown that each of the main entries in the Halo franchise took three years to develop, so it only makes sense that Halo 5 would get the same time in the oven after 2012's Halo 4. Plus, you'd rather have a polished final product than something that got rushed out the door to hit an arbitrary release date, wouldn't you?

Halo 5's 2015 release date aligns with the debut of the Halo TV show, which famously involves one . But at the moment, it's unclear if the show and the new game will share any connection beyond occupying the same sci-fi universe.

Getting gamers to care about the interaction between a big-budget release and a TV show has historically been a tough sell (see: Defiance), so perhaps 343 will opt to keep the two mediums separate. The show is still in pre-production stages, so we're bound to find out more as it starts to take shape and fuel the Halo hype machine.

We expect that it won't be too long until more campaign information is revealed. Odds are that within a month or two we'll know some of the details surrounding the story, the characters, and more. Either way, keep your eyes peeled, and check back on this page to get the most up-to-date info on Halo 5 available.

Interested in reading more top-quality internet? Want to keep things on a Halo thread? Check our our .

No sooner is the retrospective Halo: The Master Chief Collection out than the future of the series is upon us. The multiplayer beta for Halo 5: Guardians has arrived: swifter, bolder, Kevlar-ier. We're lucky enough to have early access - the public version launches on the 29th - but if you don't want to wait we have all the details for you in our beta diary: new modes, new maps, new, radically different Spartan abilities and gameplay mechanics. Think of it like a belated Advent calendar, but behind every door is searing hot death by plasma grenade.

Beyond those (extensive) details, you'll find everything we know about Halo 5 overall, so carry on through, and keep checking back at this article in the months to come. We'll be updating it each and every time new Halo 5 info lands, so consider it your one-stop shop for all of your Chiefly needs.

We could talk about how the lofty intro screen recalls that operatic opening score of Halo: Combat Evolved, but that would be using-the-Covenant Carbine crazy. Let’s get straight to the gunnery. The first map we’re thrown into is Empire: an industrial tumble of platforms, vantage points and corridors. Aside from the pre-match scan of the area, there’s no time to stop and admire your surroundings.

It’s a wonderful kind of chaos, but still utterly familiar to anyone who’s played the series; bristling with fresh ideas, all promising Halo’s familiar game of rocket, paper, scissors. We’ll explore the new abilities in a bit, but right now you need to know that it immediately feels natural. As soon we discovered how the buttons have shifted - a rite of passage necessary in every new Halo - we were boosting away from grenades and scoping the map for ledges to pull off the brand-new power slam: the single most satisfying addition to the series since the whumping rocket launcher melee attack.

As different as this feels, the first match goes surprisingly well. Our attempts to ground-pound are laughably inept, but this is as it should be: it's a one-hit instakill, so it needs to be difficult. We're starting off with the Assault Rifle - which feels tighter and more lethal than ever before - and the Magnum. Blasto, God of Guns, bless the Magnum. All the shooters now have ADS (no, we're not calling it Smart Scope) but zooming with ol' Maggsy still feels sharp, poppy and delicious.

It's harder to nail those headshots, though. Enemies are faster and more mobile, so your best bet is to pick people off as they slow down to clamber over scenery. That said, there are already people doing sickeningly talented things with the Sniper Rifle - the standard power weapon on Empire. The pace of Halo 5 means that bedding down and waiting for Spartan heads to peek out is less of an option, but in the right hands it's monstrous.

The next stage we try is Truth - a remake of Midship from Halo 2. It's the same familiar doughnut of doom, but infinite sprinting alters everything. Instead of bloody bottlenecks peppered with plasma grenades, it's a frantic chase. It's harder than ever to hold an area, because you're effortlessly outflanked, thanks to Truth's warren of tunnels and back doors. Thankfully, anyone foolishly using the grav-lifts is still meat for the beast: a pleasingly recognisable throwback.

The power weapon here is the Prophets' Bane: apparently the Arbiter’s personal energy sword. All we know is that it’s too bloody bright. Seriously, it’s like carrying around the severed head of a celestial being. And, as anyone who's ever carried an incandescent glowing pate will know, this massively impairs your vision. We got around this by sprinting around in an endless loop of sword-swinging murder, taking full advantage of our now-endless stamina. It works both ways: the boost ability can keep you out of lunging range so you can chip away from afar. Ah, that magnificent Halo balance. Lovely.

No sooner is the retrospective Halo: The Master Chief Collection out than the future of the series is upon us. The multiplayer beta for Halo 5: Guardians is set to land in December, and if you own the MCC, you can get access to it. That's exciting. But you know what's even more exciting? We've already played it, and can tell you exactly what you can be expecting when you enter the new world of Xbox One Spartan shooting. New modes, new maps, new, radically different Spartan abilities and gameplay mechanics... It's all here, so click on and get prepped.

Beyond those (extensive) details, you'll find everything we know about Halo 5 overall, so carry on through, and keep checking back at this article in the months to come. We'll be updating it each and every time new Halo 5 info lands, so consider it your one-stop shop for all of your Chiefly needs.

The newest Halo on Xbox One finally has a name. Halo 5: Guardians will be the next chapter in the hallowed saga of Master Chief, as announced this morning by 343 Industries. And though nothing has been shown of the actual gameplay just yet, we've got a slew of new information about the next leap forward for the Halo franchise, which is coming in 2015--though you'll get a taste of it in beta form by the end of the year .

Of course, this windfall of new details raises a ton of questions we have that, for now, remain unanswered. Looking to brush up on everything Halo 5-related? Here's everything we know, and some crucial things we don't.

Not only does that mean that you have three full weeks of Halo 5 early access multiplayer ahead, it means that you have it coming pretty damn soon, and over the Christmas holidays. It’s almost like they planned it that way.

Between today’s release of The Master Chief Collection, and the Halo 5 beta starting in December, not only does that make for a very Halo Christmas indeed, but it means that for a short period, you’ll actually (sort of) have access to the complete, numbered series, including the one that isn’t out yet, all at the same time.

343 is picking up Bungie’s community-focused lead with the Halo 5 beta, and making it an interactive experience for the majority of its running time. While the first week, from December the 29th to January the 5th, will introduce you to the new game modes and gameplay systems, weeks two and three will be thrown out to a player vote.

The shape of the beta, the modes, maps and Lord knows what else, will all be at the behest of the players. And speaking of those new gameplay systems and modes…

Literally the first thing you’ll notice about Halo 5 multiplayer is the match intros. In Slayer and Team Slayer at least, each map is now introduced with a multi-angled camera fly-by showcasing the key areas of the arena. Holding points and key skirmish areas are all shown off, but perhaps even more crucial is the tweak to the way power-weapon drops are highlighted.

So far, Halo 5 seems to be going back to the earlier games’ method of depositing map-specific power-weapons after a designated period of time, unlike Halo 4’s approach of using more randomised Ordinance Drops. Not only are power-weapon locations shown off before the match, but in-game they have a drop-timer visibly attached, which turns into an on-screen navigation blip once they land. The race for the big guns just got a bit more accessible, and probably a whole lot more frantic.

Here’s where the big changes start. Halo 5’s multiplayer picks up where Halo 4’s left off, by way of an increased focus on speed and aggression. But where the previous game’s augmented Spartan abilities were a case of choosing from an unlockable bank, Halo 5 gives everyone a full roster of brand new tools to use straight out of the box.

Everyone now has unlimited sprint, but it comes with a price. Your shield won’t recharge until you stop running, meaning that there are serious tactical decisions to be made when under fire. Tied to sprinting, all Spartans can now slide, by hitting duck while moving apace. That’s great for evading fire, but also a really powerful tool when it comes to getting into cover quickly. It’s vital in the new Breakout mode we’ve played, but more on that in a little bit. You can now mantle up onto otherwise unreachable platforms, opening up the scope for much taller maps, as well as hidden routes and alternative paths.

And there’s more. Four additional default Spartan abilities make full use of your Mjolnir armour’s jets. Tapping B with any directional input now activates a rapid side-dodge, Titanfall-style, to weave around incoming fire and set up fast, close-range flanking. Jump into the air and scope your gun - every weapon now has ADS - and you’ll hover briefly in mid-air, before floating down slowly. Great for getting the jump on unwary targets, but be wary of how exposed you’ll be left in heavy fire areas.

Even more extravagantly, you now have two separate, powered-up melee attacks, capable of scoring an instant kill in the right circumstances. Get up to full speed and hit the melee button, and you’ll use a rocket-powered dash-punch to clobber the merry hell out of anyone in front of you. Get high into the air and hold crouch, and you’ll activate a ground-based reticule with which to aim a devastating ground-pound. Charge ii for a second or two, and boom. Two-dimensional Spartan all over your boots. But while both attacks are undeniably meaty, in practice, so far at least, they don’t feel overpowered. The dash requires a bit of built-up speed to activate reliably, and the pound, just like the airborne ADS, leaves the attacker horribly exposed while winding up.

The trusty old BR has been an iconic Halo staple since the second game. It has though, gone through a few subtle tweaks and iterations over the years. How does Halo 5’s version stack up to its illustrious ancestors? Based on our experience so far, it feels like a monster.

Put it this way: For the first few blasts, we thought that 343 had reduced its burst fire to a single shot. Not so. It turns out that the traditional three-shot spray is now so fast that we’d mistaken it for only one round during the early, bamboozling festival of carnage. It’s too early to analyse the minutiae of fire delay, accuracy and stopping power, but both for the latter categories, we’d be tempted to venture ‘a lot’. Once we found its spawn spots on Halo 5’s maps (which seem to be locked in and consistent), it rapidly became our default weapon of choice. A total death-finger.

One of the fanbase’s biggest problem s with Halo 4’s changes to multiplayer was the lack of descoping. That is to say, the process of knocking out an enemy player’s zoomed view by shooting them while being targeted. There’s a strong argument for the mechanic’s importance. Without it, longer-range weapons such as the BR and sniper rifle become overpowered, and on certain maps the joy of Halo’s close-range, cat-and-mouse game dissolves.

Well descoping is back in Halo 5. It’s back, and it works. That’s about all there is to say at the moment. But, er, hey, good news, right?

The Halo 5 beta introduces a campaign-style chatter function for multiplayer, which gives you real-time updates on the battle directly from the Spartans involved, independent of the words of your living, breathing teammates. While that sounds annoying at first blush, the simulated team-talk is actually sparse enough that there's never an issue. It's also extremely helpful, giving you meaningful feedback so you can quickly figure out how to tackle tense situations. It's great at letting you know that the enemy is flanking you or that a grenade is sailing towards your head, and does so well before most human companions would even notice.

This feature helps to organize what can become a very chaotic combat scenario, but the new squad chatter should also be a great boon to the solo multiplayer challenger. Playing MP without friends always puts you at a disadvantage due to the lack of helpful team communication, but with the game now simulating that stuff, the experience should be a whole lot smoother.

There’s at least one new game mode in Halo 5’s multiplayer. We know because we’ve played it. It’s called Breakout, and it’s very much a more demanding evolution of the old SWAT mode. It’s also bloody brilliant. Two 4v4 squads fight on small, tight maps, built around focused sight-lines and sharp requirement on the use of cover. Overall wins are based on a best-of-multiple-rounds system, but there are no lives. Once you go down, you’re out until the next go-around.

That little tweak leads to some of the most intense, satisfying, and air-punchingly heroic Halo we’ve ever played, not to mention some of the most authentically strategic. Within seconds we were playing proper, old-school, tactical Halo, giving map locations nicknames, speaking in garbled, pseudo-military shorthand, communicating every move, and using the post-death spectator-cam to both guide our surviving players with strategic info and whoop like drunken sports crowds when our last man snatched a killer, underdog victory. A round can last seconds, or a final stand-off can run for agonising, nerve-shredding, blissfully tense minutes. But however it goes, Breakout is consistently a big damn hoot.

Halo 5’s XP system will be active in the beta. It’s not yet clear if progress will follow through into Halo 5 proper (our guess would be ‘no’), but some of the bonuses accrued through it will.

We know at least that there will be beta-exclusive armour sets to be had. Other stuff? At a guess, we’d say beta emblems will probably turn up too, at the very least. But either way, this is going to be the place to get all the Halo hipster equipment you need in order to be authentically elite and ‘in it before it was big’ come the game’s 2015 launch.

We’ve played three of the seven beta maps so far. All are good for different modes, and all are very different. Truth is a remake of Halo 2’s Midship, a small, two-levelled circular arena with a central raised platform and snaking, twisting paths around the outside. It’s great for free-for-all Slayer, though we’d prefer to give it a go with a shorter-range, custom weapon-set than that available at our preview day, to reduce the random factor and keep things a bit tighter.

Empire is a new map, set in a large warehouse/industrial complex, with a wide, open-air balcony at one end. Largely flat and open in the middle, with a plethora of small cover opportunities, its raised peripheral areas and small, overlooking rooms make it a great choice for medium-range Team Slayer, providing ample opportunities for open firefights and close-defensive play. And finally, there’s Crossfire, used for playing Breakout. Very different in terms of its bold, primary-coloured, geometric stylings, it’s nevertheless a classic slice of strategically-minded, asymmetric design. The archetypal Halo ‘little room’ on one side provides a fantastic choke point and opportunity for base-defence. The box-littered middle section is a minefield of ultra-tight skirmish opportunities, while the raised platforms and opposite-side bridge mix up the verticality for risk-and-reward vantage points and ground-pounds aplenty.

And now, moving onto Halo 5 in general...

You might already have figured this out, but 343 Industries, the Microsoft-owned studio behind Halo: CE Anniversary and Halo 4, is continuing to develop for the franchise with Halo 5: Guardians. With two blockbuster entries in the series under its belt, it's safe to assume that the developers at 343 know what they're doing.

It also helps to have shaped the previous entry in the franchise, which put much more emphasis on building Master Chief as a relatable character. This came to a head in the ending of Halo 4--and Halo 5: Guardians will be about Master Chief getting through his identity crisis. "He's questioning everything: His past, his purpose, what's he fighting for, why he's fighting," says 343 studio head Bonnie Ross. "This is about [Master Chief's] journey. It's about his past, and about his future".

In Halo 5's single piece of key art (or "visual IP," as 343 called it), an unfamiliar soldier was standing proudly behind the Halo 5: Guardians logo. At first, we thought that the silhouette and proportions of this Spartan looked distinctly female. Some thought it was Cortana or Sarah Palmer, but according to a by Josh Holmes, Executive Producer on Halo, that's not the case. "For everyone speculating about the mysterious Spartan in Halo 5: Guardians, he’s not Palmer (or Cortana!). He’s a NEW character. :)"

We now know that the new character is Naval Intelligence agent Jameson Locke, star of the upcoming Halo: Nightfall live-action series. He gets an in-game introduction in The Master Chief Collection's Halo 2: Anniversary, via a new opening cutscene which depicts him talking to The Arbiter years after the events of the second game. For some reason, he's hunting down the Chief. Whether as a target or as a potential ally remains to be seen.

As one of Microsoft's biggest exclusives, a new Halo game presents a huge opportunity to showcase everything that the Xbox One hardware is really capable of. To facilitate that, 343 has built an entirely new engine for Halo 5: Guardians. Graphics, audio, rendering, you name it--it's all being redone to make the most of the Xbox One architecture.

"It's not necessarily about layering on content--it's about actually changing the ecosystem that the Xbox is part of," said 343's Frank O'Connor. With its new engine, Halo 5: Guardians has been built to utilize Microsoft's latest tech in methods that could pave the way for other developers. In O'Connor's words, "Even if you never buy a Halo game on Xbox One, you're going to benefit from some of the things that we're putting on that technology."

It's one thing to say you're going to be building a next-gen engine, but it's another thing entirely to show it, and 343 hasn't done that yet. And, honestly, we haven't the slightest idea of how good it'll look, at least in terns of fidelity. We can make a decent stab at what it'll look like in terms of art design--Halo 4 was a slightly more stylized take on the shooter, and we'd expect Halo 5: Guardians to continue in that direction--but style is only part of the formula.

It's easy to assume it'll just be a fancier-looking version of Halo 4 with more particles. But there hasn't yet been an FPS built specifically to take advantage of the Xbox One's power on a new, next-gen engine, so it might end up surprising us. Just picture Ryse: Son of Rome's graphical fidelity, except with Chief blasting Prometheans with plasma rifles.

Bungie and 343 have gotten pretty creative with their wave-based modes in recent years. Halo 3: ODST and Halo: Reach both included the inventive Firefight, which did a great job of providing randomized, repeatable encounters you could play with friends. Halo 4's Spartan Ops continued that trend by adding a story and regular updates. But there hasn't been a peep as to whether or not these modes will continue in Halo 5.

If we had to guess (and, let's face it, we do), we'd say that some version of Spartan Ops will be included. The mode was a huge success before, and it'd be easy to tie it into whatever other media plans Microsoft has for the Halo franchise. Imagine if the weekly Halo video series comes with weekly missions that weave into the story--how cool would that be?

E3 brought news of , a set of games that includes Halo 1, 2, 3, 4, all playable on the Xbox One. But Microsoft also made it clear that the game will be a stepping stone into the future of Halo. Not only will the classic games tie-in to Nightfall, the original TV series hosted on Xbox One, but the November game will be followed up with the Halo 5: Guardians beta.

This continues the tradition of Microsoft attaching Halo betas to its major releases, though this time it's directly tied to another Halo game. So, if over 100 classic Halo multiplayer maps isn't enough for you, by the end of the year you'll be testing out the first maps for the first truly next-gen Halo adventure.

Note that we said "Master Chief's story." No mention of the Covenant. Because we reckon that's done. In many respects--art style, characterization and narrative in particular--Halo 4 was a transitional game; a safe, intermediary work intended to move the series on from the original trilogy and towards the real start of 343' Halo. By the end of the game the Covenant stragglers are dealt with, the immediate threat is subdued, and Master Chief is back home on Earth, ready for his next deployment. Everything is rebooted to a relative status quo, and thus, Halo 5 is free to do its own thing.

So don't expect Halo 5 to be just another continuation of the 6-games-long story so far. Expect the core Halo shooting to be wrapped up in a new narrative direction, with a new setting and a new tone. The focus on desert environments in the released promotional assets so far--rather than the usual verdant countryside and high-tech facilities--certainly implies a major geographical shift. Don't be at all surprised to see that affect the over-arching game design as well.

Remember the one from last year? A hooded figure walks through the desert and is attacked by a giant robot. A gust of wind catches the hood and reveals that the mysterious character is Master Chief, with a broken visor and a ratty robe. What led up to that event? Is he wearing anything under the robe? How did his visor break? Like, seriously, how did it break--the guy has fallen from space without taking much damage; it'd take a pretty mean hit to crack that glass.

There's a chance that, like some other Halo teasers in the past, the video was more of an acknowledgement that more Halo is coming, rather than a specific reference to an actual part of the next Halo game. Microsoft Game Studios VP Phil Spencer once called the video "a thought piece by the studio," so we'll likely have to wait a while before we know if any of that concept ends up becoming a reality.

When the new Halo was teased at E3 2013, the announced release date for Master Chief's next epic undertaking was 2014. Plans change--and with them, release dates. Halo 5: Guardians is slated for a Fall 2015 release on Xbox One.

Don't get too upset: History has shown that each of the main entries in the Halo franchise took three years to develop, so it only makes sense that Halo 5 would get the same time in the oven after 2012's Halo 4. Plus, you'd rather have a polished final product than something that got rushed out the door to hit an arbitrary release date, wouldn't you?

Halo 5's 2015 release date aligns with the debut of the Halo TV show, which famously involves one . But at the moment, it's unclear if the show and the new game will share any connection beyond occupying the same sci-fi universe.

Getting gamers to care about the interaction between a big-budget release and a TV show has historically been a tough sell (see: Defiance), so perhaps 343 will opt to keep the two mediums separate. The show is still in pre-production stages, so we're bound to find out more as it starts to take shape and fuel the Halo hype machine.

We expect that it won't be too long until more campaign information is revealed. Odds are that within a month or two we'll know some of the details surrounding the story, the characters, and more. Either way, keep your eyes peeled, and check back on this page to get the most up-to-date info on Halo 5 available.

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