It’s the same team that built the services for Halo 4. We have an in-house services team that’s been focused on Halo 5 for the past three years, building the services at the core of the experience. Holmes: Scale is something we think about all the time. Is there anything in the design that you thought about and said, “With tens of millions of people playing this, maybe we shouldn’t take the risk of doing this right away?” Just to ensure that the game scales well. GamesBeat: Day one is always a nail-biter for the people who run servers and things like that. I hope they come away pleasantly surprised. We think it’s fitting for Halo as we move to Xbox One, to make this big leap in the way we tell stories and let people experience the universe. It’s a different approach to storytelling in Halo, but we’re excited about it. I hope they enjoy the journey we take them on. GamesBeat: What sort of feeling do you hope people will get when they’re done with the campaign? Players have a whole new suite of abilities that they can learn and put to good use. We’ve tried to stay true to the core of what Halo is as an experience, tried to continue to expand the universe and the story.

Holmes: We definitely have new skills to master. It’s not going to be the same old multiplayer. But there are lots of new things for them to master here. You have at least four major iterations here. GamesBeat: That seems to to why Halo 5 is different. You can do some things once you start to master those skills that really set you apart. I had him dead to rights, but he managed to jump up and thrust over my head and take me out. Just simple things like the thruster ability-I was just playing Quinn. They can chain together to produce some pretty spectacular results. They’re designed to work with all of our maps. Holmes: In multiplayer it makes a big difference, mastering the different abilities. GamesBeat: If you invest the time to learn those and get good at them, is that going to separate you from players who don’t? The hope is that knowledge then transfers over to multiplayer and people can put the abilities to use in that space. From there, it’s up to players whether they want to keep using them and which ones they take advantage of. Holmes: We have tutorial moments early in the campaign at specific points where we teach the new abilities.

Do you have ways of introducing them so people learn them and use them throughout the campaign? GamesBeat: Some of the more complex new abilities can be easier to forget. We can all share those stories with each other, which I think is really powerful. Even for players who only play the campaign once, too, it lets us all have our own story in how we approach each encounter. There are plenty of places you can discover and clamber up to or smash through. All the spaces throughout our campaign have been built around the new suite of Spartan abilities, all the new mobility options. That’s been one of the design pillars for campaign from the beginning, trying to give players more freedom and flexibility in how they approach the combat encounters and how they navigate the space. GamesBeat: Going back to single-player, I saw that you could take a lot of different paths to get through each level. Three or four friends will get together and say, “Let’s take out this boss” or “Let’s push on that base.” That’s more reflective of what I believe we’ll see when the game goes live. But you can coordinate well between three or four players at a time. The team that wins, invariably, is the one with the best communication and collaboration.Ĭoordinating between 12 players is really tough. Both teams are pushing really hard to win, playing very competitively.

We do play tests at the studio that we call our “try hard” tests. GamesBeat: Coordination seems to matter a lot.

Josh holmes halo 5 split screen