For avid players of the popular first-person shooter game, "Halo," the long wait is almost over. Already three years in the making, "Halo 5: Guardians" will finally be released on Oct. 27, a mere 16 days away. On its official blog dated Oct. 7, the developers at 343 Industries shared their excitement.
"Halo games have always been about epic scale, and 'Halo 5: Guardians' is no exception," the blog post reads. "From our multi-character campaign to the robust suite of multiplayer experiences included with 'Halo 5: Guardians,' this game is packed to the gills with loads of exciting content."
Design director Kevin Franklin told Gamespot that it's all systems go come Oct. 27. "Halo 5 is built from the ground up for Xbox One. All the technology is really lined up. There's only one network layer, we're not trying to build three to four different games in one," he said. "We did our beta almost a year ago now, that gave us a whole bunch of time to stress test our servers and make sure everything was running, and work through some problems."
An exciting feature for gamers who will purchase the upcoming game is its free DLCs for one year. According to Franklin, this is because they want to invest in their players. "We didn't just want to release a game and hope it worked," he said. "We're going at it big, we're giving them dedicated servers, so it really felt natural, when it came to the DLC question, to put all of our players in one place."
"The benefit of this is it's going to give us better match-making, because there's less buckets people have to filter through, everybody has access to the same content, it's going to give us a lot more focus on when we want to start adding things," he added.
With this ambitious project, Franklin said that the end goal would be to attract more players, even those who have never played "Halo" before. "We want to get Arena players into Warzone as well. We really feel like it's a great place for players to live a Halo fantasy of having a massive, massive, Halo battle," the design director said.
Because of this multiplayer feature, "Halo 5" will have a content update prior to the launch. The makers of the game remind players to set the power setting of their Xbox One to "Instant On" so the update can be automatically downloaded and ready by Oct. 27.
Gamemakers promise that the launch is only the beginning. "Our dedicated live team will be focused on supporting the game with monthly releases of new content and experiences," the blog post stated.
"Halo 5: Guardians" is exclusively for Xbox One users.
