Game developer 343 Industries has revealed on Monday some important details about its popular video game, "Halo 5: Guardians." In a Gamespot interview, design director Kevin Franklin highlighted some salient features of the soon-to-be-launched "Halo: The Master Chief Collection."
It can be recalled that the game was announced in 2013, and the company has exerted diligent efforts for the game to be bug-free at launch. The title has undergone several beta tests to ensure its quality.
"Our biggest thing is that '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. That's given us a huge advantage," Franklin told Gamespot.
"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. Lastly, we have a lot of base skill testing we're doing with thousands of players almost every weekend before launch," he added.
Franklin also hinted that "Halo 5: Guardians" will be viable for eSports in the near future, saying, "It's definitely a goal for us. We want it to be like 'Halo 2,' 'Halo 3,' really show off the legacy of Halo within Arena. We really had to start that from the ground up. We want to say hey, we want to be an esport."
In terms of the game's DLC, Franklin explained why the company is giving free DLC maps to all the players. He said: "There's two reasons we're doing this. One, we decided from the get-go that we wanted to make a very big investment in our players. We didn't just want to release a game and hope it worked. We wanted to say okay, this is an investment in our players."
Franklin also explained how microtransactions in the game work. He said that microtransactions were integrated in the game to make it "balanced."
"The biggest thing for us the moment we started even talking about this system was that the game has to be balanced. At the end of the day, it's a multiplayer game. It's not a spend-more-to-win game. We wanted to make sure that if you spend a whole ton of money, and you thought you could get five scorpions just because you spent more money, it's not going to work. You're still going to have to earn the right to call these scorpions into the battlefield," he said.
Meanwhile, Gear Nuke reports that early copies of the game has been leaked to some players. A cover photo of the game has been posted on a social media site and reveals that the game requires 60 GB in Xbox One.
"Halo 5: Guardians" will be released on Oct. 27.
