Halo 5: The sky's the limit

Games Halo 5: Guardians
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A relatively decent amount of people were disappointed by Halo 4, from what I can observe. Many people still enjoyed it, but there are still many people that wanted more from it. I can count myself as one of the people that were disappointed, but I think my expectations were too high for 343.

Only a fair way through development, did they actually have enough employees to make an impact, before that the team was pretty small. I think it’s amazing they even got the game finished. Not to mention the fact all of these people never even worked together before, in a newly formed company. And I wouldn’t be surprised if it takes even longer for everyone to get integrated with each other.

To make matters worse, they inherited a long running AAA franchise which a majority of them never worked on before, on an almost decade old piece of hardware with only 500mb of ram! I could only imagine the things that had to be cut on the sole fact the hardware had such limited memory. I consider Halo 4 a learning experience for 343.

Now, they’ve already been together for over 4 years, have released 2 games, and their next game (which is most likely Halo 5) is being released on brand new hardware, with a large already established team (which has gained enough Halo game development experience). With the Xbox one, they have 8gb of DDR3 ram to play with; that’s over 16 times more than the 360. Not to mention the brand new CPU and graphics card. I think it’s safe to say: The sky is the limit now. They are no longer restricted by old hardware, and now the only limit they really have is their imagination.

The most common complaint about Halo 4 was it’s levels, they were linear and pretty small compared to previous Halo games. I think it’s obvious why they couldn’t have big or non linear levels: Because of the limitations of memory of the 360. There are many things you can’t have because of limitations in hardware, but even with the limitations, they produced pretty high fidelity graphics. 343 have a clear shot of making something amazing, and I think at this point it’s almost impossible for them to disappoint anyone with the jump in hardware. My bet is Halo 5 will be one of the best Halo games so far.

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Oh, it is possible to disappoint. I just hope for them, and for the sake of Halo, that they don’t.

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> Oh, it is possible to disappoint. I just hope for them, and for the sake of Halo, that they don’t.

Did you read what I said? It’s impossible to disappoint considering the fact they have 0 hardware restrictions, which is a problem which plagued the 360. Whatever they make will automatically be an improvement over the previous games. For example with level design, they can put in large free roaming levels if they like, and there is nothing stopping them, they have 8gb of DDR3 ram to play with. Or large epic battles, considering the jump in CPU power, they can put a much larger amount of sophisticated AI in a large battlefield. Technically wise, Halo 5 will surpass all the other games (and will be running at a blazing 60 fps). And because the technical side of a game is what makes a lot of the game good (such as smart AI and level design) it is bound to be hailed as one of the greatest Halo games of all time.

Also, for multiplayer, they are bound to realize that there are mlg/hardcore/classic players that want a bare bones experience, so it would be silly for them not to include a classic/mlg mode when it ships. They didn’t include it last time, but I’m not surprised since they barely finished the game on time (because for a while the Halo 4 team was very small). They had to focus on the larger picture because of that.