“Xbox One allows us to do things we’ve never done before.” These are the words of Bonnie Ross – general manager of current Halo-making people 343 Industries – and they’re blindingly obvious. Of course advanced technology will let you do more advanced stuff, but just what that stuff is is likely to be a mystery for quite a while yet. We can safely assume it means the game will have a brand new engine, and subsequently look divine, but who cares about that? Okay, fine… everyone. But Halo 5: Guardians is still going to need a whole bunch more to keep the franchise interesting.
Now, we’re obviously jumping the gun a little bit – Halo 5 isn’t even out until next year. In fact, it seems ludicrous that the Xbox One dared to launch without a Halo title when you think about it, but at least we’ve got Kinect Sports Rivals to keep us going in the meantime. That meantime also includes a 99% chance of appearance at this year’s E3, but before those cold, hard details start to trickle through, we present to you a list of the things that we think the game absolutely needs to have.
Before that though, let’s quickly tell you what it doesn’t need to have: a TV miniseries leading up to it. Quite why anyone would care about this is a mystery to me – if you’re a fan of Halo, you just want to play it, if you’re not a fan, why on Earth would you want to watch a program about it? It’s madness, is what it is. But viewer or not, Speilberg’s production attachment seems to spell big things for the game itself.
So, with that in mind, let’s start laying our space-desires on the table and see if it doesn’t live up to them come 2015.