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February 12, 2022
In the early days of 2022, Microsoft made waves by purchasing Activision Blizzard. The company is responsible for some of the biggest online franchises of all time (starcraft and overwatch), the biggest MMO ever (world of warcraft), and the highest-grossing annual series (call of duty), could possibly become an Xbox exclusive developer. And for a price tag of over $70 billion, it was the largest acquisition in gaming history.
With such a massive acquisition taking place, Sony was quick to respond with one of their own. Sony will be purchasing the original Halo developer for a relatively tame price tag of just $3.6 billion. It is one of three major consolidations to happen in the games industry in a single month.
According to the fine print, the original Halo development studio will become an independent subsidiary of Sony Interactive Entertainment (SIE). The current management team at Bungie will be part of the board of directors, which will include the current CEO.
SIE
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December 24, 2021
Halo Infinite is the biggest upcoming video game from Microsoft. The campaign was released on December 8th. At E3 2019, Microsoft presented the audience with a cinematic trailer of this game. This trailer gave a much closer look at the master chief and his cinematic design. In that sequence, the master chief woke up to embark on his journey and fans have been trying to figure out the rest of the sequence for months.
Microsoft is keeping extensive story details hidden for the time being. Nonetheless, the developers did confirm that the new Halo game will be more centered on the master chief. Emphasizing on master chief shows their commitment towards improving the inadequacies of the Halo 5. Ultimately, enter into this game thinking of it as a continuation of Halo 5.
Takes Place in Zetta Halo
Zetta Halo is a location found on Halo Lore. According to the story of Halo, the ring worlds were created by the forerunners race, and they acted as super weapons looking
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October 28, 2017
With the Xbox One X set to storm the world next month, Microsoft is gearing up their game library by releasing visual updates. Surprisingly, even some older Xbox 360 games available on the Xbox One X via backward compatibility are set to get the visual upgrade treatment.
According to Xbox, a number of Xbox 360 backward compatible games will be getting an upgrade to support a higher resolution, 9X the original pixel count, and expanded color details.
This upgrade allows to improve game visual quality without touching the game code in any way. It's called the Heutchy Method and "leverages the power of Xbox One X to let the Xbox 360 emulator present the very best version of the game possible with the existing assets--all without touching the game code."
The number of games to get upgraded visual support is quite limited so far. The Xbox 360 games available for an Xbox One X visual upgrade are Assassin's Creed, The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, Fallout 3, and Halo 3.
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March 02, 2017
The radar has been an iconic part of the franchise ever since the Halo: Combat Evolved days. Over the years, the radar has had a number of changes but it has mostly remained the same.
The trouble with this is that much of the rest of the Halo gameplay experience has evolved. The radar is now a little outdated and it certainly needs some more love to fit better with the gameplay available in Halo 5: Guardians.
343 Industries has finally started working on changes to the radar, and the new tweaks will soon be ready to test in an upcoming multiplayer playlist.
An official update post on Halo Waypoint mentioned, 'Nearly 16 months of player feedback and game data has driven some interesting internal explorations to alter the way the Motion Sensor functions in Halo 5. On Thursday, March 9, we will kick off a public test of this new Motion Sensor to gather player feedback and metrics to help determine if this has a potential place in Halo 5 going forward, as well as potential
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September 02, 2016
Halo Wars 2 will have all of the key elements of a good real time strategy game, but it will also have some elements that could have only come from completely out of the box thinking at the Halo Wars headquarters.
It has been revealed that a 'mysterious mode' in Halo Wars 2 will offer gameplay that's unlike any RTS experience we have seen before.
Unfortunately we do not have any information about the mysterious Halo Wars 2 mode, besides a small tease from 343 Industries Studio Head Dan Ayoub, who said, "One of the modes, which I can only tease for the time being, is actually a completely new way to play a RTS. It really takes standard RTS gameplay and turns it on its head. And that's a mode that can be played in a shorter time frame as well, like five, six, seven minutes."
It's hard to say whether the new mode will truly turn RTS on it's head, or whether Ayoub's statement was a little overhyped. It seems that they have designed some kind of quick match mode that will
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July 07, 2016
After what felt like an unending schedule of free Halo 5 content, it's been announced that the monthly content drops for Halo 5: Guardians will now stop. Whilst this was the original plan announced by 343 Industries in the beginning, it's almost a shock to think that’s almost been a year since the game launched.
Since the release of Halo 5: Guardians, there have been eight big content drops, all of which added plenty of new cosmetics, new maps, new items and in some cases even new Warzone modes or AI enemies.
Now that the monthly content drops have stopped, 343 Industries want to make it clear that support for the game won't stop. In fact, some new content is still planned for the near future, even if it isn't going to be as substantial content releases. It's likely that the 343 team are now moving most of their resources to the next Halo title.
343 Industries recently mentioned that, "While you won't be seeing updates every month moving forward, nor updates the size
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January 10, 2016
Soon Rocket League will finally be coming to the Xbox One. After being available for PlayStation 4 and the PC since it's release, Xbox One players have not had the chance to play Rocket League. However, Rocket League will be launching on Xbox One in February and it won't just be the exact same content as the other versions.
When the Xbox One version of Rocket League lands in February, exclusive content will be added. The exclusive content will only be cosmetic, but it can be considered a bit of an extra bonus for loyal Xbox One players. The cosmetic items have all been based on the Xbox One exclusive, Sunset Overdrive.
In Rocket League, players can customize their vehicles with a variety of attachments. They can also change their rocket fuel color and make a number of other adjustments. A lot of the cosmetic items already available in the PS4 and PC versions of Rocket League are based around popular video games or concepts so having Sunset Overdrive content will be a welcome
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November 26, 2015
It should come as no surprise that Halo is one of the biggest selling franchises on the Xbox. Since the release of Halo 5: Guardians on the Xbox One, a lot of people have been wondering exactly how many sales the game has managed to make.
Now that data is slowly coming in about sales around the world, fairly accurate information on Halo 5's week one sales are being announced. According to VGChartz, a website dedicated to reporting video game sales, Halo 5: Guardians managed to sell approximately 1.46 million copies in its first week.
The exact first week number, according to VGChartz is 1,457,849 copies, although this does not include digital sales, so we could be looking at over 2 million copies at least.
For an Xbox One exclusive title, 1.46 million isn't bad at all, but it is quite small in comparison to previous Halo releases. In fact, Halo 5 Guardians sold less copies than almost every other Halo release. Here's a week one sales rundown of the last eight Halo games.
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November 12, 2015
Despite the small map pool on Halo 5, it looks as if there are still some issues that has caused 343 Industries to take some pretty extreme measures. One of the Arena maps for Halo 5 is called Orion - this map is a small spaced 4v4 map designed mostly for objective modes like Strongholds.
For now, Orion has been removed from the active map pool because there are currently a number of exploits that players have been using that 343 Industries would like to fix before reapplying to Halo 5 matchmaking.
Whilst 343 Industries did not list the exploits that are being fixed, it's very clear that there are some that were very advantageous. One exploit allowed players to use ground pound to glitch themselves out of the map - they could stay there without dying and could attack players from outside of the map.
On top of fixing Orion, 343 Industries has also stated that they are working on fixing up the spawn system - this seems to be an issue for some maps and game types, especially
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November 07, 2015
If you've been paying attention to anything that has come out of the 343 Industries camp then you may have heard that they will be releasing map packs as free DLC for Halo 5. Most of the additional funds for Halo 5 will come straight from the gold REQ packs, which cost $2.99 and provide players with cosmetics and Warzone boosts and items.
Thankfully, it looks like there won't be a lack of DLC content, despite all of it being free. In fact, the first DLC content patch for Halo 5 will be hitting servers in November. 343 Industries has already revealed what content will be included in the first patch.
In just under a week, the new content patch for Halo 5 will be launched. In this first content patch, 343 Industries will be adding a few different features, including the much loved Big Team Battle game mode. Unfortunately there aren't any dedicated in-house maps for BTB yet - instead, you'll have to make do with maps created in Forge by the 343 developers for the 8v8 game mode.