14 DAY TRIAL // 343 Industries has announced that Halo 5: Guardians will be making its way to the Xbox One sometime during next year's fall, along with the Halo: The Television Series live-action show directed by legendary filmmaker Steven Spielberg, part of Microsoft's Xbox Originals initiative.
The company has also scheduled a beta test to take place at the end of the year, starting on December 27, 2014, and going through January 15, 2015, stating that the reason why they put it almost a year before launch is that they want to incorporate all the valuable feedback gathered during the three weeks into the final version.
Halo franchise development director Frank O'Connor has said that the development team's goal with Halo 5: Guardians is to make a Halo game that's going to be a perfect fit for all Halo fans out there, in addition to pushing the Xbox One's boundaries, just as they did before with Halo 4, and how previous Halo developer Bungie did it with the first games.
"So we want to make sure that since we're on a new platform, we're pushing it in interesting ways. That's one of our biggest philosophies," O'Connor explains in an interview with Eurogamer.
"That's not as easy as it sounds. Halo is different to different people. Some people think of Halo as this purely co-op experience. Some people only care about the story. Multiplayer guys don't agree with each other on anything, period. DMR is the worst and best weapon," he continues.
Halo 5: Guardians is the culmination of a much greater plan for the Halo franchise, beginning with Halo: The Master Chief Collection, featuring new prologue and epilogue cinematics, and continuing with Halo Nightfall, the digital series produced by Ridley Scott, serving as an origin story for the new Spartan that Halo 5 will introduce, Agent Locke.
Halo: The Journey, as 343 Industries chief Bonnie Ross calls it, also includes a ton of Halo-related projects, from TV shows such as the one being led by Steven Spielberg, to comics, merchandise, and, most importantly, new video games that will push the boundaries of the series.
"Knowing you have such a disparate set of audiences as a subset of your overall audience and trying to figure out the best way to cater to them without compromising everyone else's experience - that's a hell of a balancing act. And it's one we'll always struggle with. I know our audience is changing," O'Connor concludes.