Halo 5′s ‘Great Journey’: Concept Art Revealed

As spotted on the Halo Waypoint blog, new concept art for Halo 5: Guardians has been revealed. Alongside this reveal also was an explanation from a member of the 343 team, discussing the future for the iconic Halo series.

“But getting the Halo 5: Guardians announce out of the way is a big weight off our shoulders. This audience has correctly stated and assumed that you can’t necessarily squish a full Halo game into anything less than a three year development schedule – and at least up to and including Halo 5: Guardians, that’s more or less true.

But we’re not just making a new game in that three year span, we’re also making a new engine. During the development of Halo 4, we pushed the Xbox 360 and the engine to its limits, and we were happy with the way we were able to make the Halo universe look. The Xbox 360 still has a few tricks up its sleeve, even now. We are moving to a whole new platform with the Xbox One – a new architecture, new graphics hardware and bluntly some new ways to think about gaming, period.

Bonnie [studio head for 343] also called out 60fps and dedicated servers last year – attractive, desirable, and possibly expected upgrades to the Halo experience. After all, we won’t be the first 60fps shooter out there. That said, these must-haves are not necessarily easy to achieve.

Previous Halo titles, Halo: Combat Evolved and Halo 2 for example, strove to push the entire ecosystem forward – dual stick FPS with big open spaces in the case of Combat Evolved, and broadband matchmaking in Halo 2 – are just a couple of examples of the series innovating or amplifying ideas. So in building Halo 5: Guardians, we want to push the ecosystem as well as the universe. And we’ll have some surprises in store for new and loyal players of the series.

So that’s it for now, but E3 is just around the corner. So if you bide your time and hold your breath, you won’t have to wait too long to hear about the next steps on this Great Journey.”