343 Industries





























LOS ANGELES—There's no getting around it: The powers that be at Halo have some serious catching up to do after the debacle that was December's Master Chief Collection. In particular, that game's smorgasbord of online modes, spread across a package of four Halo re-releases, proved too much for the dev team at 343 Industries.

Thus, we're still a little anxious about any ambitious announcements for a new Halo game, but the biggest one 343 made at this year's E3 was a good start. Say hello to Warzone, the series' newest, biggest multiplayer mode yet. It's set to debut in October's Halo 5: Guardians, and based on our two sessions in the mode during E3, it's exactly what Halo multiplayer needed.

PVE, PVP, PV-everything

Up until now, Halo online battles have maxed out at 16 players, typically in eight-on-eight battles of modes like Big Team Slayer. Halo 5's Warzone mode jacks that up to a respectable 24-player count—not quite the whopping 64 players on console versions of the latest Battlefield games, of course, but a welcome boost all the same.

The reason for the larger Halo teams this time around is because the levels, and the scope, have grown dramatically, and they elegantly juggle a combo of PVE (player vs. environment) and PVP (player vs. player) battles. Combat starts with two teams of 12 starting off in their own respective bases, which are littered with about two dozen AI baddies. Kill those, and you unlock your base's doors to the outside arena, along with the ability to buy new weapons and vehicles.

From there, the two teams race to be the first to rack up 1,000 points, and they have a few avenues to accrue them. Like in most online shooters these days, the map contains three control points in the form of bases; whoever controls each gets a few points per second. The bases in the level we tested were multi-tiered structures with lots of sneaking passages, stairwells, and corpse-littered funneling points, so keeping each of them locked down was satisfyingly tricky.

Simply killing an opposing player nets a few points, while teams can rack up serious points if they take out the AI-controlled "boss" characters hiding in the map's dark corners—meaning, far away from the control-point bases. They've been designed to be real damage sponges, so even if you send a bunch of soldiers at one boss, you'll still need some time to take it down.

As a result, there's a real trade-off in terms of how teams can focus their efforts. Should one team capture all three control points, they can skip ahead of the whole point-accumulating process by invading the opposing team's starting zone and destroying its energy core, so skipping the optional bosses might seem smart. That being said, killing a boss offers a giant boost: a Scrooge McDuck-sized pile of in-game currency.

Put some 22s on that Phaeton, son

The Halo series has never forced players to grind for weeks at a time to unlock in-game weaponry a la Call of Duty, and that appears to be the same this time around. However, in Warzone, players do have currency to contend with, which is paid out based on completing objectives, killing rivals, getting ribbons, and so on.

That currency is shown as a vague "level," and the more of that level amount you spend, the cooler stuff you can spawn at any safe point (including any control points your team has overtaken). Spending two level points means you can swap your default weapon for a charge pistol, or generate a Warthog to ride in. Spend more points, and you can generate better stuff—from sniper rifles to rocket launchers, or from ghosts and Mantis robo-walkers to the new, holy-what-the-jesus Phaeton cruiseship.

In one of our Warzone battles, our squad wiped out a currency-rich boss just as the enemy team tri-capped the bases. Our team rushed to spawn new gear, and between the influx of cash we'd just gotten, and some of the team members having saved a few level points already, we rolled hard into the enemy. Phaetons, Mantises, and rocket launchers, oh my, oh my.

(To clarify, this currency exists solely in a single battle, but it sounds like Microsoft is doing some sneaky stuff with a "REQ Pack" system that will... include... microtransaction-fueled items. Microsoft. WTF. No. Pull back. Disengage. While you still can.)

Warzone's overall formula shamelessly picks little pieces and ideas from other recent online smashes, from Titanfall's PVE elements to Dota 2 and League of Legends' XP-rich bosses, but man, it works. It's also rooted in the comfortable, old Halo moveset—one that, admittedly, got a boost via new speed-minded maneuvers introduced in January's team-deathmatch multiplayer beta, which includes run-and-slam melee attacks, ground pounds, and quick dodges.

We obviously only got to test one arena, and one running on Microsoft's LAN—as opposed to any potentially awful servers, like the ones that plagued The Master Chief Collection for far too long—but our two Warzone battles really did make the old feel new again in the Halo multiplayer universe. We look forward to battling more in that one when the game launches in October; hopefully by then, we'll also have seen more of the game's co-op campaign mode, which was only teased in a very linear demo at Microsoft's Monday press conference.

Listing image by 343 Industries