343 Industries

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

To the surprise of almost nobody, Microsoft is working on a new Halo game for its next-generation Xbox console, and they showed off a trailer for the game during the company’s E3 press conference.

The new game is known as Halo Infinite and was teased in a trailer that takes place in space. In the movie, a marine comes upon Master Chief floating in space, rescuing him and activating his suit. Chief then decides to get ready and carry on fighting, blasting back into space to take on his enemies.

The new Halo will be a first-person shooter, just like every other major release in the game’s history, but will feature 4K visuals. The game’s unveiling comes alongside news that the Master Chief Collection is coming to PC later this year. The game will be compatible with the Xbox Elite Series 2 controller, and

While 343 Industries have been very quiet about their progress on Halo 6, we do now have some information on upcoming support for older Halo games.

It's now been confirmed that a total of four previous Halo titles will be added to the Xbox One's ever-growing backward compatibility list. All of the four titles were originally launched on Xbox 360.

The four titles include Halo 3, Halo 3: ODST, Halo 4, and Halo: Combat Evolved Anniversary. It's essentially the same list of games that were originally bundled in the Master Chief Collection. All four games will have a campaign and multiplayer support. Players will even be able to set up LAN games between the Xbox 360 and Xbox One.

To make the news even sweeter, 343 Industries will be releasing all four games with all of their DLC. All previous downloadable content for the four titles will be made available for free, so long as players own the game, either in the digital or physical copy.

This will be a great opportunity

While content updates for Halo 5 stopped some time ago, new balancing changes will be making their way to Halo 5 soon.

The new balancing changes will bring a huge overhaul to the different weapons players can use in Halo 5. Many players are speculating that the balance changes are a method for 343 Industries to test the waters with changes that they may bring to Halo 6 when it finally launches.

After 2 years of data to go through, those at 343 Industries that are still working on Halo 5 have decided on a new plan of action for the weapon mechanics in Halo 5: Guardians.

The 343 team warned that not everybody will like the changes, but they think the balancing is for the best.

"With a game and community as varied and nuanced as Halo 5, it's just not going to be possible to make everyone totally happy all of the time. Some folks may not like certain changes, while others may think some of these changes are great."

A total of twelve weapons will be getting

OpTic gaming has managed to hit their second consecutive Halo World Championship win this month after they faced up against EnVyUs in the grand finals.

OpTic has been dominating the Halo scene recently. Unfortunately, they didn't quite perform as well as they may have liked to throughout the majority of the Halo World Championship. EnVyUs, on the other hand, looked as if they had the entire championship in the bag.

Even though they had performed incredibly well during the tournament, we weren't ruling out the nV grand final win. In fact, to begin with, EnVyUs had won 12 games in a row. By the time EnVyUs had reached the finals, they had only lost a total of two games. With the two teams facing off in the finals, it looked as if EnVyUs could have easily taken the game from OpTic's grasp after the incredible performance from EnVyUs earlier in the tournament.

Things took a turn for the worst

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

Halo Wars 2 is now available for Xbox One and Windows 10, across most regions. So far, critics have taken a liking to the real-time strategy game sequel, but the game isn't quite complete.

If you were a diehard Halo Wars fan, you'll know that a big part of the multiplayer aspect focused on the leaderboards and ranking system. Thousands of players would compete to be the very best, and this kind of competitive atmosphere helped to keep the Halo Wars name alive strong after the initial release date.

In Halo Wars 2 there isn't a competitive ranking system at launch, but it's for what we think is a good reason. David Nicholson, the executive producer at Creative Assembly, mentioned that they decided not to add competitive ranking at launch, "Because we want to make sure the balance is there. We think we've got the game well-balanced, with the two betas we had. But we continually make those balance changes. Our plan is to bring it out, but just not at launch."

This means

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

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

In a recent update, a glitch was found in Halo 5: Guardians that allowed players to have a whole world of new fun with custom weapons in Forge.

The glitch in question essentially allows players to assign weapon effect, damage and fire rate to another weapon model by using the REQ pads. Not only did this glitch apply to Forge games, but the glitch carried out into custom games too.

As an example, a player could place down a weapon pad and set it so that it spawns a REQ weapon. A player could then edit the item properties to change the weapon model. The end result allowed players to have SMGs that fired sniper bullets, plasma pistols that fired spartan lasers and all sorts of other things. Plenty of crazy combinations are possible with this glitch, and like mentioned before, this glitch does allow players to set up some incredibly fun custom games.

Perhaps the most exciting bit of news to come from this all is that Tom French has confirmed that the glitch will be staying