Halo

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

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

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 Xbox Game Pass has been announced and it's seeking to be the Netflix of gaming.

The newly announced Xbox Game Pass will cost users a monthly fee of $9.99, but with it will come unlimited access to over 100 titles. Unlike Netflix, users of the Xbox Game Pass will be able to download their games and play them - there will be no limit to the amount of games a player can download at once, as long as they have enough internal memory and their Xbox Game Pass subscription is still active.

Some of the games included in the Game Pass are older titles that can be picked up for cheap, both digitally and in physical form, but a lot of the games are recent releases. Most titles on the list so far are considered to be very decent games, too.

Highlights of the Game Pass include access to Halo 5: Guardians, Gears of War Judgment, Gears of War Ultimate Edition and NBA 2K16. The Xbox Game Pass also includes a number of classic Xbox 360 titles and arcade games such as Kameo, Hexic

Backwards compatibility on the Xbox One is a big thing for some gamers, but it doesn't come with its own little hiccups. Halo Reach has been available on the Xbox One via the backwards compatibility feature for a while now, but the performance for the game has been terrible.

Until now, players have struggled to play Halo Reach on the Xbox One without having juttery frames, freezes and crashes. Thankfully a brand new patch has been released for Halo Reach that has been designed to fix all the performance issues entirely.

The new update has been confirmed to help with frame rate on Halo Reach and from early tests it seems as if the game is now running as smooth as ever. Not only is Halo Reach on the Xbox One now working smoothly, but in some cases it has a higher frame rate than the original Xbox 360 version.

Now that we know that patches like this are possible for backwards compatible games, we wonder whether it'd ever be possible for a developer to revive a once-popular

343 Industries may be cutting down on the amount of content being released for Halo 5: Guardians, but that doesn't mean new content isn't coming. In fact, a brand new content drop will be hitting in September. The release date for Halo 5's Anvil's Legacy DLC will be September 8 and it will see a number of new features, including new REQs, new weapons for Warzone and more.

Two brand new maps will also be coming to Halo 5 in Anvil's Legacy. The first of which will be a Warzone exclusive and the second will be a remake of Halo 4's Haven. The new Haven remake is called Mercy and it will be perfect for any close quarters game modes like Rumble Pit or team doubles.

Like previous updates, Anvil's Legacy will also be getting a number of new REQ items. Firstly, three new rare Warzone weapons have been added, including a powerful tactical magnum. There are a number of new common weapon drops added as well, along with some new armor items, new armor colors and a range of legendary weapon

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

It may sound odd, but the 343 Industries team are adding a new enemy to Halo 5 Warzone and it's called the 'Grunt Goblin'

The new Grunt Goblin will appear in games as either a Legendary or a Mythic boss. It's essentially a large covenant mech that seems to be the enemy equivalent to a Mantis. It's operated by a grunt and has a very, very large needler and a big fist that looks menacingly capable of smashing through pretty much anything.

Character designer Steve Dyck left a few statements about the new vehicle. "There are two variants of the Grunt Goblin with different capabilities. "Essentially, the backstory of this battle suit is it was built by Grunts for Grunts in what the Grunt designers agreed was the perfect embodiment of agility and lethality."

Senior systems designer Chris Proctor chipped in to say that, "Unlike other vehicles, the Grunt Goblin cannot be hijacked or boarded and has a complete immunity to EMP effects." This means plasma pistols aren't going

Is this real life? Yep, it seems that even though 343 Industries confirmed that Halo 5: Guardians wasn't coming the PC, we just end up getting more and more Halo content on the PC. The latest piece of the Halo PC pie are a set of free Halo 5 Forge tools for Windows 10 owners.

Microsoft has named the piece of software as Forge - Halo 5: Guardians Edition and it will be coming to Windows 10 soon. So far we're not sure whether the tools have been built from the ground up for support on the PC or whether they've mostly been ported for use on the PC but there will be a few changes regardless. Here are some of the changes posted by Microsoft on an Xbox news post.

+ Keyboard & Mouse Support - For the first time ever, Forgers will have the option of using a keyboard & mouse allowing for more precision control than ever before.

+ Increased Resolution - Support for multiple resolutions including 4k.

+ Test and Play with Friends - Enlist the help of Friends to help