You've played the Halo 5: Guardians multiplayer beta. Now it's time to uncover the mysteries behind the story.
We went to 343 Industries to get the first hands-on with Master Chief's campaign. As you can see from the cover imagery, the Chief is now accompanied by the legendary Blue Team in both single-player and four-player co-op. Linda, Fred, and Kelly were abducted when they were six years old alongside John to be turned into Spartan-II super soldiers. This tight-knit squad grew up together and battled through many adventures in the expanded fiction, but this will mark their first significant role in a core Halo game. With the loss of Cortana in Halo 4, Blue Team steps up to interact with Chief, appear in cutscenes, and accept commands from him in single-player. In co-op play, everyone takes on a specific member, each with a different loadout unique to their specialty.
We played an early mission set before Master Chief and Blue Team are declared AWOL by the very military that made them. The flipside of the campaign follows Spartan Jameson Locke, seen in the Halo: Nightfall TV series, as he tracks down Halo's signature hero to bring him in or take him down. Locke recruits a team of his own, Fireteam Osiris, to do the job. This mix of familiar and new faces rounds out the team of high-tech Spartan-IVs, who all come from elite military backgrounds. See if you can spot a returning fan favorite in our coverage trailer below.
Our lengthy hands-on sessions also included plenty of time in the revamped competitive Arena multiplayer. In the cover story, we break down specific changes to the Empire map from last winter's beta and we debut a never-before-seen map called Fathom. This undersea base looks gorgeous and is loaded with all kinds of hidden tricks for experienced players to dig in and discover. 343 also teases a new multiplayer mode never seen in a Halo game before. Read about all this and more in the latest issue of Game Informer.
Halo 5: Guardians is set to release on October 27 on Xbox One
