Stay on top of all our E3 2013 coverage here.

Bungie showed off gameplay for its long-awaited Destiny at the 2013 Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3) this week. We had a close look at the title, and this is our first impression. Destiny is a huge bet for Bungie, which moved off its best-selling Halo video game franchise, and for its publisher Activision Publishing, a division of Activision Blizzard. And Sony has made a big commitment to Destiny by signing a long-term partnership deal with Bungie and Activision to get some exclusive content for the multiplayer-centric first-person shooter.

So far, we’re not nearly as wowed as we wanted to be. While so many things about the game are impressive, from the graphics to the depth of customization to the unique multiplayer gameplay — we were left wanting more. During the first-hands on gameplay demo at Sony’s pre-E3 press conference, Bungie co-founders Joe Staten and Jason Jones walked out on stage to demo the title in a two-player cooperative session.

On the big-event screen and on the smaller screens where we saw it, the graphics are breathtaking. The demo opened with a view of a huge valley on Earth, where an alien attack has savaged the world, leaving it with a small number of heroes, known as Guardians, defending the last safe city from alien attack. The art work was impressive and first-rate, considering that Destiny is a massively multiplayer online release, which will have hundreds of hours of gameplay and many such environments. I can see why Bungie has 400 people working on the title.

Destiny will contain a shared, persistent online world, set in our solar system. Bungie has announced four playable races so far. The passage of time has made Earth strange, and nothing looks like it does in the present day.  The canyon in front of the players was full of awesome lighting and shadows. Weeds and bushes swayed in a gentle breeze. The trees feature graphic-rendering techniques like tessellation, so the details come to life. The surroundings are alive with audio effects. You can hear the footfalls. Shadows cast in real time, and that makes the world feel alive. The water looks realistic with accurate reflections and ripples. The landscape views are truly epic in scope, with big views of giant buildings and vistas.

The action

When the developers got to the action during the Sony press event, the Bungie co-founders bantered as they showed off Destiny’s features. They went on a mission together into a dark underground space. Staten was chattering a lot, and I couldn’t tell if that was actually the characters in the game talking. In fact, it might have been nice if it was. The lighting in the dungeon-like space was spectacular.

“I’m going to meet some friends, and we’re going to shoot some aliens in the face,” Staten said. “Because shooting aliens is relaxing.”

But the two characters were strangely silent as they went through the world in a section called Old Russia. One character was a male Warlock, while another was a female Hunter. The game will let you customize your character through your clothing, armor, and weapons. One gun was a level 200 weapon, suggesting a huge tech ladder for leveling up your arsenal. Some of the upgrades will completely change the way a weapon feels. That’s how players will express their personalities and abilities in the world over time.

A ghost, or an artificial intelligence character, spoke up and said, “We always visit such cheerful spaces.” That character is a lot like Cortana, the A.I. who always banters with Master Chief in the Halo series.

One of the characters dispatched enemies in a casual manner with a powerful “hand cannon.” It seemed like a very large six-shooter, and it could take hostiles out with a couple of shots. Rockets and machine guns also took part in the action.

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Stay on top of all our E3 2013 coverage here.

Wake up, John. Again.

Honestly, the Master Chief’s barely had enough time for a brief nap. It’s only been eight months since Halo 4′s release, but Microsoft used the big stage at their pre-Electronic Entertainment Expo conference to formally announce a new Halo game as an exclusive release for their upcoming Xbox One console. No release window was given.

Another sequel was expected — developer 343 Industries promoted Halo 4 as the beginning of “the Reclaimer trilogy” for Microsoft’s premiere first-person shooter — but not until 2015 at the earliest. Bungie Studios, the original developer behind Halo, spent three years creating the first three Halo games and Halo: Reach, and it rarely even dropped teaser trailers until they were well within a year of release. It appears 343, a wholly owned subsidiary of Microsoft, may cut production time down to a shorter cycle.

The teaser trailer gave little away, but showed a lone, hooded figure wandering a desert until a massive sinkhole opened up in front of him and a colossal Promethean construct rose up into the air. The wind kicked the figure’s hood off, revealing the Master Chief’s iconic helmet. The scene ended with the Chief gripping a pair of dog tags in his fist and looking up at the monster.

Microsoft’s presentation didn’t specifically call the game Halo 5, but as first-person Halo game, it seems unlikely it could be anything else. Regardless, for the first time in the franchise history, this Halo will run at 60 frames per second — the holy grail of video game performance — and have dedicated servers powering its multiplayer.

Halo: Combat Evolved, the first entry in the billion-dollar franchise, was an exclusive launch title for the original Xbox and its undisputed killer app. Microsoft credited it half the console’s sales during their first 60 days of release. The Xbox 360 launched without a new Halo game, but Halo 2′s multiplayer mode drove sales thanks to a revised Xbox Live service that made online gaming easy and intuitive on a console platform for the first time.

By announcing a new top-tier Halo so early, Microsoft clearly wants to boost enthusiasm for the Xbox One among their core constituents after a string of PR blunders around the new console’s mandatory-online structure and confusing DRM policies.

If anything can, it’s the Master Chief.

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Kate Edwards has had a long career in video games, and now, she has become a leader of the industry. In December, Edwards became executive director of the International Game Developers Association. Her job is to run an organization with 10,000 members who are navigating all of the big changes in the game industry.

At Microsoft, she was the first “geopolitical strategist” who had to identify geopolitical and cultural land mines for the company as it moved into different regions of the world. She implemented a geopolitical quality review process for Microsoft’s games from 1995 to 2005. She worked on titles like Dragon Age: Origins, Dragon Age 2, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3, Star Wars: The Old Republic, and other releases. She was the founder and chair of the game-localization special interest group within the IGDA and a leader in the IGDA Seattle chapter. She runs her own consultancy, Englobe.

This week, she attended the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco and had to handle the tough issue of women in games, particularly as a dispute erupted among IGDA members about an IGDA-sponsored party where scantily clad female dancers appeared. We sat down with Edwards on Monday, March 25, before any of that happened. Here is our edited transcript of our interview.

GamesBeat: How big is the IGDA now?

Kate Edwards: We hope to approach the neighborhood of 10,000 members by the end of this year. That’s the overarching goal. We have about 90 chapters worldwide. We have 20 or 25 special interest groups.

GamesBeat: How would you describe the IGDA to people who don’t know what it is?

Edwards: The way I like to describe it is, the IGDA is a professional development community. We’re a professional association focused on development. We’re focused on advocacy for issues that affect game developers. We have an international presence. We serve as a place of networking and community for individual game developers.

GamesBeat: Has the membership been growing?

Edwards: It leveled off for a while. Part of that is due to the structure of how we do membership, with studio affiliations versus individual memberships. We’ve gone through some adjustments there. That added to a bit of a plateau. Plus, with the industry being the way it is these days, that affects membership to a degree. We see studios that close, like 38 Studios for example. The members retain their membership, but the studio affiliation goes away.

GamesBeat: It’s hard to tell whether there’s more growth or more contraction.

Edwards: I like to the word “evolving.” That’s the way I see it. This is still a relatively young industry. It’s finding its way. We’re so receptive to the technology that arises in how we deliver and how we develop. It’s only natural that we’ll see a bit of evolution. Some things are going to die off and some things are going to rise. It’s not something that we necessarily want to see, when we see people laid off. It’s not a good thing. But unfortunately or not, it’s a natural part of a changing industry.

GamesBeat: Has anybody done a lot of tallying up there, working out whether they see growth or change like that?

Edwards: We have not done that kind of thing, no. We do the quality of life survey, which is an empirical survey along those lines. The latest one came out recently. But we don’t focus on the numbers as far as layoffs. That’s something that the ESA would know better than we would.

GamesBeat: It’s good that people do surveys, but yeah, I do wish there was more information to give people, a way to give them sound advice. “Okay, here’s where the wind is blowing. Go in that direction.”

Edwards: Within the IGDA, the chapters do communicate with one another, which is one of the strengths of the organization. Developers who are in the IGDA can do that. They can reach out to other chapters. “My studio is downsizing in Boston. I might move to San Francisco or Los Angeles. What’s going on out there?” You get a lot of qualitative information. You get some quantitative information on a per-studio basis. Someone in L.A. might chime in and say, “My company has 35 positions open.” I know it happens at that individual chapter level, but there’s not any oversight quantifying all of that.

GamesBeat: Has that quality of life gotten any better?

Edwards: It’s changing. In general I think the trend is better. Studios are getting more aware. A lot of times [quality of life] is equated with the notion of crunch. We like to look at something broader. It’s not just the crunch mode issue, although that tends to be a major issue. More studios are aware of it. That doesn’t mean all studios don’t do it, but they’re more aware of it. I was at Microsoft for 13 years, and even within my time there, the company became far more aware of work-life balance issues and all the other things that go along with them, for all kinds of good reasons.

GamesBeat: I wondered if some of these problems would carry over from the console business into the mobile and social studios.

Edwards: I think that’s inevitable. They’re going to carry over to some degree. When you’re self-employed or a small shop, you tend to have more control, but that affects your time schedule. It affects all kinds of other things. A lot of the indies that I know, or smaller studios, that’s one of the reasons they might have left a larger developer. They felt they would have more control over their work-life balance, and they do for the most part. At the same time, I’ve seen some of those small studios go through the same issues as any large studio. It comes down to promising a date and not delivering. That’s a reality in any business, not just the games industry.

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At face value, the heroes of Gears of War aren’t all that likable. No one can relate to soldiers with Hulk-like muscles, bloody chainsaws, and a penchant for catchy one-liners like “Shit, yeah!” Some circles of the Internet (including former Gears designer Cliff Bleszinski) have affectionately pegged this exaggerated masculinity as being too “dude-bro.”

The problem, I think, isn’t with the excessive violence and humor on their own, but in the way they clash against the third-person-shooter franchise’s narrative tone. Developer Epic Games attempted to add some empathy and drama — such as the search for a character’s missing wife in Gears of War 2 — over the course of the last three games, all to varying levels of success.

I brought this up during my interview with Gears of War: Judgment writers Rob Auten and Tom Bissell last week in San Francisco, where we all found ourselves taking in an unusually warm afternoon as we stood on the third-floor landing of an outdoor staircase. It was a nice change of pace from the noisy room in the floor below us, which was full of journalists and Epic Games employees curb-stomping the crap out of each other in Judgment’s multiplayer modes.

“I think Gears’ reputation for that is not entirely earned,” said Bissell. “Because the fact is, when you have four characters killing stuff in a combat scenario, certain ‘dude-bro’ emotional insinuations are inevitable. What are they supposed to do? The kiln of combat forges these relationships.”

Bissell is an award-winning and prolific writer whose work encompasses a wide range of topics. He has written books about the Vietnam War, his experience as a member of the Peace Corps in Uzbekistan, and even video games.

“If anything, [Gears] is not afraid to acknowledge that more openly,” said Rob Auten, Bissell’s writing partner-in-crime. “I think the ‘dude-bro’ [image] is sort of a double-edged sword: People slag Gears for being sort of emo, and they slag it for being dude-bro. It’s like, ‘Look guys, you can’t have both!”

Auten is no stranger to working with video games, either. He’s been “in or around” the industry for the last 10 years in different jobs, including being an animator and a writer.

From our short chat, it was clear that Auten and Bissell (along with Epic Games and developer People Can Fly) were out to craft a decidedly different Gears tale that would remain true to the series’ roots while injecting some much-needed nuance and personality.

Making Kilo Squad more dynamic

The main characters of the first three Gears of War games were Delta Squad members Marcus Fenix, Augustus “Cole Train” Cole, Damon Baird, and Dominic Santiago. Since Judgment is a prequel to the trilogy, we have a different group in the form of Kilo Squad. Included in its ranks are younger versions of Baird and Cole, as well as new faces Sofia Hendrik and Garron Paduk.

“I think our goal was to make the characters a little bit more … jagged,” said Bissell. “Marcus and Dom love each other — they bicker a little bit — but they’re fundamentally old friends. Our characters are not old friends: They barely know each other. Baird and Cole have known each other for a month. Sophia and Paduk hate each other. Sofia doesn’t like Baird. Paduk hates everyone.”

I played about an hour of Judgment’s campaign, and in that time, seeing just how different Kilo Squad was in comparison to the trilogy’s Delta Squad surprised me. They’re still efficient killing machines when it comes to fighting off the invasion of the monstrous Locusts, but their disagreements and snide comments to one another gave the impression that they’re far from being a cohesive military unit.

“And to me, [that kind of interaction] automatically creates an interesting dynamic between these four squadmates,” Bissell continued. “And so right away, when I realized these are going to be our characters, I thought, ‘Well, this is gonna be really good. This is gonna create a kind of dynamic that I don’t think has really existed in the Gears [universe] … But I think the relationships between the four people in Judgment is a little bit subtler than it is in the other games.”

“We talked to some real military people a couple of times through the process,” said Auten. “There were some people who came by Epic, and they would tell us stories of, ‘We had this one guy in our fire team and we didn’t like him very much, so we all kind of decided we weren’t going to talk to him for a year’ [Laughs]. These kind of reactions — characters, people who work closely [together] — conflict does come up in intensive situations, and we just kind of want to enable that to happen. That’s drama, right?”

Paduk’s biggest fans

Garron Paduk seemed like an interesting, if volatile, choice as a member of Kilo Squad. He fought on the wrong side of the fence during Gears’ Pendulum Wars (kind of like the universe’s version of World War II) and joined the Coalition of Ordered Governments (COG) because he thought it was better to serve his former enemy than stay in jail. He definitely fights with a chip on his shoulder, much to the dismay of the other Kilo members.

Source: Microsoft

Garron Paduk

And the writers absolutely adore him.

“We’re probably Paduk’s biggest fans,” said Auten. “There have been points in the game where people have come up to us and were like, ‘Paduk is kind of a downer.’ For us, [the answer] was never ‘Yes’ or ‘No.’ We’re like, ‘Look, let’s try this. Let’s take Paduk as we know and have ambivalent feelings about him in the Judgment part of the game, and let’s throw him umpteen years into the future and imagine who he would’ve become [Editor's note: Paduk also appears in Aftermath, a campaign that takes place in the same timeline as Gears of War 3. You unlock it after earning enough stars in Judgment's story mode].

“He’s taken his own direction. He’s not a Stranded. He’s not a soldier. He respects soldiers but doesn’t want to be part of the military unit…. And he’s traipsing around basically the last big battle he ever fought and the place that has a lot of emotional resonance for him [as he leads] this kind of rag-tag group of stragglers. All of a sudden, all of the Paduk-ness of Paduk really came rushing back into the character, and everybody was like, ‘Okay, Paduk’s pretty good.’”

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I met Pete Parsons before Halo came out, as he was going around the country evangelizing the first-person shooter on the Xbox game console that Microsoft was about to launch way back in the fall of 2001. I recall his enthusiasm as marketing director at Microsoft, always promoting the idea of doing a pioneering shooting experience on consoles that, frankly, were inferior to the PC. Now, Parsons is still doing the same thing, only he is promoting Destiny, the next shooter from developer Bungie.

As chief operating officer at Bungie, Parsons must help lead the 350-person team do the enormous amount of behind-the-scenes work in bringing the persistent world of the always-connected Destiny to life. Activision Blizzard is planning on publishing a series of Destiny titles over the next decade, and Parsons will play a big role in making that happen.

Parsons left his job at Microsoft to become the COO at Bungie after Halo launched. In 2007, he left Microsoft to start Meteor Solutions, a viral-marketing startup, and worked double duty for a time. As Bungie prepared to leave the Microsoft fold and move on to a new franchise, Parsons came back. He returned to the studio in 2010. Parsons is now fully focused on getting Destiny out the door and managing the culture and talent inside Bungie’s 80,000-square-foot headquarters in Bellevue, Wash.

After a few years of secrecy, Bungie finally revealed concept art from its new game universe while announcing that Destiny would debut on the PlayStation 4 (and likely other platforms). We visited Parsons at Bungie HQ last week, and here’s an edited transcript of our conversation.

GamesBeat: You must feel good right now.

Pete Parsons: [Laughs] Well, I think it feels good to be Bungie right now. We’re always about doing great things and ambitious things. That’s because we have such a great team, because we can do that. It’s a great time to be at Bungie. It’s an energy that many people haven’t felt since some of the earliest days of Halo. That’s exciting. We still have a lot of the old guard around, but we’ve been able to bring on a massive amount of new talent.

GamesBeat: Did somebody in particular sell you on the idea of Destiny? I think you came in after it started, right?

Parsons: No, we’ve all been working from the very beginning. Well, it depends on how you look at it. Destiny has been an idea bouncing around since even before the technology to make it existed.

Destiny is very much a product of everybody at Bungie, but its inception comes from Jason [Jones, co-founder of Bungie]. This is very much a vision that Jason has. Then, he gathers a small group of really talented people who have been here a long time, and they begin hammering on it. It’s had multiple incarnations until it finally landed into what it is today. That’s fun to watch. Not just on technology, but art and story.

GamesBeat: It sounds like you did have options, though. Was there a point where you bought into Destiny and said, “I want to do this too?” For 10 years or whatever it will be.

Parsons: As naïve as this may sound, if Jason believes in something and he’s ready to go for it, I’m in. No joke, I still walk in the door every day and think, “Who gets to do this? This is awesome, to be a part of this thing.” Even when I’m having a shitty day, I feel that way. There are so many other things I could do that, for me, wouldn’t be as satisfying or as interesting. They might be enriching. They might satisfy some level of my curiosity. They might be exciting. But there’s something about these people and this place.

GamesBeat: Did you feel any tug when Halo went off in another direction, with Microsoft’s 343 Industries, and then Bungie went its separate way with Destiny?

Parsons: Personally, I did not. I love the Halo universe. I think it’s great. It inspires me. It inspires my children. They’ve never played, but they know the universe. One, though, I’ve spent a lot of time with Halo. Two, the mythic science fiction of Destiny immediately attracted me. It was that first image … It’s a simple image, but it took weeks of back-and-forth to put together. There were a few images already, maybe three or four, but they didn’t speak to what it was. The moment that image was done, it was like, “That’s it.” That’s the game. That’s the idea. That’s a place that I want to be.

GamesBeat: Is that published now? Which image is that?

Parsons: I don’t know if it’s ever been published. It was just this very striking image that had that feeling of — this is not purely a science fiction universe. It’s not just about two big military-industrial complexes smashing into each other. It’s a place with myths and lore. There’s a guy with sci-fi armor on, and yet he’s got a rifle that looks like it’s from an ancient desert somewhere. It was super cool. That certainly spoke to me. I didn’t look back.

At the time, we were working on both Halo: ODST and Halo:Reach. I still love the Halo universe. It’s an interesting place. But I think what we’ve been able to do is create an incredibly deep fiction and a place that you’re going to want to be in.

GamesBeat: You had a leak. You had some interesting reactions. What was it like, looking at the reaction from the inside?

Parsons: You’re never really excited when you first learn that a leak happens. Then you get to see the reaction. We had this really quick thing. We said, “There’s a leak happening. We can either say nothing, or we can say, ‘Yeah.’” Instead of looking at images that we didn’t want you to see, let’s give you one that we want you to see. So, we released the picture of the Fallen. When our community, who we love, reacts so positively to an image — “Oh my God. That’s so great. That’s a place I want to be in. I can’t wait to learn more about that” — we go from, “Oh, man” to “Sweet!” Within less than half an hour, we were like, “This is the course of action. Let’s go.”

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Gearbox Software started production on Aliens: Colonial Marines back in 2007, and after a torturous five-year development cycle pockmarked with delays, layoffs, and more delays, it finally comes out Feb. 12. But it started, like a lot of things do, with a list.

“We’d just finished our first Brothers in Arms game,” says Randy Pitchford, the cofounder of Gearbox Software. After years of playing in other company’s properties — most notably creating side-story games in the Half-Life and Counter-Strike franchises and porting Halo to PC for Microsoft — Gearbox finally took a chance on its own property. Brothers In Arms: Road to Hill 30 was a World War II first-person shooter in a market already over-saturated with World War II first-person shooters.

The risk paid off.

“It was a big success,” says Pitchford, “Sold 3.2 million units — this is 2005, so that’s a lot — lots of 90-plus reviews. So we had all this credibility, all this new experience, and now we had resources.

“We decided we were going to do more Brothers In Arms, and we were also going to create something original that no one else was doing, and that’s what led to Borderlands. The third thing we decided was that we should work with someone else’s property that we liked. It’s fun to create original things, but there’s a lot of awesome stuff in this world that’s just a joy to work with. It’s one of the reasons why we created Gearbox.”

So much awesome stuff, in fact, that picking their targets wasn’t easy. “We put a list together,” says Pitchford. “Brands and properties that it would just be incredible to do something with.”

Blade Runner earned a spot on the list. So did Michael Mann’s Heat, and Pitchford secured a license to adapt Mann’s epic heist film into an epic heist game. “I think there’s value in that set-up, where it’s less about being stealthy and more about the plan. I wanted more of a brute force approach.” Pitchford also wanted to present both sides of the fight — the heavily armed thieves and the police called out in force to stop them.

Heat: The Game never materialized, but Pitchford still had his first choice left. “Aliens was at the top of our list.”

Pitchford’s partner, Brian Martel — who’d put Blade Runner on the list — scored a meeting with the man behind both properties, director Ridley Scott. “They talked about Blade Runner, and they talked about Aliens,” says Pitchford. “During the meeting, Ridley took out his original, hand-drawn storyboards for the film, blew the dust off this book that probably hadn’t been looked at for 15 years, right? They just nerded out together, talking about this universe that Ridley created.”

“Brian discovered all kinds of interesting things,” Pitchford adds. “Things I’d been wondering about for a long time. It really just invigorated us and got us excited, and it also proved that there could be a path to making a game.”

Approaching the talent side definitely provided a geeky thrill, but Gearbox still didn’t have a license, a publisher, or a game. A year later, in 2006, that all changed when an offer came in from an entirely different direction.

“We’d been flirting with Sega for a while and imagining what we could possibly do together,” says Pitchford. Then out of the blue, a Sega rep approached them. “He said he’d been in discussions on the business side for Aliens, and he believed he could make that work out. We were like, ‘Whoa, no way!’”

In an amazingly rare moment of corporate symbiosis, the creative and business angles suddenly aligned and struck a deal. Gearbox got the full go-ahead from film studio 20th Century Fox to build a canon sequel to the movie narratives. Two years after making the list, Aliens: Colonial Marines went forward in 2007, with Mantel directing. Multiple delays would push its development out to nearly five years, but Pitchford’s first pick has finally become a real game.

“It was like a dream come true,” he says.

Aliens: Colonial Marines releases Tuesday for Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, and PC with a Wii U port to follow.

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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A lucky screen grab indicates the first three Halo games and hit perspective-platformer Fez might make the jump from Xbox to Steam. If true, it would mark the first appearance of Microsoft’s billion-dollar Halo franchise on Valve’s billion-dollar game-streaming service … and its first official appearance on a non-Microsoft platform.

The Escapist reports that listings for Fez, Halo: Combat Evolved, Halo 2, and Halo 3 appeared in Steam’s content database — a first step before any game goes live on the service — and were discovered by two programmers, “Pavel” and Martin Benjamins using the CDR tool. Hackers used CDR to view Steam’s complete game content database. All four listings have since been removed.

This would also mark the first PC ports for both Fez and Halo 3. It also leaves an open question around Halo 2; Its multiplayer servers are scheduled to shut down next week.

While none of this constitutes a confirmation that Microsoft’s premiere franchise is indeed heading to Steam, all four did appear in a screen-grabbed list that included games already confirmed for release on Steam;

• La-Mulana
• The Splatters
• Octodad: Dadliest Catch Beta
• Duke Nukem 3D: Atomic Edition (Duke Nukem 3D+)
• Super House of Dead Ninjas
• Fez
• LucasArts Test App
• Fast and Furious 6
• Lococycle
• Yogventures!
• Hardware
• Hardware (Demo)
• Dyad
• Cut the Rope
• Shadow Warrior Complete
• Hardware (VIP)
• Hardware (Internal)
• THE KING OF FIGHTERS XIII
• Retro/Grade
• Resident Evil: Revelations
• THE KING OF FIGHTERS 2002 UNLIMITED MATCH
• THE KING OF FIGHTERS ’98 ULTIMATE MATCH
• Quantum Conundrum 2
• Halo 3
• Halo 2
• Halo: Combat Evolved
• The Witness
• Angry Birds Space
• Angry Birds Seasons
• Second Life

Benjamins also discovered a Halo 3 game hub. Steam game hubs are official groups people use to share user-generated content, mods, screenshots, and the like.

We’ve reached out to both Microsoft and Valve for comment.

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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Gears of War is bombarding the childrens’ toy market this month. French toy manufacturer Meccano has created a range of construction sets based on the violent, Mature-rated third-person-shooter gaming franchise, and it is marketing them heavily at boys 8 and over. The sets are on sale at toy stores in the U.S. and the United Kingdom (one place you can find them is at Toys ‘R’ Us). Nickelodeon, Disney XD, and Cartoon Network have also been running advertising spots for the toys on U.K. television  in the lead up to Christmas despite a target demographic that should never have played the games.

Wandering around Toys ‘R’ Us with my two children last week, this marketing strategy and the in-store placement of the new Meccano range struck an odd chord. Nestled snugly alongside pictures of Sonic the Hedgehog and brightly colored constructable cars, Gears of War protagonist Marcus Fenix’s face staring out from its Meccano box looked strangely out-of-place. It made me wonder why such a range is being aimed at young children.

Aspiring gamers

I contacted Meccano (U.K.) to ask why it’s targeting such a young audience, and whether it’s concerned about cross-promoting Mature-rated games to that demographic. “The Gears of War range is targeted at 8+,” said a spokesperson for Meccano. “Our focus is on vehicles from the game as well as characters and weapons, which is not dissimilar to Mega Bloks’ Halo models. The ambition of the range is to broaden Meccano’s appeal to younger modelers as well as to older modelers who are also gamers and who will be familiar with the 18+ game.”

The Halo Mega Bloks range is a similar concept to Gears of War Meccano line. First released in 2009, Halo Mega Bloks — based on Microsoft’s series of first-person-shooter games — are found prominently displayed in most major toy stores. It’s easy to forget that Halo, too, is a gaming franchise aimed at a mature audience.

“It would seem a tenuous proposition to aim [Gears of War] toys at 8 year olds based on a license they ‘shouldn’t’ know,” said Sean McGowan, a toy industry expert and senior analyst at Needham & Company, via email. “But aspirational marketing is nothing new, is it?”

“The success of the Halo toys tells us two things,” said McGowan. “Firstly, that kids like what their older siblings  – or even parents — are doing, and a watered down toy version lets them participate. Secondly, that collectors who are ‘of age’ like to have toys depicting their favorite properties.

“I can tell you that the median age of buyers of Halo blocks from Mega is much older than the average for their blocks, so maybe it won’t actually be little kids buying Gears of War toys. But, still, you have to wonder how it could be a responsible idea.”

Epic Games: We don’t market Gears of War to children

I approached Microsoft to discuss the Gears of War and Halo toys and the implications of involving young children in the world of Mature-rated games. “Generally speaking, video game figures and collectibles are not necessarily created with a younger market in mind, so we would not look to comment on Halo-branded items,” said a Microsoft spokesman. It also declined to comment on Gears of War Meccano, leaving that to Gears developer and intellectual property [IP] owner Epic Games.

“It’s always been the stance of Epic Games that we don’t market the Gears of War series to children under the age of 18,” the studio said in a statement. “We do not condone the actions of Meccano, and we will do everything in our power to make sure it doesn’t happen again.”

When asked for more details on the license negotiation, the studio issued an additional statement: “Epic Games owns the Gears of War IP and we advise our licensees on high-level branding for the franchise. We vigorously support the ESRB/PEGI ratings system. If a licensee comes in conflict with that, we make every effort to correct the situation.”

That is a strongly worded response, showing that Epic Games is not at all happy with Meccano’s use of its license. What it means for the future of Gears of War Meccano toys, though, is not totally clear.

A case for the ESRB?

The Entertainment Software Ratings Board (ESRB) provides video game age ratings for the benefit of consumers, helping keep unsuitable games away from minors. But its jurisdiction doesn’t extend to related products, meaning the sale and marketing of these toys do not contravene ESRB regulations.

“ESRB enforces guidelines that prohibit inappropriate target marketing of Mature-rated games to children,” Eliot Mizrachi, the ESRB’s director of communications, said in a statement. “These restrictions pertain to ads placed in media [in the U.S. or Canadian markets] whose audience is known to be composed of a certain proportion of children but do not apply to ancillary products that may be associated with or related to a Mature-rated game.”

The European equivalent of ESRB ratings is the PEGI system, overseen by the Video Standards Council. When asked about the Gears of War toys, the VSC was unconcerned . “There does not appear to be any attempt to directly use the toys as a means of selling the game which, in any case, is legally restricted to 18-year-olds and above,” VSC Communications Officer Gianni Zamo said.

Mega Call of Duty?

With no guidance from the ESRB or VSC on the sale of such toys, responsibility seems to fall on the shoulders of individual companies. Where there is a clear market, though, it will inevitably be targeted. Mega Bloks’ success with Halo has set an example for other mature gaming franchises to follow, and Needham and Company analyst Sean McGowan said he would “not be surprised to see MegaBrands do toys tied to Call of Duty, too, considering their link to Activision through Skylanders.”

For the time being, Gears of War seems set to continue its infiltration of the toy store, with blind-bagged figures joining the fray. Soon being traded in a schoolyard near you.

You can see the initial TV advertisement for Meccano Gears of War below. Meccano/Erector (U.S.) director Robert Grey told me there is no plan to run such television spots in any North American market.

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Welcome back to Extra Hearts, GamesBeat’s dating site for our favorite game characters. We’ve already seen a few romantically hopeful guys and gals from the digital realm create their own profiles, but today we’re looking at Master Chief’s page. Yup, the green-tinted Spartan from Xbox’s popular first-person-shooter series is looking for a little love. I guess he’s really just a sweetheart under all that armor and emotional turmoil.

Let’s see how John-117 does in his mission to find a soul mate. Just don’t expect him to put any rings on any fingers.

Likes: Shooting, driving, and sleeping in.

Dislikes: Onion rings, hula hoops, donuts, bagels, bracelets, wheels, and Cheerios.

Why I’m here: I’ve been going at it solo for a while, but everyone tells me I’m more fun in multiplayer.

Our first night: I can go all night as long as you give me time to regenerate.

Politics: Green party. SEE, CORTANA?! I DO HAVE A SENSE OF HUMOR!

Faith: I believe in believing. Believe.

My best feature: Probably my face.

Comments:

More Profiles:

• Peach
• Chell
• Kratos
• Samus
• Aerith
• Mega Man
• Luigi
• Kerrigan
• Nathan Drake

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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Before you move on to this holiday’s other big first-person shooter (that’s Call of Duty: Black Ops II), here’s one last look at Halo 4 from our team of reviewers. GamesBeat’s own Rus McLaughlin already offered his thoughts on Microsoft and 343 Industries’ grand sci-fi adventure. But what does an analyst think about the game’s business potential? And what does a Ph.D. who studies games think of the design? One of these guys liked the game a lot less than the others… .

Halo 4: The critic’s review

• By Rus McLaughlin, GamesBeat staff writer

Halo 4 constantly ups the ante in smart, satisfying ways. Everything might’ve changed under the hood, but 343 did what it set out to do: make a Halo that can stand tall with original developer Bungie’s revered classics. That’s no mean feat. If you want numbers, you get two 8-10 hour campaigns plus a deeply involving multiplayer. That’s a hell of a lot of game for your dollar. Not an Xbox Live Gold member? Wait until mid-January, shell out $10 for a month’s access, and nab all the extra Spartan Ops episodes in one go. Consider that my sound economic advice.

It’s unfortunate that 343 didn’t stretch past the standard Halo playbook instead of falling back to so many recognizable gameplay beats (and I do wonder if that was a conscious decision meant to counter the “Will it be Halo?” doubters), but the gameplay itself offsets those issues. The level design is a precision instrument. Above and beyond that, Halo 4 expertly folds an intimate story into an epic scope, taking risks with iconic characters and sticking the landing every time. The Master Chief was heroic before. Now he’s a hero.

Next time, I’m expecting legendary.

Read the full GamesBeat review

Final critic’s score: 90/100

Halo 4: The analyst’s review

• By Jesse Divnich, VP of insights and analysis, EEDAR
• Twitter: @JesseDivnich

With Bungie fully exiting the Halo franchise, publisher Microsoft was faced with a fork in the road: Continue the Bungie-fashioned story, which could potentially upset loyal fans of the studio and the Halo franchise, or plow forward as if nothing behind the scenes ever happened. Choosing the latter, it is clear — after the fact — that Microsoft and 343 Industries made the right decision as consumer reception has been universally positive for Halo 4. Add a splash of a few bar-raising single-player and multiplayer features, throw in a $25-million marketing campaign, and a pinch of software and hardware special editions, and you have a brilliantly executed triple-A product.

It’s rare for any entertainment brand to reach its fifth iteration and still maintain — and in this case grow — its loyal install base. Especially a brand that faced a significant behind-the-scene game changer. In other entertainment verticals, changing of the director or primary cast members is often a death cry and a clear sign that some executive suit is obviously milking any remaining fan equity that a brand may have (I’m looking at you, Saved by the Bell: The New Class). With Halo 4, this isn’t the case, and against all odds, 343 Industries has successfully met the unprecedented high expectations of the 15+ million loyal Halo fans around the world.

Halo 4 is a masterpiece, and while we’ll miss Bungie behind the wheel of the Halo franchise bus, Microsoft and 343 Industries have successfully hurdled an obstacle that few in entertainment have ever accomplished.

Microsoft and 343 Industries are a shining example of how to keep an entertainment brand going, even when the original creators have decided to hang their hats to focus on other projects.

Final analyst’s score: 95/100

Halo 4: The academic’s review

• By David Thomas, Ph.D., researcher at the University of Colorado Denver
• Blog: Buzzcut

With space junk drifting silently past the Halo 4 start screen, the game promises a story of rebirth. Instead, this scene provides an unwitting metaphor for what comes next: a junkyard of recycled ideas, a patchwork universe that fails to provide the kind of epic stage necessary to support gaming’s most iconic space marine.

While there is plenty to like about Halo 4, and much to quibble with around its increasingly baroque plotlines and worn game mechanics, it is the lack of inspiration in the game’s settings and levels most indicative of its failure to live up to the greatest moments the Halo universe.

Great games all share a common feature — they take place in evocative locations and fantastical worlds. From Mario’s many lands to Grand Theft Auto’s Liberty City, the best play always takes place in an appropriate playground. And this version of Halo, when it’s not simply recycling familiar sets from previous versions, simply slaps on a new coat of paint on the same old thing. When you crash-land on the planet of Requiem, for instance, you feel less a sense of awe than a creeping sensation of the familiar. The world is kind of orange, and the Prometheans look predictably devilish. And then it occurs you have seen this before. This new Halo world is nothing more than Doom’s haunted house design and aesthetics borrowed and dropped down as something new. Tossing aside Halo’s tangible worlds and places, Halo 4 throws up a cheap amusement park ride.

It wasn’t always this way.

The original Halo: Combat Evolved rang true on so many registers that it’s easy to forget how impressive the Halo world was itself. Looking up and staring at the ring arching across the sky provided a breathless moment of being someplace else, someplace special. At its best, Halo was a place that felt like it was there before you, and Master Chief showed up with an arsenal of weapons. Clever level design would tease with views of places you hadn’t reached and would send you sensibly backtracking through levels you had completed. Halo avoided what many shooter games in the past had never managed. It put the player in the role of explorer rather than a rat running through a maze.

Halo 4 fails on this account early on.

Notice when orderly and rectilinear corridors of the first level’s spaceship suddenly turn windy. Why? In the logic of the haunted house, it doesn’t matter. It’s just all a part of the drama. But to the person playing the game, this is a clear indication that you are being pushed through an attraction. And at each stop on the ride, moving forward means only gunning, or possibly flanking, yet another garrison of enemies sitting, waiting, and blocking the way to the next bit.

Even as Halo attempts to extend its legacy, it leaves behind one of the series most successful features: the shape of its places.

Final academic’s score: 75/100

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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The following review contains mild spoilers only.

In one of her increasingly rare moments of lucidity, Cortana — the sassy artificial intelligence who’s guided us through three iconic Halo games that have generated more than $3 billion in revenue for Microsoft — asks a favor: “If we get out of this, promise me you’ll figure out which one of us is the machine.”

Cortana is dying, an 8-year-old with a 7-year life expectancy. Her longtime partner, the Master Chief, makes her a different guarantee: We’ll fix you. Those aren’t empty words, either, coming from a man physically augmented and mentally conditioned from childhood to be humanity’s perfect soldier … possibly at the cost of his own humanity. Saving his last, best friend just represents the latest objective assigned to him. At first.

Unbreakable promises and questions about our very nature provide a strong foundation for Halo 4 (releasing November 6 for Xbox 360), the first in a new trilogy from largely untested developer 343 Industries. They also present an interesting metaphor. Expectations run high when you bring Halo into the conversation, and many people asked whether 343 could keep the magic alive without Bungie, the studio that created the Master Chief and made his war into Microsoft’s signature video-game franchise. Would the Chief survive the transfer from one creative team to another intact?

He did. Halo 4 keeps every promise it makes. The real question is whether you think it promised enough.

What you’ll like

Things change
A moment comes in Halo 4 when the Master Chief does something we’ve never, ever seen him do … something I never even thought he could do. The entire universe pivots in that instant.

We haven’t exactly gone without Halo anytime in the last decade, but it’s been five years since we last played as the Chief. It’s good to be home again. Even better, our pulpy space opera hangs on to the dramatic weight it found in Halo: Reach’s doomed last stand and makes the crisis personal. It hurts to see Cortana, one of the strongest women in gaming, so vulnerable and unsure, and her uncharacteristic glitches soon deteriorate into full-bore schizophrenic breaks. I actually hesitated a few times when the game prompted me to insert Cortana’s chip into, say, a weapons terminal.

But it’s entirely gratifying (and a little telling) to watch the Chief circle the wagons around her, back her to the hilt, and defend her against all comers even past the point where he probably should. This is new ground, and the choices they make push both characters in new, unexpected directions. That’s what I wanted. That’s what I got.

And we get to shoot things. The Master Chief’s tenuous plan to save his friend hits a snag when they’re pulled inside Requiem — a majestic, artificial world built by the ancient Forerunner race — along with a fanatical Covenant splinter group searching for a new god to worship. Turns out those zealots came to the right place. What the Chief and Cortana discover on Requiem puts mankind in the crosshairs of the Didact, an overwhelmingly powerful enemy with an eons-old grudge against our species. If you ever wanted to see the Master Chief completely helpless, the Didact will oblige you.

He also provides our new targets, and they are no joke. Prometheans come in three sizes (pack-animal Crawlers, hovering support unit Watchers, and heavily armed, heavily shielded Knights), but they operate as one interconnected unit. Forget jumping into a pack of them and shooting your way out. Prometheans defend, repair, and even spawn each other, so it’s crucial to apply some strategy in order to shut them down fast. I found popping Watchers from a distance usually made a reliable Step 1, but priorities change according to who’s killing you at the moment. Individually or in a squad, Prometheans make pleasingly dangerous adversaries.

Knights in particular are tough, tricky — they can teleport out of harm’s way if you start scoring on them — and imposing in ways Covenant forces just aren’t anymore, so it’s especially satisfying when you assassinate one. Game-wide, it’s roughly a 50-50 split between Prometheans and Covenant encounters, though it gets especially tense when both come at you at once.

So show up for the violence, stay for the story. Big things happen in this game. We see evidence of a resurgent humanity represented by the UNSC Infinity, a massive, fully-loaded dreadnaught also drawn inside Requiem. Hints drop about our race’s destined role as we march out among the stars. And watch the Master Chief’s body language closely. Something’s happening behind that expressionless visor.

Yes, the universe changes in Halo 4, and I’m eager to see where we go from here.

Looks good, feels better
Stepping up to your first vista of Requiem evokes a genuine sense of wonder and awe, not unlike the first time we walked out onto the surface of a Halo, aided in no small measure by the all-new graphics. Halo 4′s stunning visuals represent a quantum leap for the series and a serious bump on nearly any other game franchise you’d care to name. This game is endlessly beautiful.

That’s only the tip of the overhaul. 343 Industries took major cues from Call of Duty — current holder of Halo’s old first-person-shooter crown — to add a slightly more tactical edge to the familiar run-and-gun game, and everything feeds into that philosophy. It’s in the Prometheans’ rock-paper-scissors approach, the new grenade-warning indicator, the new armor abilities, and in how the best weapons in the Master Chief’s revised arsenal tend to be more precision-focused. The Chief even moves noticeably slower than before, balanced by a permanent sprint function. Man, does it feel different. But once you dial in, Halo 4 takes off.

For better and worse, I never dug into the short-burst Thruster Pack or enemy-scoping Promethean Vision (the range on both didn’t impress me). But a handy, deployable sentry turret and a mobile, hard-light shield became invaluable. I also clung to my scope-equipped Battle Rifle and the improved Designated Marksman Rifle (DMR) like never before. Seriously, I passed over energy swords to hang on to my iron. That’s unheard of in previous Halos.

But whatever you’re shooting, the audio design takes everything up a notch. No more mistaking assault rifles fired in the distance for misaligned typewriters. You bring thunder to a gunfight, and alien weapons truly sound alien.

343 retooled absolutely everything in the never-ending quest for balance. The Warthog jeep feels far less floaty; I actually enjoyed driving it. A lot of old favorites — Ghosts, energy swords, shotguns, jetpacks — feel slightly (and rightly) scaled back from their always-win status. New favorites abound. I grabbed any Sticky Grenade Launcher offered to me for the pure comedic value of remote-detonating my enemies. The Promethean Lightrifle (a super-cool Battle Rifle analogy) and sniperish, one-hit-kill Binary Rifle are definite keepers, though the SMG-style Suppressor seems too inaccurate. And I’d take a very scary squirt-gun over the Boltshot pistol any day.

On the other hand, picking up the ridiculously overpowered SAW, a BFG heavy rifle, pretty much puts you on par with God. That suited me fine in the campaign; less so in multiplayer.

Also overpowered is the heavily publicized Mantis combat mech. It comes in handy when a few squadrons of Banshees strafe you, but it doesn’t distinguish itself from any other recent gun-heavy mobile suits (Mass Effect 3, Gears of War 3, etc.). You hop in and fire barrages of missiles at one teeny little Grunt. Because you can. I actually preferred  getting behind the stick of a Pelican for the first time in the series’ history. That’s some long-deferred wish fulfillment … even if that sequence feels more like a reward for my patience than an actual challenge. I like rewards.

You get a lot of them in Halo 4. The rhythms differ, and the sexy looks are a surprise, but the gameplay feels at all times tight, precise, and joyous.

Particularly once you fire up the multiplayer.

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I usually think of stained glass as an art form reserved for churches, but the Internet has shown me that the medium is well suited to showcasing some of gaming’s greatest icons.

The gallery below features the likes of Mario, Halo’s Master Chief, Half-Life’s Gordon Freeman, and other classic characters from some of the most popular titles in the industry.

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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What if the popular shooter Halo was made a decade earlier? What if Nintendo decided to make a fighting game featuring its stable of characters a console generation earlier than it did with 1999′s Super Smash Bros.? What if the role-playing game Final Fantasy XIII looked more like Final Fantasy VI? Well, they’d all probably be a lot more pixelated, but (as the gallery below shows) they’d still look awfully fun.

This collection of images, originally gathered by Reddit user Afrotators (I always love these usernames), shows multiple titles from gaming’s more recent years given the retro treatment. It makes you yearn for the days when pixels dominated polygons and your mother picked out your clothes for you. Now she just ties my shoes for me. Oh, how I miss those golden years!

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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You voted, and now we have a list of the 10 greatest prequels in gaming history. This epic list features titles from different genres, systems, and generations. They offered insight on the histories and backstories of their respective series.

GamesBeat defines a prequel as any game that takes place earlier in the series’ chronology than titles released before it in a series. God of War: Chains of Olympus takes place before the first God of War but hit stores almost three years later, so it counts as a prequel. But God of War 2 doesn’t count, because it’s a sequel to the original God of War and was released before God of War 3.

Now then, let’s get to the list.

Percentage of the vote: 3
Release date: 2010
Place in the series’ timeline: Ghost of Sparta takes place after the original God of War and before God of War II.

Staff Writer Mike Minotti: The upcoming PlayStation 3 action game God of War: Ascension won’t be the first prequel in the series. Heck, it won’t even be the second. That honor falls to God of War: Ghost of Sparta, the second PSP entry in the deity-killing franchise.

Now the god of war after killing Ares, Kratos is searching for his lost brother, Deimos. This gives the pale Spartan ample opportunity to once again brutally kill an impressive cast of mythical creatures, but the plot offers insight into a Kratos driven not by rage but by personal motivations.

Most important, the sad tale in Ghost of Sparta helps us understand the source of Kratos’s anger and justifies his actions (you know, basically killing every god ever) in God of War II and God of War III. Sure, the PSP couldn’t compete with the epic scope and high-definition graphics of the PlayStation 3′s God of War III, but Ghost of Sparta feature the better story.

Neat prequel fact: The plot of Ghost of Sparta was originally set up with a secret video that players could unlock in the original God of War (released in 2005, more than five years earlier), which showed Kratos and Deimos as children being trained for the Spartan army. Deimos is left to die for being too weak, and his spirit in Hades wants revenge against his brother.

Percentage of the vote: 3
Release date: 2007
Place in the series’ timeline: Crisis Core chronicles the seven years before the events of Final Fantasy VII, the groundbreaking role-playing game for the original PlayStation.

Staff Writer Rob LeFebvre: This action role-playing game on the PSP had many fans excited about the prospect of more Final Fantasy VII content, and it showed many of us the potential of the PSP handheld system. The game’s story takes the player from the war with the Wutai to the events at Nibelheim and right up to the time just before the beginning of Final Fantasy VII, one of the most popular installments of the venerable Japanese RPG series.

Originally, director Hajime Tabata and character designer Tetsuya Nomura planned on porting the mobile phone game Before Crisis: Final Fantasy VII, but they decided to start from scratch, utilizing the new PSP handheld’s capabilities. They also wanted to enrich the stories of the beloved characters from VII, including fan favorites Aerith, Cloud, and the evil Sephiroth, who ended up showing a much more human side.

Fans responded with their money. Crisis Core sold 350,000 copies in Japan on its release date, eventually becoming the third best-selling game for the PSP in that region, according to Square Enix. It also became the sixth best-selling PSP game in the States when released here in March 2008. Critics gave the game positive reviews, showing that you can please both groups on occasion.

Neat prequel fact: Final Fantasy VII spawned a large number of other titles, including Crisis Core, Before Crisis (the aforementioned mobile phone game), the feature length Advent Children, and an original video animation titled Last Order: Final Fantasy VII. Crisis Core is the fourth entry in this metaseries of media created around the Final Fantasy VII story, titled Compilation of Final Fantasy.

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In many ways the first-person shooters of today owe a lot to the original Halo, which launched back in 2001 alongside the original Xbox on November 15. It stomped its way onto the scene and proclaimed the genre could indeed be successful on consoles despite most gamers believing a keyboard and mouse was needed for a truly great experience. The naysayers were incorrect and nowadays first-person shooters are the single most popular genre on both Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3. Halo not only proved that first-person shooters could work on analog sticks for a console game controller, but it also created a totally original universe steeped in cultural and religious undertones as well as a meaningful, yet understated relationship between the main character and his computer-AI fueled, yet simply human, compatriot known as Cortana.

So, here we are ten years removed from Halo: Combat Evolved’s launch with a remastered edition staring us in the face, trying to have a voice among the throng of other titles in the holiday season. The original developer Bungie has moved on, but Microsoft’s new Halo studio 343 Industries — and two external developers Saber Interactive and Certain Affinity –have created a “gift for gamers.” The game packs re-done high-definition visuals that take advantage of the leap from the original Xbox to Xbox 360 and game play that’s extraordinarily similar to the original, less a few discrepancies that I’ll get into later. It also comes complete with six remastered multiplayer maps that piggyback on the Halo: Reach multiplayer experience as well as a reduced price tag of just $39.99, compared to the standard $59.99 for most games.

It’s good to be back

If you’ve never played the original Halo (first of all, where have you been?), it’s a classic tale of good versus evil with players taking the reins of Master Chief, a revered soldier in the UNSC (United Nations Space Command) and humanity’s last hope against the alien race known as the Covenant. Master Chief begins Halo as a silent participant, not unlike Gordon Freeman from Valve’s Half-Life series, but soon changes to become something more. Something wholly relatable despite the most unrelatable of circumstances. This is largely thanks to his purple digital compatriot, the aforementioned Cortana. It all begins with a very simple setup that gains depth and meaning as you progress through the campaign and through the subsequent games in the series. Very little has changed from ten years ago as far as the story is concerned. The dialogue is identical and the cut scenes, though re-imagined with some nifty new camera angles, are essentially the same.

The first of two deviations in the single-player is the addition of terminals. There’s one hidden in each level and activating them triggers a cut scene that peels back a small layer of the Halo mythos. Terminals are designed to tie the action of the original Halo to the direction that the series is going to take with Halo 4. I won’t give away anything other than to say that they’re well done and add some nice depth to a few select characters and events. The second change is the inclusion of hidden skulls, items that originally debuted in Halo 2. Picking up a skull allows you to alter the game play in some way, almost always increasing the difficulty.

As you make your way through the somewhat lengthy (at least by today’s first-person shooter standard) campaign, you’ll realize that the game play feels exactly as you remember, though there are some slight inconsistencies. First of all, you no longer have access to binoculars by clicking the right analog stick. This won’t matter if you have a scoped weapon in-hand, but if you want to zoom in on enemies from afar when using the assault rifle or shotgun, you’re going to have issues. Secondly, for some reason the folks at 343 Industries didn’t include vehicle degradation in this anniversary edition. In the original players could shoot off hub caps, break windshields and further tear up their rides, but none of that is included here. Neither of these subtle changes have a detrimental effect on the core fun you’ll have in the campaign, but they’re noteworthy nonetheless.

Of course, if we’re talking about purely aesthetic changes then there’s more than this review will allow. The entire campaign has been remastered and includes the requisite amount of detail that you’d expect on the current Xbox 360 hardware. Textures on enemies and objects are far more stylish than they were ten years ago and everything else has an extra sheen of polish. Particle effects are more plentiful (as evidenced in the later levels when snow flurries become common), enemies are a bit more intimidating and even weapons and vehicles have benefited from the upgrade in technical capability. In fact, the developers were so proud of their work that they saw fit to include a flashback ability. By tapping the back button or saying “Classic” if you have Microsoft’s Kinect peripheral, you’ll be teleported back to the 2001 version, just as it was. You can play the entire game in either mode, but take note that you can’t switch back and forth during a cut scene, which occasionally contains some of the most impressive visuals.
All of that new panache comes at a price, though. The frame rate (the number of images that are displayed in a second) chugs very often, especially when Master Chief heads outdoors or the action gets especially frenetic. What’s more puzzling is that the frame rate runs into issues in both Remastered and Classic modes. The great looking textures that I mentioned earlier also run into some issues. Occasionally they’ll take a split-second too long to load and some objects wind up looking very muddy until the high-resolution texture loads into frame. This was especially prevalent in later levels.

While Halo: Combat Evolved Anniversary does a solid job of bringing new life to the visuals, the same can’t be said for the core design of the game. Much like they did in 2001, the levels feel very repetitive late in the campaign with backtracking being commonplace and mission objectives being quite redundant in spots.That withstanding, this dated campaign still manages to be a breath of fresh air when looking at the current stable of first-person shooters. Franchises like Battlefield and Call of Duty tend to be more about style than substance. Enemies pop up from behind cover and retreat again as if in a game of whack-a-mole. There’s none of that in Halo. Enemies typically have a discernible level of intelligence and strategy is a must when attacking a situation. And while the campaign is linear, different situations present a number of tactical opportunities for players to discover. Halo: Anniversary is less about awesome scripted set pieces and more about delivering fun game play and crafty artificial intelligence and it’s a better experience for it.

A missed opportunity

Straying away from the campaign, Halo: Anniversary also comes complete with multiplayer game play. Sort of. It leverages the Halo: Reach (released in 2010 and developed by Bungie Studios) multiplayer engine, which means you’ll get Firefight as well as Forge. Firefight pits you and a group of players against wave after wave of AI opponents that increase in difficulty as you progress. The Anniversary Edition comes with a new Firefight map called Installation 04 that’s ripped right from the campaign and should please fans of the original Halo. Forge is taken straight from Halo: Reach and allows players to make edits to current maps by adding and deleting objects as they see fit. Neither of these modes are unique to the Anniversary Edition, but both are welcome inclusions.

What people will be most interested in, though, are the six newly remastered multiplayer maps from Halo: Combat Evolved. They’ve been given a similar graphical treatment as the campaign missions and play largely as you remember, except with Halo: Reach’s game play. That’s my single biggest issue with the multiplayer offering in this Anniversary Edition, it simply isn’t faithful to Halo: Combat Evolved. It was a conscious decision from the folks at 343 Industries to not fragment the Reach player community and ecosystem, but those who want to experience the same nostalgic feeling that they’ll get from the campaign will be sorely disappointed, despite maps like Beaver Creek and Hang ‘Em High making their return (the absence of Blood Gulch is blasphemy in my mind). It’s obvious that the developers knew this was going to be an issue and thus included some options to make Halo: Reach’s gameplay feel like the original’s as much as possible. Sadly there’s still a fairly large disconnect between the two experiences, and it sadly keeps the Anniversary Edition from feeling like a complete package.

Conclusion

Halo: Combat Evolved Anniversary is a good game, made even more impressive if you’ve never played a Halo title before (I envy you, in a way). It does a great job of replicating the feel of the single-player gameplay and story with some great-looking visuals, that do come at a cost. Being able to use that over-powered pistol again and hear the Halo theme that was crafted by Marty O’Donnell more than a decade ago is a fantastic experience, especially when you toss in the ability to hop back into 2001′s version of Halo whenever you please.

But with a lot of good, you also get some bad. The framerate and texture issues are inescapable and the mission design as well as level structure could use some serious variety, especially when compared to what else is on the market today. The multiplayer, while it is as strong as Halo: Reach’s offering, never feels connected to the Halo: Combat Evolved experience, despite six original maps making an appearance. The Anniversary Edition of Halo: Combat Evolved is a definitive rendition in terms of the campaign, but for my money I’d rather be playing in a LAN (Local Area Network) party with four Xboxes wired together in my parents’ house with the original game than this Halo: Reach version of a handful of original maps. In the end, Halo: Combat Evolved Anniversary gets an 82 out of 100.

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The company has tried to market its Kinect motion controller as an “experience” by giving Xbox 360 owners ways to control other parts of their Xbox 360 with motion controls — like the menus in the console’s dashboard that let owners access popular applications like Hulu and Netflix. That includes rebuilding games — even hardcore games like first-person shooters — with those same Kinect features.

Giving players new ways to control the game is one way to make the gaming experience more immersive. Adding voice controls gives gamers an array of new options to control their squads in role-playing shooting game Mass Effect 3. While still controlling series protagonist Commander Shepherd with a regular controller, players can tell their squad mates to advance on enemies and use special skills to disable them while Shepherd goes in for the kill.

Microsoft announced at the Electronic Entertainment Expo earlier this month that it would release a remastered version of Halo: Combat Evolved. Halo: Combat was one of the games that put the original Xbox, and Microsoft, on the map for home console gaming. It spawned two sequels and a number of spin-off titles that have all sold extremely well. The first Halo game was announced 10 years ago, when console gaming was still becoming more popular with mainstream audiences.

Today, home gaming consoles are a staple for most living rooms. That’s especially true with the advent of motion-controlled devices like the Xbox Kinect, which lets Xbox 360 owners control the console’s main features with arm motions and voice controls. Console owners are able to access popular apps like Netflix and Hulu, which found their start on computers, on the Xbox 360.

The Kinect is a strong part of Microsoft’s portfolio and has been a large factor in the company’s recent success. Revenues from Microsoft’s entertainment and devices division were up 60 percent to $1.9 billion in the third fiscal quarter this year from $1.2 billion in the third quarter last year. Revenue rose 13 percent to $16.4 billion, up from $14.5 billion in the same quarter a year earlier.

The new version will feature high-definition graphics that appear in the latest games in the series like Halo: Reach and recreate the first maps of the Halo franchise for multiplayer games. But players can switch back to “Classic Mode,” which will revert to the same graphics the original version of the game had when it shipped in 2001, at any time when they are playing the game.

The Halo franchise is considered partially responsible for making first-person shooter games, where users control a character and see the game through that character’s eyes, more popular on home gaming consoles like the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360. It popularized a number of features in first-person shooter games that are now staples — such as regenerating health over time and only carrying a limited number of weapons.

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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Gaikai embeds games in Facebook — Gaikai is the business-oriented equivalent of OnLive that gives game publishers a way to stream high-quality games through a web browser. The company showed off the technology by letting companies render their high-quality games like Dead Space 2 in Facebook. The service could run OnLive off its rails by giving publishers a way to directly stream games through the Internet without having to go through a middle-man game service like OnLive. Electronic Arts, one of the largest game publishers in the world and the publisher behind triple-A titles like Mass Effect 3 and Battlefield 3, is one of the first companies that Gaikai is working with to bring its games to web browsers.

Gamers can switch between remastered and classic Halo graphics on the fly — Microsoft announced that it would remaster the first game in the Halo series, Halo: Combat Evolved, for the Xbox 360 at E3 this year. The new version will feature high-definition graphics that appear in the latest games in the series like Halo: Reach and recreate the first maps of the Halo franchise for multiplayer games. But players can switch back to “Classic Mode,” which will revert to the same graphics the original version of the game had when it shipped in 2001, at any time when they are playing the game.

The whole game is part of the 10th anniversary of the release of Halo: Combat Evolved, which helped popularize first-person shooter games on home consoles and created a franchise that has given Microsoft an incredible cash cow. 343 Industries — which took over the development of the Halo franchise from Bungie, the development studio originally responsible for Halo: Combat Evolved — is working on the game.

OnLive renders a web browser in the cloud — OnLive, an online service that runs games on remote cloud servers and streams the game over the Internet, unveiled a web browser that uses the same technology at E3 this year. But the advantage OnLive has, along with its super fast cloud computers, is an incredibly fast internet connection that can download a lot of information very quickly, compress it and stream it over the Internet to end users. The whole experience usually ends up being much faster than typical web browsing, which can take upwards of a minute to fully download the contents of a website. OnLive can download that same content in a matter of seconds and stream it over the Internet at about the same quality and speed as a YouTube video.

That means websites that use heavy-duty Flash videos and games are suddenly much more accessible on mobile devices like tablets and smartphones. It also gives iPhone and iPad users, who have had to go without games and other web sites running on Flash, a way to access those websites and run them at the same quality that other tablets and personal computers can.

Sony lets gamers take their games anywhere with PS3, PS Vita connectivity — Sony is dead set on getting their games into every aspect of a gamer’s lives. To do that, the company is working with game developers to give players a way to transfer a player’s saved games, which store all the information about where a player was at a given time in the game, between PlayStation 3 and PlayStation Vita versions of the same game. That will give players a way to play the same game regardless of where they are.

Konami is one of the first companies that will use that capability — though the company is labeling it as “Transfarring.” Sony also showed off the technology with a new PlayStation 3 and PlayStation Vita title called Ruin, a brawler-style role-playing game that plays a lot like the Diablo series released by Blizzard. The new tool will also be available in the Metal Gear Solid and Zone of the Enders HD Collection, though Sony wouldn’t indicate what other games would use it when the PlayStation Vita comes out later this year.

The Wii U packs a punch — Nintendo isn’t known for having the best graphics in the business. The Nintendo Wii, for example, is much weaker than the other consoles in the current console generation and doesn’t play games in high-definition. That’s going to change with the Wii U, which looks like it will be more powerful than the Xbox 360 and the PlayStation 3. Nintendo showed off a high-definition demo of Link, a character in The Legend of Zelda, fighting off a giant spider — and the whole demo looked gorgeous. Everything in the demo shifted dynamically when the lighting changed or when there was any kind of wind in the room and the characters looked great.

Nintendo even tried to show off a little bit by giving E3 attendees a way to quickly change the lighting from a daytime setting to a nighttime setting, which would normally required the game to re-render everything to account for a new lighting setup. The Wii U was able to do that without missing a beat, changing the lighting completely and still chugging along at somewhere between 45 and 60 frames per second while still showing off a giant battle and high-definition graphics.

The PlayStation Vita’s rear touchpad is surprisingly cool — While at E3, VentureBeat’s Dean Takahashi and I got a chance to try out a few games on Sony’s latest console, the PlayStation Vita. That device features a touchpad on the main screen of the device and a touchpad on the back of the device. The touchpad was pretty fun to use in games like Uncharted and LittleBigPlanet and it ended up feeling like a useful part of the experience without getting in the way of the game like some new controller peripherals tend to do.

For example, when playing Uncharted, you have to swipe down on the back of the touchpad to climb up a rope. At first it seems a bit strange, but it then feels surprisingly intuitive after the second or third time doing so. Climbing ropes suddenly has a unique gesture that you instinctively know to use when you approach a rope. Likewise, in LittleBigPlanet, players use the back touchpad to push things that are in the background of the game to the foreground. That means that if players can’t make a jump without falling off the edge of the world, they can push a platform from the background into the foreground and just run across the gap.

Dust 514 is the next step in massive online games — Dust 514 is much like other FPS games at first, dropping players into closed matches that consist of team-based matches with certain objectives like capturing a position or eliminating the opposing team. But the whole game is tied very closely to EVE Online, a massive role-playing game where gamers play as pilots in space in the EVE Online universe. Each match that a Dust 514 player participates in is actually a contract created by an EVE Online player, a completely separate game that features tactical space combat and lots of player-driven politics.

Both Dust 514 and EVE Online are run on the same servers, so they regularly interact with each other. For example, the squads on the planet’s surface can fire artillery into space to damage ships in a battle in EVE Online, and ships in the EVE Online universe can initiate orbital strikes on the planet’s surface to help Dust 514 players.  They are two completely different games. EVE Online is geared towards hardcore MMO players and the average play session lasts around 3 hours. Dust 514 is a game for FPS gamers that only have 10 or 20 minutes to play. But they exist in the same universe and regularly interact with each other, creating an experience another MMO game has yet to match.

Be sure to check out VentureBeat for a full wrap up of the show and some of the crazier things we saw last week.

We’ll be exploring the most disruptive game technologies and business models at our third annual GamesBeat 2011 conference, on July 12-13 at the Palace Hotel in San Francisco. It will focus on the disruptive trends in the mobile games market. GamesBeat is co-located with our MobileBeat 2011 conference this year. To register, click on this link. Sponsors can message us at sponsors@venturebeat.com. To pitch a startup at the Who’s Got Game contest at GamesBeat 2011, click here.

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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Halo: Reach

This game fits into the epic story arc, taking you right back to the beginning of the events leading up to first Halo game released in 2001. If you’re a Halo fan, you already know how this game will end without even playing it, because it is a prequel. That gives the game an overarching sense of fatalism. You can only be so happy when things turn out good for the good guys since you know they’re part of a losing cause. As much as I’m happy to play another Halo, I’m sad that it’s all coming to an end, for now. (Microsoft has a new internal team, 343 Industries, working on other Halo titles, even as Bungie moves on to something new.)

The game’s story is based on the novel, Halo: The Fall of Reach, the first in a series of books set in the Halo universe. But even if you know the ending will be tragic, you still want to follow the  journey. It is a tale worth telling, full of heroism, much like how Homer’s Iliad begins in the midst of the Trojan war and ends before the fall of Troy. As on the plains of Troy, Halo: Reach is the scene of individual acts of heroism in the context of a larger war. The death of each hero is a tragedy unto itself, amid a battlefield of unnumbered tears. It makes you feel like, even though you as the player have a bit role on a vast stage, you are at the critical point in a great war.

The book chronicles the creation of the Spartan III warriors, an elite group of fighters who are humanity’s best hope against the Covenant, the collection of alien races who are bent on wiping out humankind. To the aliens, the planet Reach is just another place to be “glassed,” or laid waste via wholesale destruction. It is the last stopping point on the way to Earth and home to the military command of the United Nations Space Command, or UNSC, which holds the human galaxy together. The planet is beautiful, full of natural landscapes and big cities, and in sweeping scenes Bungie reminds us now and then that it has created an entire planet. The new game takes place on Reach, but it does not follow the story of the book, which explains the slight difference in the titles between the game and the novel.

Halo’s critics say there isn’t enough new material in each new Halo game. But to me, Halo games are always fresh because they’re mash-ups of my favorite things. The Halo games consistently please with their combination of game play, intensity, story, music, sound, graphics, and excellent voice acting. I don’t see too much reason to mess with that formula in the name of providing something different. Halo games are memorable for their unique and unmistakable experiences, and this one is no different. I give it a rating of 95 out 100 — near perfect, but with a few small flaws.

The cultural phenomenon of Halo

The Halo: Combat Evolved, Halo 2, and Halo 3 games starred Master Chief and his artificial intelligence companion, Cortana. This game does not. But that doesn’t seem to bother fans, who bought more than 3 million units of the game in its first 24 hours as it went on sale Sept. 14. The game generated more than $200 million in revenue on its first day, compared to $170 million for Halo 3. Microsoft calls it the “entertainment event of the year,” eclipsing the three-day opening box office receipts of Iron Man 2, Toy Story 3, and Alice in Wonderland.

The original Halo became such a smash hit that it established Microsoft’s place in the video game industry. It helped the Xbox cement its place among hardcore game fans, becoming part of the mass culture for a whole generation. More than 36 million units have been sold, generating revenue in excess of $2 billion. Microsoft has the No. 1 online game service in Xbox Live because of the Halo series, and that service is now generating $1 billion a year in revenue.

You don’t get to this level of business success on pure hype; you have to make your game into a cultural phenomenon. Bungie did so by making a series of good choices. Bungie, a developer of games for the Mac, envisioned the original Halo in the late 1990s. Ed Fries, former head of Microsoft Game Studios, scooped up Bungie for less than $30 million in 2000 as one of many bets on Xbox-related content. That deed earned him an angry call from Steve Jobs and a promise that Microsoft would support Mac games. The Bungie team, headed by Jason Jones, Alex Seropian and Joseph Staten, rewrote the game for the Xbox. Marty O’Donnell provided a musical score worthy of an opera. And in less than 11 months, they created a launch title that was played by 80 percent of the people who bought the first Xbox.

The first game pulled together a lot of different pieces of the video game art form. Bungie figured out how to make a first-person shooter game work on the game console, providing just enough assistance so that it was possible to hit targets with a game controller instead of a mouse and keyboard. That may not sound like a big deal, but it was huge, setting the stage for the mass migration of shooter fans from the PC to the console. Many other games tried but failed to capture the right nuances for controlling a weapon with a game controller with buttons and analog sticks.

The story of the original game was inspiring, the pace was pulse-pounding, the sound was riveting, and the music was haunting and lofty. You could jump into vehicles that had realistic physical behavior, and the setting on the ring-like planet Halo was breathtaking, from the waterfalls in its first scene to the indoor scenes of vast Covenant spaceships. All of these things explained why the first game was such a masterpiece, and the continued care and feeding of the franchise has created fans who will buy anything made by Bungie. That’s why Lord of the Rings director Peter Jackson is working on a Halo movie.

It’s hard to believe Bungie is walking away from all that in the hopes of building something better. I savored this game, playing it over the course of a week, rather than powering through it in a couple of nights as I did with Halo 3. I knew this game would be the last of its kind. I played the new game on the Heroic setting, which is one step above Normal and is the most appropriate setting for gamers who have played Halo before. It took me about a week of one- and two-hour game sessions to finish the single-player campaign. The salve for me is that I can play the multiplayer version for weeks or months.

The nuts and bolts of Halo: Reach

The main job of this prequel is to set the stage for Master Chief and his story. The action is intense, and it’s almost always preceded by long cinematic segments (mini films, really) that convey the latest twists in the story. You find that, besides defending Reach, you have to keep the enemy from getting its hands on the vital secrets of the Office of Naval Intelligence and the research of Catherine Halsey, the creator of the Spartans.

While there are nine major levels in the single-player campaign, each section is divided into its own set of chapters with pithy titles like “And the horse you rode in on.” With each new level, the game introduces you to a new feature or ability. In the very first level, the new feature is companions. You are introduced as Noble 6 (either male or female, depending on your own choice), the new replacement for a team of five Spartans. Each of the characters has a different specialty. You learn what those abilities are in the initial firefights where you learn the Covenant have invaded Reach. You could think of Noble Team as The Six Samurai (modeled after Akira Kurosawa’s classic film, the Seven Samurai).

I quickly found that I needed those companions just to stay alive. I had to play some sections of the game at least 10 times before I could proceed to the next section. It seems a lot tougher than past Halo games, in part because of the addition of new enemies that are tougher to kill than usual. The fighting is gritty. You have to fire at enemies a lot of times before they die, first knocking out their shields and then taking them out. In the meantime, other enemies surround you. You have to toss grenades at the tougher ones and switch weapons as needed. Inevitably, the fighting gets so close that you have to butt them with your gun in a desperate melee. That is business as usual for Halo.

The second level, dubbed Nightfall, introduces more breadth of play as you have to be a sniper, quietly taking out Covenant sentinels. It is here where you first use the hologram. When you tap your left bumper, the hologram sends out a decoy version of a Spartan that draws the fire of enemies. It turns out to be most effective later in the game when you are fighting the tank-like Hunters, which can only be taken out from behind.

In quick succession, you get to experience new levels in Warthogs (which are dune buggy style vehicles with big guns mounted on the back), helicopter gunships, tanks, and the final frontier — space combat. The space scenes are some of the best I’ve played in a sci-fi game. You shoot off into space in a rocket in a very dramatic liftoff scene. Then you have to fight other spacecraft that are attacking a human space station. While other games have failed to get the mechanics of flight simulation right, Bungie has made it easy and natural in Halo: Reach. Just as it made the controller work in shooting targets, it has also made the controller work really well as a flying instrument. You spend most of your time aiming, steering and shooting. You don’t have to worry as much about accelerating or decelerating.

The space combat scene is followed by a firefight in zero gravity. There is no sound in this battle,  and the physics of zero gravity change the way you fight. You can jump and fly forever, or toss a grenade that goes for a great distance. It’s one more element that makes you feel like you’re playing a brand new game, not the sixth game in a series.

The game isn’t perfect

The characters of Noble team get more airtime than the usual video game side kicks. But I miss the personality of the wise-cracking and emotional Cortana, who constantly accompanied Master Chief. In Halo: Reach, when the Spartans take off their masks, they reveal their own unique character traits. The problem is they are all of the tough-as-nails Marine variety. You get to know these characters a little, but the common trait they share is the courage to sacrifice themselves for other members of the team or the larger mission. If there is a flaw in the game, it is that you don’t get to know them nearly as well as you get to know the characters in games such as BioWare’s Mass Effect 2, which is another of the great games of the year.

The characters come and go. And you don’t learn much about your own character at all. In other words, there is too much action, and not enough back story to each of the samurai. I guess that means that Bungie should have added more cinematics to the story. As with the long cut scenes in Uncharted 2: Among Thieves (the best game of 2009), the movie part of the Halo: Reach game could have conveyed more character depth and thus more emotional attachment. Thanks to its flaws, it’s no surprise that Halo: Reach is coming in slightly below the review scores for the first three Halo games and below games such as Mass Effect 2 or Red Dead Redemption.

As far as game play goes, Bungie took away what it gave in Halo 2 with dual-wielding, or the ability to hold a weapon in each hand. That turned out to be far too powerful in the hands of veterans playing multiplayer games. And it made the single-player campaigns much too easy as well. In this game, you can tap new options such as load-outs with different weapons. You can use different enhancements for your armor, such as lock-down mode, which makes you invincible for a few seconds. You can also fly around with a jet pack for a limited time, or sprint at double speed for a burst of time. By and large, this is a good trade. But players may feel frustrated they can’t dominate the Covenant as they once did.

Multiplayer promises to offer billions of hours of fun

I am looking forward to playing a lot more multiplayer. You can play different versions such as Capture the Flag or classic Slayer (where you kill everybody). The new features such as jet packs will get a lot of use in the multiplayer combat. Multiplayer is always a joy because you get rewards and rankings based on your performance. With the new Forge mode, you can create your own maps for multiplayer combat. And with Theater, you can watch your own achievements and tell the world about them. When it comes to sharing, Bungie is on top of social media.

I started my first multiplayer game with the expectation that I would be slaughtered over and over. I actually managed to come in second place, mainly because I got my hands on a sword that gave me the ability to slay the enemy with a single stroke. The multiplayer gaming is what justifies the game price of $60 or more. Gamers have spent billions of hours playing Halo games online, and this one is likely going to be very similar. Overall, this multiplayer interface is much more streamlined. It matches you with other players quickly and it loads fast. That’s pretty impressive, considering that millions of players are going to be playing it all at once.

An opening for another sequel

Is the ending worthy of the Halo reputation? I won’t spoil it. But it is familiar in that everything comes to a spectacular head where much is at stake and the hero has to save everything, at great sacrifice. In that way, the story is very similar to that of Red Dead Redemption, which is also one of the best games of the year.

Not all ends in disaster for all of the characters in the Halo: Reach game. A couple of characters separate from the group in what seems to be a path for a sequel to Halo: Reach. If Microsoft continues with the Halo: Reach story, it could pursue the path taken by those characters. Given that there are seven novels now, Microsoft’s internal studio, 343 Industries, could take many different story paths. Bungie created an entire universe and Microsoft could publish a game every year and still not run out of material for games.

Halo: Reach is one more example of how the Halo universe could stay with us for many years to come. Whatever Bungie is working on for its new universe, it better be good. Because they’re walking away from a game franchise that has won loyal fans like no other series. I’m glad that Bungie has delivered a great game for its Halo swan song. But I’m still hungry for more adventures and frenetic game play. That’s the mark of an outstanding game. Bungie is quitting the Halo universe while it’s still in top form.

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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