Microsoft and 343 Industries aren't pulling any punches with the upcoming Halo 5: Guardians. According to some new reports the game will be much larger than Halo 4 when it comes to the campaign mode.
GamesRadar's preview says that Halo 5 will have a campaign mode that's twice as long as the one from Halo 4. Even more than that, 343 Industries revealed to GamesRadar that they were planning on making the campaign mode even longer yet, but they decided to scale it back because they needed it all to fit within a reasonable amount of length for players to not get overwhelmed and keel over from exhaustion.
The campaign mode for Halo 5: Guardians will span the locations centered around the Covenant, the Forerunners and the humans. The three locations weren't specifically detailed as to what players would be doing in each spot but we were given glimpses of Agent Locke and his crew as they were hot on the heels of Master Chief and the other Spartans in what looked like a Forerunner fortress. The mission that Microsoft showed off during E3 was a location consisting of Prometheans as Locke tracked down Chief. It's not hard to imagine that Chief and Locke will see their little cat and mouse game span the likes of galaxies, as they venture from human occupied worlds and locations to alien worlds and locations battling each other.
In fact, it's likely that the length of the campaign will be one big chase as Locke attempts to get a hold of the Chief.
Of course, the most important thing about Halo 5's campaign is whether or not it's actually fun. There are a lot of games with long and winding campaign modes but they're not always entertaining, engrossing or engaging.
Activision and the rest of the studios under their thumb have practically perfected the four hour campaign in Call of Duty games so that players get this short, replayable, high-impact, high-entertainment experience filled with explosions, one-liners and a few serious moral moments dealing with the cost and pains of war and the industrialized military complex. If Halo 5 isn't packing in enough character development, conflict or tension to keep the pace of the story engaging for the average gamer, it doesn't matter how long they make the campaign most fans will just get bored with it.
Halo 4 was one of those games where a lot of people felt as if the game had already gone on over and beyond what it had already achieved in Halo 3. That's not to mention that most of the notable characters in the series died in Halo 3. Some feel as if Halo 4 had already jumped the shark and at that point they were just coasting on the former glory of the brand.
343 Industries has an opportunity here with the fifth game to prove the naysayers wrong and rekindle some of the galactic sci-fi magic that Bungie originally introduced into the Xbox ecosystem when Halo: Combat Evolved launched 14 years ago. We'll find out once the new campaign, the improved multiplayer and the enhanced graphics go live on October 27th, 2015.
