syltefar.com: Halo 5: Guardians (Xbox One)

2015-10-27

I went into a store to get this at launch day. Later, at Martin's place, it started downloading a 40 GB (!) patch, and the process stalled at around 84%. We had to give up and play Metal Gear instead.

2015-10-28

I left the Xbox running all night to make sure the game was ready and patched today. I played the first part of the first chapter on Heroic difficulty. The game plays well, I look forward to playing some more of it.

2015-11-01

I really like the graphics of mission 7, an alien landscape of Roger Dean-esque weirdness.
The scale difference between the Phaeton craft and the Spartans is really cool in mission 7. A pity the turret shooting gameplay in that section is completely uninteresting.

2015-11-07

2016-07-29

I entered a code from my Halo box, and got 14 days of Xbox Live Gold, so I should get some sweet free games to play during the next week.

2016-08-10

After struggling with the poorly controlled and slow Mass Effect, switching to this awesome 60 FPS technical marvel of a shooter was pure joy.
Completed mission 11/15. I had a lot of trouble with a Wraith, which I spent a lot of time trying to kill, but ended up bypassing. Still, it was fun to slowly analyze the area and figure out what to do.

2016-08-12

Completed the game on Heroic difficulty (Campaign). The last couple of large scale battles were fun.

2018-04-07

I played a couple of matches of Warzone Firefight, the online co-op mode with a bunch of random dudes. This game is still very technically impressive, and this mode seems cool with new characters and weapons to unlock, but I would much rather play by myself.

2018-04-08

I tried a weird workaround for playing Firefight alone, and it worked, but I couldn't figure out how to make the match go for more than 5 minutes.

2019-11-06

At a certain developer event in London, I tried playing Halo streamed to a phone using Project XCloud. The stream was running over the public network available to all attendees, and it worked well. A few minor hitches, but the latency was generally low enough for the game to be perfectly playable.

2020-08-13

I'm trying out an Xbox One X for the first time. I've plugged it into a 4K monitor, excited to see some 4K content. Initially, I was disappointed with the Xbox One system software still being in 1080p. I downloaded some games, and fired up Halo, which does indeed run a smooth 60 FPS in a very high resolution. I'm noticing the usual cross-generation weirdness with a mixture of texture resolutions, the level textures looking amazing, and the skybox being weirdly low resolution. The readout on the back of my gun has an amazingly detailed display with text and battery information, but the shadow maps are huge flickery blocks.

Halo 5: Guardians (Xbox One)