Halo 5: Guardians: the hunt for Master Chief begins

Spartan Jameson Locke is leading a hunt to catch Master Chief, who has walked away from the UNSC searching for answers. That premise alone made Halo 5: Guardians the most structurally daring story the series had attempted — the legend himself as the quarry.

The game pairs its iconic protagonist with Locke, a character built across Halo 2: Anniversary’s “Terminals” and the miniseries Halo: Nightfall specifically to carry this story. Master Chief has gone AWOL with Blue Team; ONI dispatches Fireteam Osiris, led by Locke, to run him down and find out why. The gameplay video below shows both sides of that chase in motion.

The mechanical additions were real: direct squad orders brought a tactical layer to the campaign, which supported four-player online co-op across three worlds. Multiplayer delivered a brand-new mode, Warzone — up to 24 players, human or AI, competing across sprawling objective maps — alongside the Arena, four-versus-four combat in the purest Halo tradition.

But the headline controversy came from what was missing: Halo 5 shipped with no local play at all — no split-screen campaign co-op, no offline multiplayer, no LAN. Fans pushed back hard and petitioned 343 Industries for split-screen’s return; the studio committed to restoring it in future titles, but the damage to the couch-co-op tradition was done.

343 Industries’ Halo 5 released on Xbox One and stayed there — it remains the only mainline Halo never ported elsewhere, which makes Halo 5: Guardians an Xbox One collector’s marker to this day.

Official Site: Halo 5