343 studio head talks about Halo 5’s 4-player co-op

With only a few weeks to go until the launch of Halo 5, 343 is eager to share details about the upcoming sequel to the longstanding franchise. There’s a lot of changes on the horizon for the series, including a new Warzone mode, but a pretty substantial change will be the inclusion of four-player co-op.

“Early on we started talking about the types of stories that we wanted to tell and the experiences that we wanted to create, and we really wanted to focus on a much more sociable experience, especially in our campaign…and that sort of led us in the direction of building up the two squads, each of which has four Spartans that you can control, which would enable us to support seamless drop-in, drop-out cooperative play. We also wanted to introduce a new character in Agent Locke, who would be a direct contrast to the Master Chief, and allow us to examine the Chief more closely as a character via an external perspective or lens, if you will,” explains 343 studio head Josh Holmes.

Continuing, he elaborated, “I think co-op has always been a big part of Halo’s campaign, but in the past it’s sort of been treated as a completely separate experience, where you just have three other clones of the Master Chief running side by side. The narrative breaks down. One of the big creative goals that we had for Halo 5 was to bring that into focus and support it through the story.”

Halo 5: Guardians arrives on XB1 October 27th.