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[CamHostage]

Its a free taster session whilst they designate their main development bulk to Halo 6, like Forza 6 Apex

Eh, perhaps, but let's not go getting everybody's hopes up. Gears Ultimate Edition was not a taster for more Gears on PC, and Halo 1 PC or Halo Online meant nothing to any future tangible to future Halo PC plans. This is just this.

They could cut the middle man out with just allowing KB+M for Forge on Xbone (which I dont think should be that difficult to implement)...

For some reason, console manufacturers are incredibly careful with what hardware support they include in their box. I remember going all the way back with PSP that developers/manufacturers assumed having a USB port on the kit would mean it'd be open for them to use in their products, yet they were sorely mistaken when for example the Mercury team tried to supply a tilt sensor (and that's a well known story, I also know other attempts that hit a wall on PSP and PS3.) Even today, Sony and Microsoft are stingy with controller drivers to the point where there's been hardly any accessories for PS4/Xbox One despite very familiar and open interfaces. Access for something even as simple as an input device scares the hell out of console manufacturers, and given the strange ways that work-arounds have wormed into cracking the hardware, one can understand their timidity a little bit even though it sounds dumb as hell to not use USB universally.

Is there a way to have cross platform Halo across PC and XB1, that doesn't completely fuck over the latter. Like some kind of lockdown on kb&m controls when going into matchmaking with Xbox users? Can that realistically be programmed without being circumvented?

With this? No, no way. Please understand, this is not (at least as far as I understand it and ArsTechnica describes it) a full-fledged Halo online experience. You can simply invite Friends who are using their PC Forge app to jump online into your PC Forge app session, and you can set some rules and gameplay parameters to have multiplayer fun with them. You cannot even invite Xbox Forge users to join PC Forge users (according to text so far) to collaborate/test maps together despite the eventual cross-platform destination of the maps. The app is primarily designed to create Forge levels which you can then publish for the full gameplay experience on Xbox One Halo 5.

What's doable if they actually ported/made a proper Halo on PC that cross-played with Xbox is another matter. In that case, rules for K&M vs Controller matchmaking could be experimented with, but that's not happening today.

 

[buddha0991]

Does this mean we can actually play Custom Games? Or is Forge testing more limited?

 

[iosefe]

Does this mean we can actually play Custom Games? Or is Forge testing more limited?

fully featured forge mode, limited to forge maps i believe. you can invite people on your friends list to your games for testing and so forth. says play to any win condition you put

 

[SmoothRunningGun]

Seems silly not to package up the whole game and sell it. Maybe saving that for e3.

 

[Darryl M R]

So Halo 5 on PC? What's stopping a full port?

 

[iosefe]

So Halo 5 on PC? What's stopping a full port?

as close to Word of God as we got here:

Because the whole game would be exponentially more complex and time consuming to build. This happens to be the best way to properly test game creations, maps and modes. It's a great bonus that folks can have fun testing, but not the central point. Rather than think about this as a pared down PC game, it's more accurate to consider it as a significantly improved Forge tool for the existing game.

 

[JaggedSac]

why won't they just go all the way and let people purchase the full game on Windows?

Just tag it on the store and it should show up on PC.


Relevant?

 

[Dunkley]

So Halo 5 on PC? What's stopping a full port?

The fact that it's still a ton of work to port the rest of the game, a free application doesn't need to necessarily care covering a wide range of PC builds in terms of good performance since by all means this is designed to be a tool to create for Xbox One rather than a full fledged multiplayer client release, and lack of money.