Monday October 26th, the Roundhouse on Chalk Farm Road in London played host to the launch of Halo 5: Guardians. Luckily Calum Petrie and Fran O’Reilly were on hand to check out the event and report back.
The event was at the lovely Roundhouse venue which is situated in London’s “artistic” borough of Camden. The outside of the building was decorated in massive Halo 5: Guardians signs and posters making the event very hard to miss to passers by. The large venue was decorated with Halo themed items all over the venue; from replica assault rifles to a crashed Banshee (embedded in real soil, impressive) these little touches added to the ambiance of the evening. Other features were 20+ consoles all running Halo 5 and were available for all to play who attended the event (assuming you could get a turn), and there were many eager fans there.
Although there was a live YouTube stream on YouTube Gaming, London played host to a mini e-sports event in which YouTube personalities were teamed up and pitted against each other for a trophy and for the amusement of the people watch at the venue and at home. Sadly I did not get to check out any of the YouTube content as it was not being streamed at the venue so I just had to get my hands on the game instead.
Now obviously as I write this the game is live and many people will have managed to get hands on a copy for themselves, I was impressed with the changes to multiplayer. Though controller mapping is a little different now and with all the guns having an enhanced aiming (scoped mode) system means changes to the grenade button on the controller. Though I suppose in the grand scheme of things that is not a big deal at all, the game played beautifully and without issue at the time.
The evening was hosted by Graeme Boyd (@AceyBongos) and Julia Hardy (@itsJuliaHardy) and they done a great job of presenting the London parts of the launch event. The commentators for matches of the evening were Chris Tunn and Alan Brice who were on top form and managed to keep the banter flowing before, during and after the matches.
The evening went off without a hitch and during the show there was a raffle for people in the audience and a give-away online for the chance to win a Halo 5: Guardians Xbox One Console. There is nothing quite like the atmosphere of a place that is giving stuff away, it was a little reminiscent of EGX in that manner; where the Xbox Stage tossed swag into the audience every half hour.
There were a few celebrities from the gaming journalism world, TV and real Halo legends in attendance. Very early on in the evening we managed to meet up and get a picture with Jason Bradbury (The Gadget Show), Radio 5 Live’s Guy Cocker (@guycocker) and even got to meet 343 Industries Frank O’Connor (@franklez). There was also a lot of members of the public who just loved to opportunity to get their hands on the game before heading to the shops at Midnight to buy the game for themselves.
The evening was a pleasure, it was great to attend the launch of this historic game; and now the only thing left to do is ….. to finally play the game for myself. We hope that all our community and the Xbox community in general can appreciate the amount of time and effort that has been put into creating, developing, testing, fixing and so much more in the Halo 5: Guardians development process. Let us know you thoughts and feeling on the game and the launch event.
Check back soon for our Halo 5: Guardians review which will be live on the site soon.
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