Halo 5: Guardians out on October 27 - watch the new footage now

An official release date of the 27th of October has been set for Halo 5: Guardians on Xbox One. Dropping not one but two trailers, Microsoft is continuing to ask us to 'hunt the truth' when it comes to a showdown between the Master Chief and ONI manhunter Spartan Locke.

Each trailer depicts the same situation; a blasted world, a battered statue of the Chief and the two Spartans facing off - the difference is in who's winning. One trailer has Master Chief lording it over an injured Locke, the other Locke giving John-117 a right ticking off.

There's no telling quite where they are at this point - this is certainly a more habitable world than the empty desert we saw in the game's announcement trailer. In fact, the story as a whole remains shrouded in mystery - Halo 4 ended with Master Chief returning to his UNSC home. In the interrim, he's apparently gone AWOL, been branded a traitor and become a lot more talkative.

The tagline for each trailer is 'there are two sides to every story' and, given we've already learned that Locke will be a playable character, it's increasingly conceivable that Guardians could one-up Halo 2's Arbiter sections by featuring two separate campaigns, one for each Spartan as they journey to their inevitable showdown. Speaking of which, we know the Arbiter will be turning up too - where's that Keith David-voiced monster gotten to?

343's very much playing the long game here - every trailer (not to mention its ongoing Hunt the Truth ARG) has added new questions, but with a firm release date in place, we'd expect to start hearing more concrete information in the next few months. Now if they could just tell us why Master Chief even needed to wear that big wizard's cloak in the original trailer...

Joe Skrebels
Joe first fell in love with games when a copy of The Lion King on SNES became his stepfather in 1994. When the cartridge left his mother in 2001, he turned to his priest - a limited edition crystal Xbox - for guidance. And now he's here.