Halo 5: Guardians is, to my knowledge, the only mainline Halo title that hasn’t been ported to PC. It remains confined to consoles, with the sole exception being Halo 5: Forge, which is essentially just the custom game editor and isn’t the full experience. Fortunately, if you’ve been waiting for Halo 5 to arrive on PC, one determined fan is putting in most of the legwork.
I’ll be the first to admit that Halo 5 is probably my least liked game in the franchise, and that might even include the mobile spin-offs. In my opinion, the campaign was disastrously terrible by every metric. What wasn’t a disaster, though, was the multiplayer. While I will die on the hill that Halo 5 is a flawed game, the multiplayer was, annoyingly, pretty fun.
Warzone was a great addition to the franchise, which makes the fact that it was missing from Halo: Infinite all the more frustrating. But alas. Now, a community-run effort is aiming to get the entire Halo 5 package working on PC, with all the PC bells and whistles you'd expect, like higher FOV, increased FPS, and more.
How 'Halo 5: Reforged' actually works on PC
Halo 5: Reforged uses a custom PC runtime built around Halo 5: Forge, adapted to work with content you supply locally. This does mean you’ll need to source your own legitimate copy of the game to extract the necessary files.
It is still a work in progress, but the campaign, multiplayer, and Warzone are all playable in development builds. All 15 campaign missions currently load into gameplay, and two-player co-op is working. On the multiplayer side, they've even managed to support up to 32 players, something Halo 5 didn't originally have. On the Warzone Firefight side of things, testing seems to be going smoothly too.
Regardless of my personal feelings toward Halo 5, I do think this is great. I genuinely believe the game’s multiplayer would have been better served on PC rather than being locked to console, and if you are interested in this project, I suggest you join their Discord here.
Will Xbox shut down this community project?
As for whether this project will get taken down, it’s sort of up in the air. Prior to Halo Studios essentially being closed down, with few staff remaining, Ske7ch, the Community Director for Halo Studios, commented on the project.
Ske7ch says that from their loose understanding, it felt potentially problematic, but after getting more context, they realized it was a wrapper of shared components with players needing their own personal copies, but they do say that they couldn't know for sure.
Now if I were to speculate, I would say that given the recent announcement of Xbox Labs and Xbox embracing all this weird and wacky game porting and mashups happening, I could see this port sticking around without much issue.
Let me know your thoughts. Are you happy PC players can get disappointed with Halo 5’s campaign and enjoy the game’s multiplayer, or are you a genuine fan of this entry? Leave a comment and be sure to take part in our poll!
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