To some of our readers, this will come as a pleasant surprise, it seems that Microsoft does indeed care about us PC gamers after all. For the first time since 2004 comes a first-person shooter campaign Halo experience to our beloved platform, pretty sweet eh?! It’s only been 12 years since Halo 2 was released on Windows. Since then Halo was exclusively an Xbox only series (if you don’t count upcoming Spartan Strike/Assault) but that time is about to change! WOW! Halo 5 on PC…oh wait…my bad, Halo 5: Forge, coming September 8 to the “lovely” Windows 10 exclusive Windows Store comes the most powerful and accessible world, level and game creation suite. Letting all you would-be Spartan’s and map makers out there the freedom to build, share and play the Halo experience across Windows 10 and Xbox One!!!

If you couldn’t tell, I’m not impressed that the only Halo experience us PC gamers get, besides Spartan Strike and Assault, modded Halo: Combat Evolved and Halo 2 games, is going to be a map making tool basically for console players to enjoy, instead of Halo 5: Guardians itself. It only gets worse from here, in regards to the PC Halo experience, the only hope we had for a fun multiplayer Halo deathmatch experience has just been murdered in its infancy. Some of you may have known about the free-to-play multiplayer Halo: Online game, announced back in 2014. I’m sure even more gamers would have known about it, if only it wasn’t for the fact of it being stuck in a Russian only closed Alpha/Beta testing phase for the last two years. Unfortunately with its cancellation due to unforeseen reasons by Microsoft, only the Ruskies had the opportunity to play this modified Halo 3 engine built 16-player multiplayer game. R.I.P.

To enjoy Halo 5: Forge, according to 343 Industries, the optimal experience for users recommends Windows 10, GTX 970, 12GB RAM, 40GB HDD space and a speedy 3.4GHz Intel i5-3570k, for those modest gamers like myself would need at least a 2.3GHz Intel i5 with 8GB RAM and a GTX 650 Ti with 2GB VRAM and for the elitists out there drooling to run at the glorious 4K resolution would need a beefy 3.4GHz i7-4770k and a GTX 980 Ti with 6GB VRAM or higher or AMD equivalents.

In all honesty, I’m sure it’ll be fun to play around on PC through community made environments for Halo 5: Forge, but for the most part, at least for now, unless they release Halo 5 on PC sometime in the foreseeable future, only console owners will reap all the benefits of Forge’s tools. 343 Studios have mentioned in the past that they have no intentions on porting Halo 5 to PC, hopefully they change their mind on that. Lately we’ve been seeing more and more Xbox One exclusives coming to PC via Windows Store, so there will always be the slight chance of seeing it one day on our glorious gaming platform, in one form or another, be it via Windows Store, Steam and other digital storefronts or via emulation down the road in a couple of years. Only time will tell, but Microsoft does need to throw PC gamers a bigger bone then some half-arsed Windows Store ports and map making utilities. It’s a mighty deep hole to climb out of since the Games For Windows Live (GFWL) disaster of yesteryear and Windows 10 Store isn’t the savior they were hoping for either, Microsoft needs to “WOW” us sooner than later, but Halo 5: Forge is a step in the right direction, albeit a teeny, tiny, baby step.