Another short news week, but we’re back to talk about the few nuggets from the last week. With community guest Bobby B444, we talk about some of the things in Halo 5 we could see making the transition to Halo 6 and some things that don’t. We’ll have more conversations about these things after HaloWC, but in the meantime, we look forward to what next weekend brings.

There’s a strange thing happening in Halo Wars 2 right now with Yap Yap THE DESTROYER wreaking havoc on the game’s mechanics. If you head in to multiplayer, you’ll instantly see Yap Yap’s influence and his units having some heavily boosted abilities. In other news, the HaloWC Latin American Finals have concluded and Dust Storm has moved and gotten hitched.

The time has finally come for Dust Storm to leave his home at 117 and move on to married life. As cause for celebration (and a little bit of shed tears), we are reminiscing the time spend over the last two years and everything that has happened in that time span. We gave away a lot of Halo gear too, for those tuned into us live on Mixer. We’re excited to see what the next few years of Halo brings us and are very thankful for our fans and listeners who are along for the same crazy ride as we are.

Since Grim snuck in last week’s community update after our last podcast, we’re sneaking in one of our own to talk about the Chief Concerns update. We get more information about Halo: Bad Blood coming out later this year, celebrate Master Chief’s birthday and have more community highlights.

Halo: MCC has another development update addressing some of the community’s most burning questions and wishes to see come to the game. While the team would love to incorporate everything we want, there are some ideas that will be included or patched in and some things that will be left to future updates if feasible given the game’s architecture. Another comic book three-issue miniseries has been announced: Halo: Collateral Damage, which will follow a mission of Blue Team somewhere in between the events of Halo: Fall of Reach and Halo 2. We’re also catching up on last week’s community update.

We’re diving into another Halo novel and this one connects quite a few of the other Halo novels together. The Kilo 5 trilogy, New Blood and Halo 5’s campaign all tie in to this podcast’s book of discussion, Legacy of Onyx. Taking a new perspective on the Halo universe, we get to see the events unfolding at Onyx through the eyes of children along with the standard Covenant or Servants of the Abiding Truth and Spartans viewpoints. This has become one of our favorites among the published Halo works, and we’re looking forward to the ties this book has into future novels and titles.

The life of the Battle Rifle in Halo is probably the toughest out of the entire sandbox. It seems like no balance update goes by without tweaking some aspect of the beloved weapon. Along with the continuous changes to the Halo 5 sandbox, the Halo World Championship is well underway with the Orlando Open LAN behind us with Splyce taking home the gold and the London finals up next. Since there hasn’t been an update for a couple of weeks, we are graced with a little community love from Valentines day artwork, screenshots, videos and more.

The Master Chief Collection is at long last getting some much needed polish and overhaul. While we’re still months away from seeing any big changes coming to consoles, Ske7ch has let us know that the legacy team is hard at work swapping out new XDKs and APIs to give MCC a second wind. Over the next few months, there will be a slow stream of updates, but there will be some public builds available to members of the Halo Community Feedback Program and Xbox Insiders.

We continue through the slow roll of Halo news this week, but we did get a community update looking at some new Halo merchandise, updates on the HaloWC and more community content catching Grim’s eye. However, as we have been touting the last few episodes, we are pleased to welcome Justin from Eckhart’s Ladder as our first guest of 2018. While he mostly focuses on Star Wars comparisons in his videos, he’s still a dedicated Halo fan running the gambit of comparing technologies, ships and soldiers against other Halo factions and Sci-Fi franchises.

We’re another week without much news so we’re left to talk about our weekend activities related to Halo. We’re hoping to have more to bring to the table next week with our first guest of the year.