Halo 4

Say hello to the new-look Master Chief. Following the brief CGI teaser at last year's E3, 343 Industries has finally given us a closer look at what it's done to Bungie's iconic hero, in the form of a trailer coming soon to Halo Waypoint and a glimpse of two multiplayer maps.

"In some ways you can think of Halo 4 as a bit of a reboot," says 343 Industries' Frank O'Connor. "It's not a reboot in the sense of well-known film franchises like Batman or Star Trek or Bond. The difference here is that we're not pressing reset on the story, we're not resetting the state of the universe, this is a very deliberate continuation of th events that transpired in Halo 1, 2 and 3. It connects directly to the events at the end of Halo 3."

While much is familiar, including the Chief himself, the iconic Warthog, and the design and features of the multiplayer maps, 343 is bullish on the number of changes. Combat is "faster, visceral and more intense" and the still-unspecified threat is a far bigger thing than anything Master Chief has faced before. How he deals with it "will start to define him a little differently as a hero," says Executive Producer Kiki Wolfkill, "and hopefully add some dimension to him as a character." Telling a deeper and more moving story is a key aim, although we're assured this won't be achieved by making Master Chief a lot chattier.

As you can see in the images, his armour looks a bit more lightweight than in Halo 3, but it won't feel it. 343's trying to nail the sensation of being a 64-stone super-soldier who still manages to be flexible and athletic. How he feels to control and how he interacts with the world have both been updated in ways that, yes, 343 doesn't want to mention yet.

Inside the helmet there's an updated HUD and a greater awareness of Master Chief's personality, "but in a way that's not disruptive to the player," says Wolfkill. "One way of doing that is using the characters around him to reflect on Chief himself. Cortana's a huge part of that, she's obviously his closest friend and ally."

Multiplayer gets big changes too, although all we've seen so far are the all-new Spartan 4s: customisable in both appearance, weapon loadout and via "gameplay-enhancing choices", which sounds like a CoD-style perk system. More bafflingly there's a backstory too - red Spartans now fight blue Spartans for a reason. Presumably not because they were the ones who left that red sock in with the white washing.

In motion, the Spartans still have that familiar dogged focus, but we caught glimpses of new death animations and HUD updates that blast work-in-progress text prompts like "HEADSHOT KILL" and "MELEE KILL" into your view. This seems distracting, but O'Connor assures us it isn't, having tested it himself. "We put the video together two days ago," he told us. "I got the video back and I said 'there's a lot of UI there, when did it change?' And it was like: 'it's been the same for a month and a half, during all your tests.' It was a big surprise to me in the video, all the UI stuff coming up like it's intruding on the screen, because the reality is that you don't notice it in the game at all, other than I suddenly have a lot more information about what I'm doing and how I'm doing."

Halo 4 looks very, very good, with a level of detail that we've not seen elsewhere on Xbox 360. Of the two multiplayer maps, one's a Forerunner creation set on a shield world generating artificial sunlight, and is bathed in the stuff throughout. "The catwalks and drop-downs mean you can quickly move from level to level," says Creative Director Josh Holmes. "There's the circular floor around the outer corridors, and lots of different routes in and out of the centre including man-cannons that'll allow players to launch themselves right back into the heart of the action, where the combat takes place around the central point."