Halo:Waypoint

Halo Waypoint is your one stop destination for all things Halo, coming to Xbox Live on November 5. This portal seeks to bring together the entire Halo universe in one place and provide a sort of string that ties each game together. Included will be an assortment of screenshots and videos -- some official and some fan-made – a career system that links the achievements for all Halo games together, and the latest in Halo news. IGN spoke with Halo Waypoint's creative director Jason Pace to get the details on how the career will work and what the future of Waypoint holds.

"The career milestones are a little different from achievements," says Pace. "As you earn new [Halo] achievements... you will level up your career milestone." There will be 40 milestones, or levels, available at launch. With 3950 possible achievement points to unlock through three Halo titles on Xbox 360, there are plenty of ways to reach that level cap. It will take about 60% of the total achievement points unlocked to reach the highest milestone, a percentage that was chosen with care. "I really tried to focus on a model where any committed player could reach the level 40 cap by cherry picking achievements that you can generally earn by working really diligently towards them," said Pace. And once you've reached that cap, everyone on your friend list will know it. These milestones can be compared with your friends for bragging rights.

The focus at launch was to get the system working and properly balanced. Some tweaking post-launch might need to happen, which is why you won't see bonuses like Avatar awards for reaching specific milestones. "We didn't want to pin anything material to it necessarily in this initial launch, but certainly that's the direction we're moving in. We want to bake career milestones into tangible awards you can get from gameplay," explained Pace.

The long term goals for Halo Waypoint are for it to become an immersive and expansive feature. That plan for the future includes a webpage companion where you can view your milestones away from the Xbox 360, looking for ways to bake the Waypoint career into the game experience, and better integrating social networking tools like Facebook and Twitter. "We're definitely looking at expanding career mode and really making you feel like your entire Halo gaming history is encapsulated in a meaningful way and your identity expands across all of the Halo experiences you play," says Pace. Waypoint won't just be a one-way propaganda machine. Microsoft wants the community to take part in shaping the content. If you want your great content featured, there's a chance you might be able to live that dream. "We are working on a feature right now where we'll allow users to upload cool stuff through Xbox.com/halo," says Pace. "Right now we are going to partner with Bungie on Bungie.net and we'll do "Best of" community submissions. And that will generally be chosen by our community manager and then featured in weekly spotlight areas for community content on Waypoint on the Xbox."

Halo Waypoint will launch on November 5 and initially be free for both Xbox Live Silver and Gold members. On November 26, Waypoint will be locked for Silver members and only paying Gold members will have access to it. The download will be small enough to fit on most memory cards, promises Microsoft.