There's something vaguely worrying about making a game that allows you fantasise a future gone to shit, in which your every step is dogged by death at the hands of unknowable aliens or traitorous allies... and then recreating a bit of it in real life to fight in. It strikes me that this is a bit like reading War and Peace, then churning up a 4m x 4m square of turf in your back garden to weigh up the whims of religion against the reality of conflict upon.
Either way, it's happened, and people would probably end up actually carking it if it wasn't all being sponsored by a fake gun company.
At this year's San Diego Comic Con, 343 Industries.and BOOMco have teamed up to recreate Crossfire - a Breakout map you may remember from the Halo 5: Guardians multiplayer beta - as a real-life 4v4 arena for you to go a-shooting in. Using BOOMco's new Halo-themed sticky dart guns, attendees (dressed in themed armour, no less) will get the chance to connect two inches of foam to a stranger's head and pretend that they straight-up murdered someone.
It comes alongside a sizeable presence for Halo 5 at the show - two major panels, the opportunity to play new mode, Warzone, metric oodles of showfloor merchandise and, most incredibly, the unveiling of a new Warzone map through the medium of a scale recreation in Mega Blox. What the hell is going on?
You can read all of 343's show plans on Halo Waypoint, which I notice include no contingency for the moment some sugar-addled 14 year-old smacks a peer in the temple with a pistol and fires all of their fake ammo into the ceiling. Irresponsible.
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