When the Halo 5: Forge tool was first announced for the PC I was extremely excited as I figured it would allow us PC players to finally experience Halo 5's multiplayer, but in a higher resolution and with better controls. Unfortunately, what ended up happening is that Halo 5: Forge on PC more or less served only to make custom games for the Xbox One as the PC version could not actually host multiplayer matches for any of these fancy, newly created custom maps.

However, due to the most recent Monitor's Bounty Update this is no longer the case! Not only has the Forge tool been greatly improved, but the PC version now finally has the ability to browse and join multiplayer custom games. In other words, you now have the ability to play Halo 5 on the PC... for free!

While I would love to summarize all of the changes brought in with this update, I am afraid that its so bloody massive it would take me the better part of a day to even read through all of it. So if you're interested in all of the details, no matter how minute, head over to the official patch notes. On the other hand, if you're just interested in the PC specific stuff, here's a brief list covering some of the more relevant changes:

New / Updated Features:

• Players can now browse and join Custom Games in progress

• Added a 5k resolution option (5120 x 2880)

• Added a Fullscreen toggle in the Settings Menu

• Added the ability to render at resolutions higher than the native display resolution (for super-sampling)

• Added a new list of selectable Gamertags to the Pause Menu

• Added a new Minigame Game Variant

• Created a playable version of the Tutorial Map (Test Site V)

Tweaks and Changes:

• Stability improvements

- Fixed the leading causes of game instability, as well as improved stability for some specific PC build configurations.

• Improved Graphics performance/features/fixes

- An NVIDIA-card-specific issue with water effects has been fixed, along with an AMD lighting fix, shadow effects fix, and improved performance with Razer CORE exterior GPU usage 

• Mouse control improvements

- Some issues which negatively impacted the mouse sensitivity/aiming have been fixed

• Globalization/Localization improvements

 

• Fixed an issue blocking players from viewing more than 12 bookmarks

• Fixed an issue where Game Mode settings would not persist when creating copies