The best thing about the Halo 5 gameplay trailer is the story doesn't immediately collapse into sci-fi nonsense; this is a coherent elevator pitch. The people our hero Master Chief trusted have asked him to do something outside his moral boundaries, and he's gone rogue. Now, a band of four soldiers must travel across a hostile galaxy to capture the warrior of their time. That's the story, or something close to it. Either way, this trailer alone offers a more coherent through-line than the previous Halo games, each of which I've played multiple times — I vaguely remember them having something to do with space politics, a floating space ring, something call the Flood, and clone babies. Following along required a patience for text-heavy in-game computer terminals and loopy dialogue.

My only issue with the Halo 5 trailer stems from a gut feeling that the most interesting computer-animated bits we see today won't quite be as over-the-top as playable chunks in the game. This trailer promises a high-speed snow-skiing death ballet, and I hope that's what I get instead of a slow-paced bullet fest that's just like any other shooter corridor, but on a horizontal decline. Actually, I hope for two things from the actual gameplay: more snow-skiing firefights and less Muse.