Just received my physical copy of Dragon Ball Z: Kakarot that I ordered a few days ago and didn't have to pay anything for it. Doubt their digital sale is better than that :D

Not going to play it before the Series X upgrade drops in January though

Just played on the Eternity map we've seen from promo videos with a couple friends and it's AWESOME! 

DarkMaiming is a 343 Forge Council member.

He made that Haven remake and this.

I'd assume the Forge Council maps have a better chance at entering MP rotation sooner than others.

I am calling this now. If MS purchase of Acti/Blizz goes through, 343 will move away from slipspace engine and use COD. There is way to much upside to it. Only thing that could hold it back would be Forge. With enough engineers they may be able to get it up and running after a year release.

Doubt it, if they were going to swap engines they might as well swap to Unreal Engine since it's the most widely used and swapping to CoD's engine versus Unreal Engine would be practically the same aside from monetary costs having to be paid to Unreal, but Microsoft probably won't care about that since it's so low.

The amount of work to get it running on Unreal Engine versus CoD engine will likely be exactly the same. Two major issues, the first one being Forge which offers a level of editing that few Unreal Engine games do and Halo's physics heavy systems, CoD is very stiff by comparison and very 'realistic' compared to Halo's movement and physics.

Worth mentioning as well that Warzone was a buggy mess for years and they had to revamp the engine for Warzone 2, so IW's engine isn't exactly perfect either, then again, no engine is. But I don't see the point in throwing away years worth of work in getting Slipspace up to scratch, especially all the work they've put into Forge, which has years worth of updates planned (they said 2 years minimum).

Also, another leaker recently said that Slipspace has improved a lot recently but 343's main issue is manpower, Jason's article about Slipspace and the toolset providing issues was during development, so things may have improved since, I don't think they should abandon it personally, they went through the same pains that Bungie went through in their first attempt at revamping Blam, to throw it away would set them back years.

What they need to do after ABK is acquire Certain Affinity and Skybox Labs, ASAP. Expand their Halo teams but allow them to work on original IP too, coordinate between the three of them to improve Slipspace with each studio having a Slipspace engine lead and keep them Halo teams assisting 343 on a permanent basis.

But as those two studios are mostly focused on Battle Royale and Forge which both need a significant amount of manpower and will almost be their own game, leaving little help for Campaign/Multiplayer and anything else (I.E. PVE). I would also set up a second 343 studio somewhere with a fresh pool of talent for the Halo series, not in Seattle, somewhere like Canada, California, Texas, etc.

Infinity Ward has four studios, Lol.

First day of Forge has some good stuff! Till you remember since there’s no CGB, it can be difficult to get around to see what’s there and you gotta find people to play with lol, but I can’t wait to see what comes out of this over the coming weeks and months!

Unreal engine is not flexible enough, struggles with open world games and does not have the engine for vehicles like COD engine does.  Unreal just not a good engine for what Halo does best, that is why they would not go to it.  COD engine on the other hand is in house made, perfect for what Halo does and only really missing forge capabilities.  The fact that their are multiple studios that are highly talented and competent on the engine allows 343 to shore up one of their biggest weakness which is outsource studios ramping up on slipspace.

ABK also helps with the manpower issue and as we have seen ramping up more experience developers is not as easy as it sounds.  COD going to a 2 year release also helps where certain personnel will be available for assistance.  

The thing is engine developers are not always engage full time, and this will allow MS to use all their new studios from ABK to fix 343 biggest issue which is ramping up to a size that can consistently churn out content.