Halo 5: Guardians isn’t available on PC, but Halo 5: Forge, which is a Windows 10 application that lets users use Halo 5‘s Forge editing tools, is. And now, with a new update, Forge on PC may be about to become a whole lot bigger and more full featured than it already is.

In fact, as WCCFTech are reporting, the upcoming Halo 5 update will also apply to Forge on PC, and it should add a custom games browser to the app. This, then, should turn the PC version into a free Halo 5 Arena/Forge multiplayer game for PC players to join in- a very roundabout way to bring Halo 5 multiplayer to PC, in any case.

“The upcoming update to Halo 5 will indeed span both Xbox One and Win 10. I’m told there are a number of PC-specific fixes and improvements around some of the more common crash instances and some tweaks to hopefully improve mouse responsiveness,” 343’s community manager Ske7ch posted on Reddit. “The ‘join in progress custom games browser’ is a huge addition and should hopefully turn the Win 10 product into essentially completely free Halo 5 Arena/Forge MP (minus ‘matchmaking’). Personally I’m super excited about the Forge updates in conjunction with the game browser and hoping it really helps the PC community flourish.”

This sounds good to me- although I guess I hope that Microsoft just greenlight a full fledged PC port of Halo from here on out. This is one series that would find some very enthusiastic uptake by PC players.

We already know that Microsoft’s PC games of late have been basically unmoddable and unextendable, thanks to the UWP file format (which is the file format that they are distributed in) being a pretty tight package that doesn’t lend itself to much, if any, tampering. However, whatever little modding was possible before will now no longer be possible at all.

While Microsoft’s PC ports have gotten a whole lot better than the mess they used to be earlier this year – Halo 5: Forge and Forza Horizon 3 are both pretty good – they now are also completely locked down, meaning no more modding. This is because both these games run on the appx file format, meaning even simple things like XML editing are now off the table.

The good news is this, along with the Windows Store, completely kills piracy. The bad news is that modding, which is a mainstay of PC gaming, is now not possible with this format. This was probably something that most PC gamers had come to terms with as far as Microsoft’s games were concerned, but if other game developers adapt the format, then modding at large as a concept could be seriously endangered. This, plus reports that the PC version of Forza Horizon 3 has some performance issues, being attributed to the appx encryption, means that PC gamers are unlikely to be with the new format’s introduction.

Microsoft and 343 Industries may not be launching Halo 5: Guardians on PC, but they are bringing over the Forge mode from the game over to PC as a free download, and even making it cross compatible with the Xbox One version. It’s not much, but it’s something, I guess, and fans of the series would probably enjoy downloading it and giving it a spin.

Since this is just the Forge mode (and since, admittedly, Halo 5 is not much of a looker to begin with), you won’t need much to run the game on your PC at all- as long as you have Windows 10 installed on it, actually, chances are that you should be able to run the game without any problems. The official specs chart for the game, which you can see below, certainly doesn’t seem to be asking for a supercomputer.

Halo 5: Guardians is available on Xbox One exclusively. While Microsoft have no plans to bring it over to the PC for now, they will be bringing over Halo Wars 2, developed in association with The Creative Assembly, over to PC as well as Xbox One, so Halo fans on PC do have something to look forward to.