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Ridley Scott's Halo: Nightfall trailer lands at Comic-Con

Taking place between Halo 4 and Halo 5: Guardians, the Ridley Scott-produced film featuring actor Mike Colter as agent Jameson Locke makes its first appearance in San Diego.

Nick Statt Former Staff Reporter / News
Nick Statt was a staff reporter for CNET News covering Microsoft, gaming, and technology you sometimes wear. He previously wrote for ReadWrite, was a news associate at the social-news app Flipboard, and his work has appeared in Popular Science and Newsweek. When not complaining about Bay Area bagel quality, he can be found spending a questionable amount of time contemplating his relationship with video games.
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Nick Statt
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Actor Mike Colter plays a new character in the Halo universe, agent Jameson Locke, and will be a major part of the Halo 5: Guardians video game. 343 Industries

Halo: Nightfall made a splash at Comic-Con 2014 on Thursday with its first trailer, featuring agent Jameson Locke played by actor Mike Colter. Locke will go on to be a playable character in the upcoming Halo 5: Guardians video game, though Colter told attendees of the film's Comic-Con panel in San Diego that he "can't confirm whether he's a friend or foe of [main character] Master Chief."

Ridley Scott, of Alien, Prometheus, and Blade Runner fame, is executive producer on the film, while Sergio Mimica-Gezzan, known for Battlestar Gallactica, is directing. The digital feature, which will act as an origin story for Colter's character, is set to release on Microsoft's Xbox and Surface platforms on November 11. It will also be bundled with Halo: The Master Chief Collection, a high-definition remastering of the series' core titles.

Halo: Nightfall takes place after the events of 2012's Halo 4, intended as a direct lead-in to Guardians. The latter will be next main installment in the sci-fi gaming series for the Xbox One, with a release date of 2015.

Colter, best known for CBS' "The Good Wife," is taking on a slightly more ambitious role as Locke while Microsoft continues to experiment with ways to expand its core franchises beyond gaming. Nightfall is not the first live-action Halo feature -- Microsoft released the episodic Halo 4: Forward Unto Dawn in 2012. It is, however, the first to directly tie in to a major Halo installment in the series and act as prologue to the game's main events.

Microsoft announced last week that it will be closing down the studio responsible for the project, Xbox Entertainment Studios, as part of the company's restructuring efforts that will cut 18,000 jobs over the next year. However, the crew is staying on board to ferry the various Halo projects to completion. That includes not only "Halo: Nightfall," but the Steven Spielberg-produced live-action television series as well.

Check out the Halo: Nightfall trailer below: