The Halo 5: Guardians three week BETA at the end of last year saw approximately 1 million players, over 20 million games, rack up an impressive 181,389,366 kills.
The team at 343 had been nervous about releasing the BETA so early in development, with the final game not due to launch until late 2015, but were thrilled by the response from the Halo community who provided invaluable information about the whole process.
“The level of engagement and response from our community shattered all of our expectations”, wrote Guardians’ Executive Producer Josh Holmes in a blog post for Halo Waypoint.
343 is looking to create a fresh and unique combat experience while still keeping that classic Halo feel intact, and clearly knows that passionate Halo fans are an important part of doing just that.
The data collected is being put to use, with a huge number of fixes and tweaks already being detailed. With so much time ahead of launch, there’ll be even more adjustments introduced to the game over the coming months. The current planned multiplayer changes following the BETA are listed below:
Spartan Abilities
- Increase base speed (faster base movement).- Increase strafe acceleration (faster, more responsive strafing).- Reduce top sprint speed (narrow the delta between base movement and sprint).- Modify Ground Pound controls to prevent conflicts with crouch jumping.
Weapons
- Sniper Rifle: improve scope experience to making it less “clunky” and faster to scope.- DMR: adjust position of the scope to improve visibility.- Bring back the SPNKr Rocket Launcher as a legendary version of the weapon.- Reduce bonuses for automatic weapons in Smart-Link & w/ headshots.- Remove grenade detonation in mid-air based on weapon fire.- Ability to turn on/off vibration feedback for weapons.
Presentation
- Post-death replay opt-in feature. (Players will see a traditional follow-cam, but have a kill-cam option.)- Medals: decrease frequency and number of medals displayed in the medal feed.- Spartan chatter: players will have the option to turn this on or off in the settings menu.- Adding highlights to placed/dropped weapons to make them easier to see.
Competitive Skill Rating (CSR)
- Improved skill detection during placement phase.- Improved skill matching.- Improved team balancing.- Prevent skill boosting.
Matchmaking
- Much faster matches.- Better skill matching.- Better feedback to players in the lobby and matchmaking experiences.- Allow players to set desired datacenter for matchmaking (may impact matchmaking speed & balance).- Improved party vs party matchmaking.- Hide CSR ranks until in match to de-incentivize quitting.- Punish quitters with CSR penalties and matchmaking bans.
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