343 Industries released a ton of information this week regarding the Halo 5: Guardians beta, which rand for three weeks following the end of the December through the New Year.
343 was astounded by the response they had to the beta, which saw around 1 million fans of the game play about 20 million matches through the beta’s duration, which provided an astounding amount of feedback for the developer to tweak and adjust the multiplayer experience before the game launches later this year.
“With Halo 5 being such a big evolution of the combat experience for Halo, we wanted to be able to take these new mechanics, the new Spartan Abilities, and put them in the hands of the community and use that feedback to hone the experience,” executive producer Josh Holmes said.
“I think everybody was nervous and excited to see how fans would react to a lot of the new mechanics, the new ideas, the new modes,” he added. “A combination of excitement and nervous energy, and maybe a little bit of exhaustion as well because there’s just so much work that goes into packaging something up, getting it ready for release, releasing it, and then supporting that throughout the process of the beta.”
Below you can see the full list of changes 343 is planning to make with Halo 5 based on the feedback from the game’s community, descriptions courtesy of 343.
HALO 5 BETA STATS AND CHANGES
STATS:
- Total Number of Player: About 1 million
- Total matches played: nearly 20 million
- Total gameplay hours: 2,539,847
- Total Kills: 181,389,366
- Total Assists: 92,245,468
- Total Ground Pound Kills: 565,902
- Total Spartan Charge Kills: 1,286,085
- Frag Grenade Kills: 11,529,664
- Plasma Grenade Kills: 1,104,218
- Total Shots Fired: 6,492,761,794
- Battle Rifles were carried for: the equivalent of 207 days
- Most popular power weapon: Sniper Rifle – 6,606,200 kills
- Most Medals Earned: 24,998 (SSlCK)
- Killpocalypse Medals Earned: 1 (Omnipression)
- Total hours watched on Twitch: 44,693,800
- Most minutes watched on Twitch of a single gamer: 7,852,300 (Ninja)
- Gamers with the most unique viewers on Twitch:
- Ninja: 437,960
- Walshy: 348,460
- Red vs Blue Win Percentage: Red: 47.45%, Blue: 52.55%
CHANGES:
Spartan Abilities:
- Don’t like Sprint in your Halo? You’re in luck, as 343 will allow you to toggle off Sprint and all other Spartan Abilities in custom games.
- 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 w/ crouch jumping
- General tuning & bug fixes for all Spartan Abilities (Thrusters, Clamber, Ground Pound, etc.)
Weapons:
- Goal is to balance all weapons to be equally effective both in and out of zoom while continuing to respect the function of each mode.
- 343 is changing the Hydra weapon to make it more effective when not zoomed so that it feels like a true power weapon.
- Sniper Rifle: improve scope experience to making it less “clunky” and faster to scope in
- 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
- General tuning and bug fixing for all weapons
Presentation
- Remember those intro and victory sequences, when Spartans would chest-bump and high-five? 343 now thinks that doesn’t quite fit with the game’s tone. As a result, you can expect the final sequences to feature considerably fewer chest bumps and high fives.
- Post-death replay: this will become an opt-in feature. After death, players will see a traditional follow-cam and have the option to view a replay of their death from the killer’s perspective (as long as the feature is enabled within the playlist)
- 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
- General tuning for announcer and Spartan chatter to reduce the frequency of events and focus on the information that matters most to players
Competitive Skill Ranking
“Our skill rating system is one of the pillars for competitive play of Halo 5: Guardians and we’ll be continuing to refine it throughout development. The focus for our team coming out of the beta includes:”
- Improved skill detection during placement phase
- Improved skill matching
- Improved team balancing
- Prevent skill boosting
- General bug fixing & tuning
Matchmaking
Thought Halo 5’s matchmaking system failed to match you with players of similar skill? You’re in luck, as 343 said it is tweaking the matchmaking system to not only get you into games faster, but also to place you in more competitive matches more regularly.
Coming out of the beta, 343 plans to focus on the following area:
- 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 and skill balance)
- Improved party vs party matchmaking
- Hide CSR ranks until in match to de-incentivize quitting
- Punish quitters with CSR penalties and matchmaking bans
Even More Changes:
Expect to see many, many more changes and improvements for Halo 5 at launch.
“Everything from weapon placements on maps, to lighting improvements, to rule tweaks in game modes and modifications to the motion tracker to encourage more movement at higher levels of play. Our team constantly looks for ways to improve the game and we’ll continue to do so until launch later this year and beyond.”