The team has spent the past few weeks poring over player feedback from the aforementioned sources.
From this we have developed an extensive list of improvements for the game. What follows is a short summary of items that we are addressing for launch. Some of these improvements were already in development and didn’t make it in time for the beta. The majority of changes address issues that surfaced during the beta and relate to feedback coming directly from the community. It’s important to point out that
there will be a massive list of additional improvements and bug fixes that are not captured here, as we hosted this beta almost a year from release.
In the ViDoc that introduced the new Spartan Abilities before the beta went live, I touched on the fact that
a portion of the Halo community strongly prefers to play without sprint. The results from the HCFP surveys showed that nearly 11% of HCFP participants felt that Halo should not have sprint. It is important that we continue to evolve Halo multiplayer while ensuring that legacy Halo players feel right at home. As a result, I’m happy to say that
we will provide toggles in custom games so that sprint and the other Spartan Abilities can be turned off. By putting these tools in the hands of players we will give them the ability to play the game their way, enabling them to create a more traditional style of Halo if they prefer.
Some of the other improvements that we are making to Spartan Abilities and general mobility coming out of the beta:
- 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.)
Other improvements we’ll be making to presentation based on fan feedback:
- 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
Coming out of beta we have a number of fixes and improvements already in flight for matchmaking but at a high level our focus is on the following:
- 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
Some of the other improvements that we’ll be making to weapons in the game follow:
- 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
- General tuning and bug fixing for all weapons
