14 DAY TRIAL // The Halo 5: Guardians beta period was one of the biggest undertakings of the year for the development team at 343 Industries and publisher Microsoft, and the two companies are saying that they have managed to get a lot of important data and the community has significantly contributed to the improvement of the core mechanics.
A massive post on Halo Waypoint explains exactly how fans have engaged with the title and the way the studio will continue the development process in the coming months.
Josh Holmes, the executive producer at 343 Industries, states, “Over 19,000 of you have already signed up for the HCFP, with the average amount of Halo played per HCFP participant clocking in at over 900 hours (that’s more than 37 days of Halo playtime per participant!). So far, we have conducted two surveys and we plan to continue expanding this program as we see it as an important tool to help shape our game for launch and beyond.”
The biggest conclusion the studio has drawn is that many long-term fans do not appreciate the new Spartan abilities, mainly Sprint, and that means the final version of Halo 5: Guardians will allow them to turn off each one separately in custom games.
The characters will also have an increased base speed, more acceleration, and all their other abilities will be tweaked.
Halo 5: Guardians will also have improved weapons and presentation
343 Industries has said that the newly introduced Hydra will become more useful in the coming months and there are also tuning changes coming to the other weapons.
The sniper rifle will be faster when it comes to scoping, automatic weapons will get smaller bonuses when Smart Link is used for headshots, and feedback vibration will be reduced for the entire arsenal.
In terms of presentation, the team will make the post-death replay an opt-in feature because many community members dislike it, it will decrease the number of medals displayed in the feed and plans to make it easy to turn Spartan chatter on and off.
More tuning will also be linked to the way weapons that are dropped are shown and to the way the announcer works.
Halo 5: Guardians is the biggest launch of the year on the Xbox One and the game is expected to be released in the fall, although no clear date has yet been confirmed.
