Early Halo 5: Guardians Beta Led to Changes in the Final Game - News
by William D'Angelo , posted on 12 October 2015 / 3,841 Views
The Halo 5: Guardians multiplayer beta which took place earlier this year led to numerous game changes, according to design director Kevin Franklin who spoke with GameSpot.
"It was kind of crazy to have a beta that early," said Franklin. "Normally you have them, and you don't have time to change anything. This time we had tons to change. We changed ground pound, the whole way that entire feature worked. We changed a lot of the little tuners around escapability. Things like thrust, thrust recharge, the way sprint worked. We also changed the map. Several of the maps have completely different sight lines and paths changed directly in result to the beta feedback."
"On top of that, we've also taken feedback from a lot of the pros. Like hey, do you have confidence in shoulder charging, do you have confidence in ground pound, do you think we should be keeping these things even if we fix them, are you cool with thrust always on? A lot of the pros are giving us great feedback that we've carried through."
Having nearly a year to work on the multiplayer infrastructure after the beta also gave the team plenty of time to work out problems:
"Our biggest thing is that Halo 5 is built from the ground up for Xbox One," added Franklin. "All the technology is really lined up. There's only one network layer, we're not trying to build three to four different games in one [like in Halo: The Master Chief Collection]. That's given us a huge advantage. We did our beta almost a year ago now, that gave us a whole bunch of time to stress test our servers and make sure everything was running, and work through some problems. Lastly, we have a lot of base skill testing we're doing with thousands of players almost every weekend before launch."
Halo 5: Guardians is set to release exclusively on the Xbox One on 27th October.
A life-long and avid gamer, William D'Angelo was first introduced to VGChartz in 2007. After years of supporting the site, he was brought on in 2010 as a junior analyst, working his way up to lead analyst in 2012. He has expanded his involvement in the gaming community by producing content on his own YouTube channel and Twitch channel dedicated to gaming Let's Plays and tutorials. You can contact the author at wdangelo@vgchartz.com or on Twitter @TrunksWD.
