Halo 5 November community update

Team Arena

Breakout

• Trident
  

Slayer

• Regret
  

CTF

• Empire
  

Strongholds

• Plaza
  

Slayer

• Truth
  
• Empire
  
• Pegasus
  

Swat

• Empire
  
• Fathom
  
• Coliseum
  
• Truth
  

FFA

• Empire
  
• Fathom
  
• Coliseum
  
• Truth
  

"Hey everyone – Chris King (Halo 5 - Lead Sandbox Designer) and Scott Sims (Halo 5 – Lead Sandbox Engineer) here. Thank you all for your passionate feedback on Halo 5, the team has been actively following as much as we can and have identified one issue we really wanted to respond to.

First things first, in the grand scheme of things, this is happening to a small number of people. Most folks are having a good experience and the last thing we want to do is inject either placebo effect or confirmation bias into your gameplay feel, so bear that in mind if you’re having no issues, and just enjoy the dry but interesting technical data. But this is good news for those who are suffering.

Aiming is the core of any first person shooter experience, and the way Halo controls is key to making Halo, Halo. Weapon aiming is a complex subject and something that the sandbox team obsesses over every day. There are a huge number of factors that feed into the feel of aiming, be it controller hardware, acceleration curves, turn speeds, player movement speeds, aim assist, or weapon fire rates.

When we started development on Halo 5 we had some very specific goals with regards to aiming. We wanted to provide a best in class 60fps shooter experience, embracing competitive play, with an increased skill gap, while still retaining the essence of Halo.

To preserve that Halo feel we chose not to re-write any of our base control systems, but instead to perform targeted retunes to balance for the higher framerate and myriad of other changes made to our movement and weapon systems.

Throughout the project we have worked hand in hand with the 343 Pro team, Microsoft User Research, and test teams and of course absorbed the awesome feedback from the Halo 5 Beta to tune and validate our control systems to what we believe to be the sweet spot for fine control with fast turn speed across all aiming ranges, on all weapon types.

Players have identified that, by design, the game is a shade “harder” than it used to be, but we are seeing players adjusting to the new speed and precision pretty quickly.

Unfortunately, some players have identified an issue that occurs due to variance in controller hardware, commonly referred to as “slow turn” bug. This can cause players to become unable to, or inconsistently reach what we call a “pegged” state.

The “pegged” state is a region in the outermost range of the analog aim stick in which we blend the players turn speed to a much faster rate. This issue is compounded as the control input fluctuates depending on multiple factors - if you are applying even the slightest bit of downward pressure (clenching), moving the stick around the edges a bit (which is why it’s even more problematic when aiming diagonally), or torqueing the stick on the edge a bit more than normal on some controllers.

The good news is we have a fix for this issue that introduces no perceivable change to the current feel of the game. This change is going through test and pro team validation now and we will have it out to you soon.

One thing that has become clear in absorbing all your feedback is that Halo players want choice when it comes to controls. And with that in mind, we are also working on another little pet project that will allow even more precise tuning. This update will offer more custom fine-tuned control over controller settings (hint: independent vertical/horizontal sensitivities, the ability to calibrate your own dead zones, more granularity in sensitivity, and more). We hope to have that out for you in December and we will follow up with more details later.

Thanks for all the passionate feedback, know that the team is reading as much as we can. See you on the battlefield."

~Chis King and Scott Sims