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Here's how you changed the multiplayer in Halo 5: Guardians

Thanks to all the feedback received from the Halo 5: Guardians multiplayer beta, quite a few changes have been made to this portion of the upcoming shooter, such as the ability to turn off sprint in custom matches.

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Per a post from 343 Industries' Josh Holmes on Halo Waypoint, changes were made to Spartan Abilities, presentation, weapons, matchmaking and more.

Here's a general list of changes:

Spartan Abilities

  • 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

  • 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

Presenatation

  • 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 Rating

  • Improved skill detection during placement phase
  • Improved skill matching
  • Improved team balancing
  • Prevent skill boosting
  • General bug fixing & tuning

Matchmaking

  • 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

If you head through the link, Holmes provides much more color to the changes, and plenty of details.

A Halo 5: Guardians multiplayer beta infographic was released earlier today, and you can look at it through the link.

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