Developer 343 Industries is releasing an update to improve the campaign experience of Halo 5. Designer Chris Proctor said, “Having had a few months to digest player feedback, reviews, let’s play videos and internal feedback, I’ve been working on an update to Halo 5’s campaign balance, aiming to address parts of the game that players yelled at us about, or that bugged me.” He also included a list of specific changes that will apply to both the campaign and the Warzone AI:
• Reduced two-player difficulty slightly.
• Increased single player difficulty slightly.
• Made Warden attacks a little easier to dodge, particularly on lower difficulties.
• Face Beam tracks moving targets less accurately.
• Gravity Bomb has less homing.
• Melee attack has slightly less range.
• Made the Warden slightly easier to kill from the front.
• Reduced AI Focus Turret damage output.
• Reduced AI Storm Rifle, Suppressor and Light Rifle effectiveness.
• AI Storm Rifle: fires in shorter bursts, projectiles spread out more and move more slowly. Jackals are now less effective than Elites with the Storm Rifle.
• AI Suppressor: fires in longer bursts, projectiles have less homing. Crawlers are now less effective than Soldiers with the Suppressor.
• AI now fire shorter bursts with the Light Rifle.
• Increased AI Plasma Pistol, Needler and Beam Rifle effectiveness.
• AI Plasma Pistol: slightly higher accuracy and damage.
• AI Needler: AI now fire longer bursts (i.e. can now supercombine players on Heroic and above), slightly higher damage.
• AI Beam Rifle: slightly more damage (mostly this will make it a two-shot kill instead of a three-shot kill in Heroic single player, allowing Jackal Snipers to actually kill a player from time to time).
• Added a “tackle” animation to Sword Elites – shoutout to Pat Gillette for making the sweet sword tackle animation.
• Instead of stopping to swing at a moving target they can swing on the move.
• Increased Elite, Elite Officer and Soldier Officer durability.
• Reduced Soldier bamf frequency.
• Killing a Crawler now deals area-of-effect damage to all nearby enemies, softening them up or killing them outright.
• Reduced frequency of Squad AI getting killed while in a gunner’s turret in a player’s vehicle.
• Made being killed by an attached Plasma Grenade non-revivable, similar to lethal damage from a Binary Rifle.
• Increased AI special ability chance with higher player count in co-op games, e.g. Plasma Pistol overcharge, grenade throw.
• Increased AI promotion chance with player count in co-op games.
• i.e. in cooperative games you will encounter more high-ranked enemies where promotion paths exist (most noticeable with Grunts, Elites, Jackals and Crawlers).
• The first player to press the “Call for Help” now has priority, other players will have to wait their turn for a revive – shoutout to Mr. Robert Kingsley for the code fix for this.
The blog also included a tease for the upcoming infection game mode and another teaser image for an upcoming forge update, shown below.
Source: Halo Waypoint
Lewis is a games journalist, freelance gaming and consumer-tech journalist. They contributed 344 articles to ICXM between 2015–2017, focused on opinion pieces, game reviews, Windows and PC, and Xbox news: has since served as Editor-in-Chief at StealthOptional and Gaming Editor at MSPoweruser, with bylines at Gfinity Esports and FRVR.