I impressed 343 Industries’ Kevin Franklin by name dropping. Sorta.
It was more like event-dropping, you see. As our Halo 5: Guardians interview kicked off, I mentioned that I checked out his D.I.C.E. Europe Guardians presentation, titled “Just One More Game”, in preparation for our chat.
While I believe Franklin was impressed because I went that extra mile, but I’m glad I did simply because it gave me a real idea of what he spends his time on developing Halo 5. Frankly (pun mostly not intended), it’s all about stats.
Franklin was Lead Multiplayer Designer on Halo 4, and with Halo 5: Guardians moved into the role of Design Director. Before we got into those all-important stats, I was curious how that changed his day-to-day work.
“We now have two completely different multiplayer experiences,” Franklin began. “We have a team of guys who work on Arena, specifically, and another team that works on Warzone. They do spend a lot of time working with each other – things like shared features like medals and scripting. The guys are an extremely talented group – some have worked on Halo and some haven’t. I run between the two groups and help execute awesome ideas.”
Got that? Good. Now onto data.
While Xbox Live data all the way back from Halo 2 was analysed in preparing for Halo 5, the title’s recent beta was more focused on performance and stress testing. That makes sense, perhaps considering the online mess that the admittedly ambitious Halo: The Master Chief Collection proved to be.
“[The beta really measured] how long it took players to get in the game,” Franklin asserted. “We were making sure the game was working and improving that side of things.”
That’s not to say that Halo 5: Guardians went unchanged after the beta.
“We did spend time talking to our fans and pros, getting on Halo Waypoint, that sort of thing. We changed Breakout completely to add a flag to it, so it has a secondary objective now,” he said. “We changed some maps to improve flow and sightline changes. We also changed escapability; a lot of feedback from players was that they weren’t able to finish their kills; we took to that to heart.
“We completely changed the Ground Pound mechanic as well so it plays completely differently. We had pro players who constantly jump and crouch, and that would mess up the mechanic because it was accidentally start the Ground Pound. We’ve changed it to melee and it’s much, much better now.”
Franklin’s past role really enabled him to cut right down to what he sees as the biggest changes in Halo’s multiplayer this iteration.
“The biggest change [to me] is kind of a combo of fair starts in Arena along with abilities,” he said. “You’re always going to have the same stuff, no matter how many times you play – you’ll have the same starting weapons and abilities as everyone else.
“On the abilities, just learning and mastering those and figuring out how they fit into the combat loop is just incredible. Thrust, Slide, Ground Pound – they’ve all changed the way that Halo plays and we’re incredibly pleased to be evolving the game.”
While Franklin used the D.I.C.E. Europe talk to explain that Halo 4 DLC packs essentially fragmented its player base, I was curious on whether or not the decision to move to a unified map system really meant that Guardians’ REQ system was devised to recoup some of that lost DLC income. Franklin immediately disagreed.
“We decided to invest in our players and say, ‘this is most we’ve ever offered in a Halo game, out of the box.’ We’ve got so many modes; we’ve got spectator mode, two new modes in Arena, Warzone is the hardest thing we’ve ever done before, and we’re running in 60fps,” he countered. “All 15 maps available post-launch are going to be free.”
“We tried to solve the design problem of having different players in different DLC buckets in many ways. We tried a bunch of solutions [in Halo 4] and they just didn’t work,” Franklin admitted. “We knew we needed to unify the maps to improve the matchmaking experience. A better matchmaking experience means you’ll be matched with people of the same skill level and with the same content, so you’ll get into games faster.
“The REQ side, well we were really wanting to give players a good reward system to offer customisation between Arena and Warzone. I’m really excited about the new custom animations for assassinations. On the Warzone side, we wanted to give the players an option; if they wanted to spend more, they can get access to the content earlier.
“With that, we had two design decisions we never wanted to budge on. The first was wanting to make sure everything was accessible to players, whether or not you put [real-world] money in; you should be able to get everything just by playing. The second was balance; we couldn’t make an unbalanced multiplayer game. It’s about the progression loop – you get medals, you help your team – that’s when you’re going to level up your player in the game. You need to earn the right to use cards, so you can’t just call in five Scorpions immediately.”
Warzone is about way more than just the slightly-controversial REQ system. As I found out first-hand at E3 this year, the new mode really is about everything Halo, pitting player versus player versus environment, with all the goodies Halo is known for at your disposal.
“The thing we did with Warzone, with the REQ system, was to make sure you could choose when you want to use your vehicles,” Franklin said. “You can spawn a vehicle when you’re dead, you can head to a REQ station to acquire them; there are vehicle bay delivery systems and you also spawn a Banshee in the air so you’re a little more protected. That was really important to us. You can call what you want on the battlefield, and it’s all controlled by that progression system. We spend a lot of time on it and I hope people appreciate it.”
Franklin also confessed that even pro Halo players aren’t quite sure how to master the mode as yet.
“We did have a playtest where the Pro team was playing Warzone,” he said. “They went in and did their regular thing of killing everything that moved. There was a more amateur team that focused on killing the bosses. The Pro team ended up losing cause they were hunter-killing everything on site. It was great seeing those players take it to the Pro team.”
The Pro team that Franklin refers to are a group of professional players that now work for 343 Industries. Franklin explained to me how the team came about.
“Here’s a bit of history on these guys,” Franklin began. “It was back in 2011, and William Archibell, Doug Barnes – two of our Network Engineers — and I went to MLG and met Bravo [aka Andy Dudynsky] for the first time. We were just like, ‘this guy is awesome’ and brought him onto our Community Team. It was a huge boost as we were able to start connecting with pros from Bravo’s MLG days.
“One guy, GH057ayame [aka Eric Hewitt] was building all sorts of hardcore competitive gametypes for Halo 4, and we were publishing his modes, so it felt really natural to bring him on board. Then, Strongside [aka Mike Cavanaugh] won one of our tournaments, so we knew him really well. We bought him, then Dersky [aka Sean Swidersky] and Neighbor [aka Mason Cobb] in. All of a sudden, we had a great group who were bringing in a whole bunch of positive feedback on the game.”
Franklin continued onto say the Pro team’s work is quite important to Guardians.
“The biggest thing I think they do is give us a go/no-go on each of the different Spartan abilities in-game. Integrating the abilities, weapons tuning… there’s a new spotting mechanic in CTF. They’ve even built a couple Breakout mechanics that are shipping at launch,” Franklin asserted. “They’ve really shown that they can be incredibly valuable members of the dev team.”
Guardians marks Halo’s first outing on the current-gen Xbox One, and I couldn’t help but ask if 343 was worried about its release. After all, titles like Forza Motorsport 5 were quite competent, but it really took a further iteration to really harness the potential off current-gen. Franklin shrugged it off.
“I think everyone just wants to make the absolute best game with the knowledge and tech they have available at the time,” he replied. “That’s the sentiment across the team, and one we’ve had all through development We’ve spent a considerable amount of time upgrading the engine to work at 60 frames per second, moving dedicated servers, getting Warzone off the ground, building the REQ system…
“The rest of the lifecycle is going to be amazing, but I don’t want to take away from Halo 5 at all; we’ve put a lot of effort in to make it the best we can,” he concluded.
Halo 5: Guardians is an Xbox One exclusive available 27 October.
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