Infinity’s Armory
The Infinity’s Armory update is receiving its final testing as well, and as mentioned above, remains on track for delivery this month. It brings with it new battlegrounds, new weapons (and skins), new armors (and skins), various game updates and tweaks, and more. We’ll reveal some of these now. As a note, if you’ve got a sharp eye and a thing for early morning esports, you may have caught a few of these weapon skins in today’s Halo World Championship London qualifiers.
For the fiction background on these goodies, be sure to check out this week’s Canon Fodder. Riptide & Urban
The January update brings with it two new maps to play on. Riptide is a brand new take on Fathom, and Urban is a Warzone Assault variation taking place on Noctus. As you’ll see below, art and design teams have been reviewing your feedback on remix maps, and there’s a strong focus on making these maps feel, look, and play like entirely new spaces. Today, we’ll get another look at Riptide, and then hear a bit about Urban. RiptideTo hold you over until next week's live stream, here's a brand new look at the upcoming Arena map.
Urban Adrian Bedoya, MP Level DesignerI’m a big fan of Warzone Assault, and I loved getting to work on both Battle of Noctus and now Urban. For this map we really wanted to push the gameplay and visual changes between Noctus. The biggest change was done to the design of the central area of the map, making it much more terrain and vehicle focused than Noctus. The added lines of sight from different areas along the street and home base area also add a new and fresh element of finding new areas for players to fight around. Tim Diaz, Multiplayer Environment ArtistFor Urban, we had a tough time trying to figure out what we could do to make this area really feel like it was a connected part of Noctus as well as change it enough where it would feel like a different map. One of the things I talked over with our lighting artist, Kevin Daziel, was the intense lighting we had for Battle of Noctus. We decided we should go just as extreme, so we made this level a night level. It may not seem like much on paper but going with that decision has many perils. For darker maps, it’s easier for certain colors to blend into the darkness; and for multiplayer, that throws off balance and fairness which can lead to a not so fun experience. You have the ability to accidently shadow key points and paths as well as many other things. We went through many variations of night lighting and custom character lighting to get the right look and feel. Another issue we came to was trying to push the Noctus play space further. One of the main battle points of Noctus was the monument in the middle, which we ripped out to create more of an open urban terrain playground so we could still keep long rangebattles. And with the new pit in the center, it became a combat area to test how well you can handle your ground vehicles. While we lost some of the verticality, we gained more vehicle and cover combat all under the new monolithic building towering over the center base. Working with design, we came up with newer spots, jumps, and added more cover areas so players can have more ground fighting without the fear of falling over the edge.
Be sure to tune into next week’s live stream (twitch.tv/Halo, 3PM PDT on Friday 1/22) to catch Riptide and Urban – and more from Infinity's Armory – in action. Collector’s Items
As we mentioned above, the Warzone team is constantly looking at player data and feedback to determine how they can make Warzone even better. My dear friend David Ellis grabbed me this week with some news on a change they’ve been working on, and we agreed “hey, we should tell people about this.” Without delay, here he is now. David Ellis, DesignerSince releasing Halo 5 last year (seems crazy, right?) our studio has continued to support the game with a myriad of new content, tweaks and fixes, both great and small. I’ve been asked to talk about one of the “smaller” items and explain the how and why of the change.
In pretty much all Halo titles there’s a feature called garbage collection. Basically, we have a list of objects we scan periodically to see if they’re not in use and delete them out of the player’s view. This is one method of ensuring we stay as close to 60fps at all times. If the system is working correctly, you should barely notice it’s even there. Though anyone who’s ever died in a match and trekked back to the location of their demise to discover their preferred instrument of destruction has disappeared will attest, sometimes you notice.
With 24 players, dozens of the enemy and friendly AI and a multitude of vehicles and weaponry available to the player, Warzone is one of the most ambitious and, from a performance perspective, insane features Halo has ever seen. At launch, the garbage collection setting for weapons in Warzone was set to 5 seconds. A frequent bit of feedback from within our studio walls and without is a desire to have your dropped weapons stick around a little bit longer. After extensive testing in the studio we’re happy to announce that starting with “Infinity’s Armory,” we’ve increased the weapon despawn timer across all of Warzone from 5 to 20 seconds without impacting framerate. Now you’ll have more time to track down that weapon you dropped after getting bullseyed by a steely-eyed sniper, and perhaps, you’ll get the opportunity to experiment with other tools of destruction delivered by the vanquished bodies of your enemies.