For starters, you can disable Spartan Abilities in custom games
Given the adjustments to the long-running Halo formula present in Halo 5: Guardians, players were bound to be vocal about what they did and didn’t like in the multiplayer beta. 343 Industries is incorporating that feedback in a major way, as evidenced by this lengthy summary post.
“It is important that we continue to evolve Halo multiplayer while ensuring that legacy Halo players feel right at home,” wrote executive producer Josh Holmes. To that end, Spartan Abilities, like sprint and ground pound, can be turned off in custom games if you’re so inclined. 343 has also increased the base movement speed and strafe acceleration and reduced the top sprint speed.
There’s far more specifics in the blog post and, it’s worth mentioning, “there will be a massive list of additional improvements and bug fixes that are not captured here.”
How Fans Helped Shape the Multiplayer of Halo 5: Guardians [Halo Waypoint]
Here are the bullet points from the post for easier reading.
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
Presentation
- 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 (CSR)
- 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
