343 Industries released an absolute avalanche of statistics and other information recapping the Halo 5: Guardians beta on Thursday, detailing the testing phase which ran for three weeks at the end of December through into early January.

The beta phase was scheduled a little less than a year ahead of the game’s scheduled release date this coming fall, marking the earliest that Microsoft had ever launched a Halo beta in the history of the franchise.

343 Industries was positively blown away by the response it received from the beta, which saw about a million gamers knock out just over 20 million matches over its entire duration. Those millions upon millions of matches — which exceeded the developer’s expectations a great deal — provided the team with invaluable feedback regarding how it could tweak the multiplayer experience to perfection ahead of the game’s official release.

343 executive producer Josh Holmes talked about the philosophy of the team in regards to why exactly the beta was even considered and what the team hoped to accomplish.

“With Halo 5 being such a big evolution of the combat experience for Halo, we wanted to be able to take these new mechanics, the new Spartan Abilities, and put them in the hands of the community and use that feedback to hone the experience,” he said.

Although there were some internal doubts within 343 Industries about whether or not releasing the beta so early was a good idea, Holmes said that the devs now understand just how valuable the beta process was to making an exceptional game.

“Some people [said], ‘Should we really be doing it this early?’ And now, coming out the other side and having all that great feedback and data we can use to inform our development; those same people are like, ‘Yeah, really, really glad that we did this.'”

“I think everybody was nervous and excited to see how fans would react to a lot of the new mechanics, the new ideas, the new modes,” he went on. “A combination of excitement and nervous energy, and maybe a little bit of exhaustion as well because there’s just so much work that goes into packaging something up, getting it ready for release, releasing it, and then supporting that throughout the process of the beta.”

And now, let us dive headlong into the deliciously delightful world of the Halo 5 beta stats and planned gameplay tweaks.

Ready? Let’s roll!

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HALO 5 BETA STATS & TWEAKS

STATS:

• Total Number of Player: About 1 million
• Total matches played: nearly 20 million
• Total gameplay hours: 2,539,847
• Total Kills: 181,389,366
• Total Assists: 92,245,468
• Total Ground Pound Kills: 565,902
• Total Spartan Charge Kills: 1,286,085
• Frag Grenade Kills: 11,529,664
• Plasma Grenade Kills: 1,104,218
• Total Shots Fired: 6,492,761,794
• Battle Rifles were carried for: the equivalent of 207 days
• Most popular power weapon: Sniper Rifle – 6,606,200 kills
• Most Medals Earned: 24,998 (SSlCK)
• Killpocalypse Medals Earned: 1 (Omnipression)
• Total hours watched on Twitch: 44,693,800
• Most minutes watched on Twitch of a single gamer: 7,852,300 (Ninja)
• Gamers with the most unique viewers on Twitch:
  • Ninja: 437,960
  • Walshy: 348,460
• Red vs Blue Win Percentage: Red: 47.45%, Blue: 52.55%

CHANGES:

Spartan Abilities:

• Don’t like Sprint in your Halo? You’re in luck, as 343 will allow you to toggle off Sprint and all other Spartan Abilities in custom games.
• 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:

• Goal is to balance all weapons to be equally effective both in and out of zoom while continuing to respect the function of each mode.
• 343 is changing the Hydra weapon to make it more effective when not zoomed so that it feels like a true power weapon.
• Sniper Rifle: improve scope experience to making it less “clunky” and faster to scope in
• 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

• Remember those intro and victory sequences, when Spartans would chest-bump and high-five? 343 now thinks that doesn’t quite fit with the game’s tone. As a result, you can expect the final sequences to feature considerably fewer chest bumps and high fives.
• 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 Ranking

“Our skill rating system is one of the pillars for competitive play of Halo 5: Guardians and we’ll be continuing to refine it throughout development. The focus for our team coming out of the beta includes:

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

Matchmaking

Did you think the Halo 5 matchmaking system didn’t adequately match-up players of a similar skill? Then you’re in luck, friend! 343 Industries stated that it’s tweaking the matchmaking system from the ground up and not only will you get into actual games faster but you’ll also be placed into more competitive matches on a much more regular basis.

Post-beta, the 343 team plans to focus on working on and improving the following multiplayer aspects:

• 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

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That about does it, though, boys and girls. As if we weren’t already looking forward to Halo 5 the same way we used to look forward to Christmas as a kid, now we’re looking forward to it even more so. Gee thanks 343 Industries!