For those who are interested, Ryan Darcey (Senior Systems Designer at 343) gave a presentation a few weeks ago at GDC 2016 discussing the design of spartan abilities in Halo 5.
It’s about an hour long (including Q&A) and covers a lot of ground, but I think it’s well worth watching.
Link: Making Moves, Designing Spartan Abilities for Halo 5: Guardians
> Overview
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> Halo has a long legacy of delivering highly balanced, competitive FPS gameplay where concepts like “30 seconds of fun” and “golden triangle” lay the foundation for the player experience. After releasing six successful FPS titles spanning the course of 14 years, how do you advance the IP while maintaining the fundamental model & philosophy? How much do you risk alienating the community that helped us arrive to this point? What’s going to make Halo feel fresh again?
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> Spartan Abilities are just some of the features 343 delivered in Halo 5: Guardians as an answer these questions. During this talk, you will gain insight into the process of taking the new Spartan Charge and Ground Pound actions from concept to final release. More specifically, this talk will focus on:
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> 1) Choosing where to innovate.
> 2) Mapping actions to controls.
> 3) Tuning for balance.