I’ll preface this with saying: I didn’t get into the technical preview, so this experience isn’t firsthand, however, I did my research.
I’m of the opinion that the Viewmodel Adjustment settings are a great addition to Halo, and I’m glad they’re being added. It’s a simple tool to implement that truly helps with accessibility, and doesn’t affect gameplay negatively. However, I believe that the settings in the preview were far too limited. With the slider as far to the left and bottom as possible, your weapon barely moves, not even reaching the center of the screen. I think this really mitigates the usefulness of the setting to people who would actually utilize these settings. For example, the Counter-Strike series has had the setting to move your gun to the left side of the screen since the first game, and has kept it to this day. It’s not widely used, but greatly appreciated by those who do use it. Another example, some people, me included, truly prefer their weapons to be in the bottom-center of the screen, similar to Doom and Quake. Heck, I love playing Halo that way; the Halo PC OpenSauce mod gives this functionality to the game, and it works surprisingly great with a 20 year old game where the animations weren’t designed for that. I was quite excited to use the viewmodel adjustments to play Halo that way officially, but well, it’s not currently possible.
I’m aware that the weapon animations will not be designed for this sort of versatility; If you put the Sidekick on the left side of the screen and reload, your spartan will still pick up a new mag with their left hand, and it’ll probably look janky. Honestly, I don’t think any person who wants use these adjustments that much really cares, they’ll probably just appreciate the options. If it truly matters, then you could have the ingame settings similar to how they are now, but have a config file where you can change the settings and break those limits.
So please, I’d like to request that you expand the viewmodel options.
I think if they really want to go all-in on the accessibility and representation thing, having a ‘handedness’ option sounds like a relatively easy thing to implement and might help some people with opposite handedness feel more immersed. Yeah weapons would suddenly mirror when other people picked them up or vice-versa, but when you’re the only one looking at it up close, who actually cares? And it would be cool if it flipped your in-game spartan too, so they swapped hands. The only problem I could see with this is when they add assassinations back in, but as long as they don’t include any of the victim’s weapons in the animations, it shouldn’t matter.