The Tech Behind Halo 5: Guardians’ Multiplayer

The Microsoft Research team has been helping 343 Industries with improving the multiplayer in Halo 5: Guardians, as shown in a video on the Microsoft Research YouTube channel.

The tools senior researcher Rob DeLine describes in the video are called “Trill, a high-performance in-memory incremental analytics engine, and Tempe, a web service for exploratory data analysis, to monitor and quickly improve the Xbox gaming experience.”

In the video, Deline talks about the Halo 5: Guardians multiplayer beta that took place last December and notes a particular example in which players were earning a medal much more frequently than they had anticipated. The medal in question is called “Combat Evolved,” and to earn it players must throw a grenade in such a way that the resulting explosion will propel a weapon to the player. The player catches the weapon as it flies through the air and the medal is earned.

Through Tempe, 343 Industries was able to analyze the data and realized that the Combat Evolved medal was being earned “really frequently, like every few minutes somebody was getting this medal,” DeLine says. “And that didn’t make any sense to them.”

Tempe was able to show them “customer data” for this medal and that data was directly linked to gameplay videos where players were earning the medal. Then, they could watch the videos associated with players earning the medal to see what they were doing to earn it. That’s when they realized the medal was not being earned as intended. Instead of players catching a gun mid-air after a grenade explosion, they were simply throwing a grenade at a weapon, waiting for the explosion, and then walking over to the weapon and picking it up off the ground.

“By basically using Trill and Tempe they were able to discover this bug in the logic of awarding medals,” DeLine says. “This really allows the team to be in constant and really fast contact with what’s going on with the customer. So, as customers are doing things like playing the game – maybe experiencing glitches – they can find out about it really fast, find the root cause really fast, and then fix it.”

Halo 5: Guardians was officially announced in 2014 and will be released on October 27, 2015 exclusively on Xbox One. It was recently revealed that the multiplayer portion of the game will include microtransactions, but also 15 free DLC maps post-launch.