CAMPAIGN SCORE ATTACK
There’s something beautiful about racking up points for eliminating foes, and this certainly applies to both the multiplayer battlefield as well as the caverns and crawlspaces of Campaign. A few folks here have been hard at work on a new Campaign mode, and to get the details, I sat down with Gabe Deyerle after playing a few round myself.
GABE DEYERLE, CAMPAIGN ENGINEER
Following off of the work the Sandbox Team did with the Campaign balance update, and with the big focus on PvE in this month's update, the Campaign Team had an opportunity to resurrect a particular passion project of ours: Scoring.
We're big fans of scoring in past Halo games, and we wanted to bring it back to Halo 5: Guardians, but with a few new twists. We call it: Score Attack.
First of all, thanks to the work going on in parallel with Warzone Firefight, we were able to expose a large suite of the medals you can earn in Multiplayer to campaign for the purposes of earning points. With over 50 medals to earn in Score Attack, you'll earn the most points for defeating your foes as stylishly as possible.
Second, we love playing with our friends, and we know you do, too - but who doesn't like a little friendly competition? You and your friends will all earn score independently, but you'll probably want to work together if you want to beat the game on higher difficulties with lots of skulls on to maximize your points (and, ya know, survive). We've found this creates a fun tension between helping your friends and taking advantage of their fumbles. But you'll know who the true heroes were after the game in the PGCR where you can see how you stacked up against each other, as well as a full medal breakdown.
This is probably a good time to mention that after a lot of playtesting, we decided to make LASO (Legendary All Skulls On) a *little* bit easier by enabling revive if you go down while the Iron skull is on. It's still pretty brutal (as we think LASO should be) but now there's hope of having a second chance if you go down in a safe location where your allies can get to you.
And last, but most certainly not least, we've been a huge fan of speed runs for years, and we wanted to do everything we could to streamline the game to those dedicated players who find crazy ways of breaking our game wide open, all in the spirit of shaving off those few precious seconds. So in addition to the on screen timer, in Score Attack, we disable cinematics entirely. This meant we could optimize our loading times to get you into the game considerably faster than in the normal campaign. And we heard you, it's a terrible feeling to *just* miss your personal best or a world record because you failed a trick, so we added "Restart Mission" into the pause menu to ease that pain, if only a little bit.
Oh! And before we go, there's one more little thing, and it might be a bit hard to find, so we're glad we got a chance to tell you all. We added <REDACTED: ONI CLASSIFIED INFORMATION> which we're all pretty happy about. Let us know what you think of it!
From all of us on the Campaign Team, we hope you have fun <3