How are Microsoft ensuring that Halo 5 will be well-balanced and bug-free come October? Well, this latest video from Microsoft Research explains how 343i are using big data to quash every bug and fine tune combat.
Senior Microsoft researcher Rob DeLine takes us on a tour of Trill, a high-performance analytics engine, and Tempe, a web service for exploring that data. In the video, DeLine describes how 343i were able to use the data from Trill to discover a bug with one of Halo 5's medals, which awards the player for catching a weapon they'd launched into the air using a grenade. The medal was being awarded suspiciously often in play tests, they discerned this information via Tempe.
Using Halo 5's spectator mode, they were able to view the medals being awarded in-game, and discovered that a weapon became primed to deliver the medal simply by being inside a grenade's blast radius. 343i were able to squash the bug rapidly thanks to Microsoft Research's tools.
...By basically using Trill and Tempe they were able to discover this bug in the logic in the awarding of medals. 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 they may be experiencing glitches, [343i] can find out about it really fast, find the root cause really fast, and then fix it...
After the complaints over Halo 4's multiplayer, it certainly seems as though 343i are pulling out all the stops to ensure Halo 5 is a hit out of the box. If Trill collects data on awarded medals, you can rest assured that it gathers data on weapons, kills and other aspects of play to help 343i tune a balanced experience.
To read more about Trill, head over to Microsoft Research's project site here.
Halo 5 launches exclusively on Xbox One on October 27th.
