343 hope to improve Halo 5 MP and balance

343 design director Brad Welch entered into Twitter discussion today, where he admitted to things he felt went wrong with Halo 4, and outlined some of the ways that 343 are planning on addressing these issues in Halo 5.

"Halo MP is a challenging beast. Part of my love for it is the Quake arena tradition. We didn't service this so well in Halo 4," he stated, before the discussion kicked off.

One user said: "You guys went with a progression system but made it way too quick to achieve max SR. H4 had no longevity at all." To which Welch replied: "Very fair point. I actually designed that system and feel bad that it tapped out. Major surgery pulled me out of H4 a bit early. There was a few moving parts there that caused that, but we've fed all the stuff we didn't think went well into future plans."

In another exchange Welch discussed skill rankings, acknowledging that they got a lot of feedback from that the skill rankings from Halo 2 and Halo 3 were much preferred.

Welch also apologised for the balancing of the DLC multiplayer maps: "We have to plan DLC early, so ultimately I didn't balance internal, external & DLC maps well enough," before later adding "big games are tough. We'll improve next time."

Towards the end of the exchange (which was first spotted by OXM, he was asked if time constraints were an element: "We had to build a team, learn 10+ years of tribal engine knowledge and make a new game," but also suggested that looming ship dates impacted all development teams.

Before signing off, Welch gave us a little tease of what the future has in store for 343 and the Halo franchise. "Going to make whatever future 60fps, dedi server Halo we may make as awesome as possible to as many fans as possible."