In a recent blog post, Halo 5 developer 343 Industries announced that they are now planning a major update for the game’s large scale Warzone mode. Lead multiplayer designer Lawrence Metten commented that there had been too many one sided matches within the Warzone game mode. “Over time, the Warzone battlefield has changed as players have become more and more skilled at the game mode. However, not all of these changes have benefited all parties– since launch, we’ve slowly seen the Warzone ‘blowout rate’ continue to rise.”
So to counter this the development team is going to make some changes to the game in order to balance it out for all players. Metten stated that “The Warzone team is experimenting with some significant changes to the way Req Leveling works to facilitate more balanced Warzone matches.” These changes will include an adjustment to the Req Level that will be awarded in matches. There will also be a feature added call Req Level “drip” which will “slowly increase everyone’s REQ Level over the course of each match.” The update should go live sometime late next week, however the Warzone Firefight and Warzone Assault game mode will remain unchanged after the patch is applied.
Some internal tests that the developer conducted showed that with these changes the Warzone matches were more tightly contested. Mitten explained “In our internal playtesting, these changes have resulted in more back-and-forth Warzone matches with considerably fewer players stuck at low Req Levels over the course of each game.”