It seems like a lot of time has passed between now and the release of the Halo 5 beta. Well, that's because a lot of time has passed. And that's a good thing. It means that 343 Industries, the custodians of the core Halo legacy, has had time to implement changes from the beta in the months between then and now.

Halo 5: Guardians launches on the 27th of October, so I had the opportunity to sit down with Design Director Kevin Franlin when he was in town spruiking his game for the EB Expo. We chatted about higher frame rate, balancing, ADS, time to kill and escapability in Halo 5. Here's a snippet:

AusGamers: That’s good to hear. You mentioned the beta a bit earlier on, as well, I was wondering if there was any specific feedback that came from players, like any big points that they wanted to see changed or modified that you’ve been able to include for the final version of the game?

Kevin Franklin: Probably the biggest one was ground pound. We found that our competitive players they used to do this thing called ‘Ghandi jumping’, where they would basically jump and crouch at the same time and it would make their silhouette smaller, and that was kind of interfering with the new ability we created, ground pound, which used to be activated with the crouch button. So we ended up changing the entire ability to work so these pro players could maintain their classic move and keep their comfortable control set. And we reworked the whole ability with feedback from our competitive gamers, in house. We’re really happy with where it went. Another one we worked on was the escapability. A lot of fans commented on that, so we made some changes to sprint, some changes to the weapons, and also some changes to the thrust abilities to reduce the escapability a little bit. We also made a lot of changes to the levels, too, because for the very first time, we’re doing a beta early enough that we can make a bunch of art changes, and we did some refinements on pathing around the levels and also sight lines.

You’ll have to mouse-pound here to read the full interview.