All Of The Changes Coming To Halo 5's Free Expansion

343 Industries has a huge blog post about all of the small tweaks, medium alterations, and large scale changes that they've made to Halo 5 and the new Warzone Firefight mode that marks the final installment in free DLC for the game starting June 29th.

Gamespot picked out some of the more relevant aspects of the blog post over on the Halo Waypoint website. They go through a list of the different changes, including explaining that the Warzone Firefight mode in Halo 5 is an eight-player cooperative mode that spans six maps where players will fight through five rounds of multiple waves of enemies. The co-op mode features different objectives for each round, some of which will require players to defend certain areas, where-as other rounds may require players to kill a certain leader.

The round objective splash screen is one of the key things that 343 worked on. Some players had trouble being able to keep up with what they were supposed to be doing in each round, so 343 made a new splash screen in Halo 5 to give gamers a full voiced indication at the start of the round and the objective for that round.

In addition to making rounds and objectives more clear in the free Halo 5 update, they've also overhauled the UI; round objectives and the status of those objectives are displayed in the bottom right hand corner. If a round is time-based and players are required to take out a certain enemy within a specific amount of time, that will be reflected in the counter. If a base has to be defended or attacked, the counter for the base being taken over or defended will also be displayed in the corner.

The UI for how the scores are displayed has also been given a face lift, giving gamers an intermission phase between each round to show the score cards and give players both team scores and individual player scores. They also plan to use the scoreboard to show any of the bonuses received during the round, ranging from headshots and assists, to defeating special enemies, or avoiding dying the entire round. New score chains have been implemented as well, allowing players to chain together kills and earn extra score for it, not unlike Unreal Tournament or TimeSplitters.

And on the subject of dying... the team has tweaked the difficulty of the Warzone Firefight when it comes to dying throughout the match. In the early rounds of Halo 5's Firefight, dying isn't that bad, the penalty is only seconds long. However, dying and respawning on say round 5 will leave you in a rather unfortunate position because the respawn timer is longer for the later rounds. This is so that players will work together, use teamwork and communicate as effectively as possible to avoid dying, because one person dropping down on the battlefield is enough to throw the team into a spiral and ruin the progress of the firefight.

According to the post, there will be thousands of dynamically generated objectives that will randomize across each of the rounds in Warzone Firefight. As mentioned at the top of the article, players will be able to play the free new game mode across six different maps, with the sixth map being the brand new Attack on Sanctum, which will debut with the mode on June 29th.

And as a way to help lure gamers into playing the new mode, Microsoft and 343 Industries are allowing gamers to play Halo 5, the full game, for free between June 29th and July 5th.