HALO EFFECT

Why Splitgate borrowed the feel of Bungie’s shooters

Proulx cuts straight to it: “For me, Halo 2 is the greatest game of all time.” When the time came to tighten Splitgate’s gunplay, then, he was naturally biased about how it should be done. But the approach taken also made more sense for the portal mechanics than the other shooter models considered – in Call Of Duty, death came too fast to encourage portal usage; in Quake, it was too easy to speed away through one and stay alive forever. With a time-to-kill akin to Halo’s, Proulx says, “I’ve got enough time and enough health that I can do cool moves, but not so much that I can just run away the instant I’m about to die.”