The information brought back from an interview with Brian Leahy, of Shacknews.com, revolves primarily around the matchmaking functionality in the game, but it is quite interesting. Included in the reveal are the Active Roster, Queue-Joining, and Arena Playlists.
The Active Roster
Will allow players to see more detailed information about their friends who are playing, such as what map they are in, who they are partied with, how much time is left in their match, etc. This allows the player to see all their friend information from right in the game, as opposed to using the 360 dashboard.
Queue-Joining
Will allow the player to join players during a match instead of having to wait for the current match to end. The Queue-Joining feature will attach you to the player to be joined and then bring you in as soon as the game will allow.
Arena Playlists
Players are ranked into skill divisions based on month long play sessions. Arena Playlists will only be for Slayer and Team Slayer game types, but are designed to really help people (and parties) pair up with others of their same skill level. This is a perennial issue in multiplayer and it will be interesting to see how well this addition will tackle the issue.
It seems that Bungie is really focusing some attention on the experience around the experience of Halo: Reach’s multiplayer. Those of you who still own Halo 3: ODST will get to see how well these features are implemented on May 3rd, when the closed beta launches to the clamoring masses.
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