New Halo 5 Xbox One "Advanced" Controller Options Coming Soon

An update for Halo 5: Guardians coming next week will introduce, as promised, some new "advanced" Xbox One controller options. With the update applied, players will be able to further customize shooting and aiming elements such as Look Acceleration, Inner Dead Zone, and Outer Dead Zone.

As explained on Halo Waypoint, the new Look Acceleration option adjusts the time it takes to achieve top look speed. When it arrives next week, the value for this setting will default to 3. If you want an experience that more closely resembles the Halo 5 multiplayer beta, you should use the 2 setting, 343 says.

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Inner Dead Zone, meanwhile, pertains to the region around the analog stick's center position that disregards input; this is meant to prevent camera drift when you aren't actually touching the stick. Sometimes analog sticks don't return perfectly to the center (due to controller wear, etc.), and the new Inner Dead Zone customization options should help you have a better experience.

You'll need to test things out to find out what works best.

"Try turning the Inner Dead Zone down to 0 percent and test if you run into cases where after releasing the look stick, the camera continues drifting," 343 said. "If you do get drift, increase the inner dead zone setting a bit and try again. Ideally, you want as small of a deadzone as possible so that you're maximizing as much of the analog stick as possible."

The third new Xbox One controller option coming to Halo 5 next week is Outer Dead Zone. This will allow you to tweak the point at which the analog stick records 100 percent input.

"Outer Dead Zone is used to prevent slow turn (when you are applying 100 percent input on the look stick but not reaching top look speed). The larger the Outer Dead Zone, the sooner you will hit 100 percent," 343 said.

As with Inner Dead Zone, 343 provided some tuning recommendations to help you find out what works best.

"Try turning the Outer Dead Zone down to 0 percent and test if you run into cases where you can't hit the 'pegged state' and encounter slow turn," 343 said. "If you do get slow turn, increase it a bit more and try again. Note that the majority of cases we found where people were encountering slowturn were somewhat hard to discover as the problem tended to be inconsistent and were often happening only when clenching, torqueing, or rotating the analog stick around the edges a tad. So you might need to experiment with this one a tad more before settling on the proper setting."

343 also notes that the default values for Halo 5's three new controller options are unchanged from the settings as they exist today. That is to say, 343 is not changing how Halo 5 plays for everyone, but only giving players who do want more choices--and there seem to be quite a few--exactly that.

You can click through the images in the gallery above to get a closer look at the new options.

These changes come to Halo 5 through The Cartographer's Gift update, which is confirmed to launch sometime next week. 343 will showcase this update as part of a livestream event today.