: As you can begin to see, we have to be very delicate with sandbox tuning not
: only due to how each change affects the entire sandbox, but also due to
: technical concerns. These include verifying that all animations, audio
: effects, and more function correctly as we tweak the firing rate, reload
: speed, and other values. As a result, our weeks of testing and tweaking
: will ensure that the final changes, when delivered on June 3, will provide
: the most optimal multiplayer experiences.

: Aren't these all things that would have already been tested and certified in
: the title update that already included this Megalo functionality? If
: animations are broken or sound doesn't work, that's a TU level change.
: Megalo can't fix that.

There's over 30 parameters for various data they're able to tweak with the new variant options introduced with the TU. It's not done in the script proper, but it is housed in the game variant data.

To be fair, adjusting things like reload speed impacts the game simulation. However, I don't immediately see how this would be a major issue unless they were doing drastic changes. And maybe they are, for action sack type shenanigans coming after June 3rd.

They could have a variant which allows you to reign rockets like clouds do over Seattle. If you have an entire team shooting rockets like it was going out of style (didn't already, back in Reach FF?) it may overtax the effects/particles or objects system(s). Projectiles are objects too. The H4 engine's object garbage collector is already really anal for reasons unknown, but it could be due to the object memory pool being damn-near-full more often than not.

Or it could be them just trying to cover their asses. The functionality may have finished in time for TU5 (which I think also re-introduced X markers, did it not?) but that doesn't exactly mean it was pushed through full testing or was ready-to-use by in house designers. May have had only enough testing to validate that it worked within the existing sandbox and that it could handle the as-of-then hard coded Boltshot tweaks.