Introduction to Game Variants

In Halo: Reach, Bungie introduced a system in which each multiplayer engine is capable of supporting game variants. Game variants allow one to override the default settings for a specific game engine. This allows the game developers to easily and quickly tweak certain aspects of -- for example -- a certain Spartan Ops level.

In Halo 4, engines that support game variants are:

• Campaign
• PvP (Matchmaking and Custom Games)
• Forge
• Spartan Ops

Each game variant regardless of the targeted engine contains a group of settings which we call the "Base Variant." The Base Variant is made up of the following:

Name	Contents
Content Metadata	name, description, author, etc
General Settings	round options, kill cams, etc
Prototype Settings*	options for a cut feature
Respawn Settings	lives, respawn traits, etc
Social Settings	voice chat options, betrayal booting, etc
Map Overrides	equipment sets, base player traits, etc
Requisition Options	another cut feature
Team Settings	team names, emblems, colors, etc
Loadouts	loadout options and palettes
Ordnance Settings	drop sets, personal ordnance items, etc

*Since TU5, prototype settings were repurposed into an indicator for whether weapon tuning data exists at the end of the variant data. Nitrogen does not publicly expose the prototype options but you can specify whether weapon tuning data should be included by accessing the HasWeaponTuning property.

Located after the base variant, there is another group of data for specific engines such as Megalo.

Engine	Data
Campaign	None; the metadata contains difficulty, skulls, and insertion point settings
PvP	Megalo
Forge	Megalo (for compatibility with gametypes but ignored at runtime)
Spartan Ops	Zones, script arguments, etc; the metadata contains difficulty and skull settings

At this time, Nitrogen does not support modifying Spartan Ops data and probably never will until when/if a way to play Spartan Ops offline is found.