Halo: The Master Chief Collection News

MCC Development Update – October 2020

Welcome back to our latest monthly helping of updates and insights straight from the MCC development trenches! It’s been a busy stretch since we last spoke, with Halo 4 flighting fully underway and our teams working hard towards launching the sixth and final title on PC in the near future. Further, our own Postums is out on a leave (don’t worry, he’s back next week!) so yours truly is back at the helm hoping I can measure up to the high bars and tomes of information of months’ past. Thankfully, our friends on the 343 Publishing Team are here and ready to share updates and insights (so much so that you'll find the vast majority of this update is actually written by them).

For our October development blog we’re going to start things off with an update on Halo 4 flighting, talk about newly announced next-gen enhancements coming to Xbox Series X|S, dig into our ‘community mail bag’ and answer some of your most pressing questions, cover a few design items, and get a state of the game report from Farns. Let’s dive in, shall we?

FLIGHT CHECK

Our latest flight for MCC on Xbox and PC has been up and running for about a week now. Earlier today, an update was released for the flight build on all platforms that includes a variety of fixes and additions. If you're currently a participant in the flight, you should automatically get the patch the next time you log in. Active flight participants can view the updated patch notes and details HERE and be sure to check out the latest known issues HERE (note only registered players in the current flight will be able to access this link).

Additionally, to help ensure these new changes get adequate time in the wild, the flight itself has been extended and is now targeted to conclude on Friday, November 6. You'll also find an updated playtimes schedule that runs through the remainder of the flight which includes alternating modes and focus areas daily between 10AM-1PM and 5PM-9PM PT. Of course, you're free to play and provide feedback and file tickets on anything in the flight build but given some of the new matchmaking-related features coming to MCC, we're really hoping to have a healthy population moving through different Halo 4 MP modes on all platforms.

To talk a bit more about this current flight, today's patch, and the process in general, please welcome Publishing Team Associate Producer Chris Case!

Chris, welcome! Seeing as this is your very first appearance in an MCC development blog, let’s start with a quick intro and a bit of background. Clearly, your name is Chris, but what’s your day to day role as an Associate Producer on the Publishing Team? You’ve been involved with MCC for quite some time now even before this role – what’s the path that brought you to us today?

Chris: Thanks Brian! MCC has been a consistent landmark in my background working with games. My first job was a contract tester on MCC back in 2014, and later as test engineer when we began our work reviving the collection in 2017. I’ve worked on a few other Microsoft titles in the meanwhile, but I’ve found myself back at MCC multiple times now and I’ve been incredibly fortunate to see MCC through so many different stages.

Generally, my day to day involves planning with our production team, working with Support and Community teams to help give up-to-date information on our project, working with Test to ensure they’re unblocked and have the information they need to find bugs, and running our nightly Triage sessions where we discuss project status and work remaining. Ultimately, I aim to spend most of my time listening to folks on our team and helping find solutions to daily problems. Lately, most of those efforts have been put into supporting our flight and launch processes.

So we’re just over a week into this latest flight - How’s it going out there? What are some of the key learnings and takeaways the team has found so far? Anything truly surprising or unexpected pop up?

Chris: There’s always a little anxiety prior to launching a flight, for us this time it was around PC to Xbox crossplay, Input-based Matchmaking, and the Server Region Selection. These have been hotly requested features, so we’re pleased to see the positive feedback around these items from folks! Our biggest reports from Halo Support (which we monitor daily) have been around giant white squares on Pitfall, crashes while alt-tab’d out, and a binding issue with the Sprint key - all of which were prioritized for fixing in today's Flight Patch and upcoming retail patch. I think our biggest learning from this is usually the same as all our flights – often our biggest concerns going in usually aren’t the biggest issues we hear about from Flighting, and that’s a great thing. While we’re listening on all fronts, the reports we get through Support really help our team prioritize bugs that are impacting the community the most. The alt-tab crash is a good example of this: a known bug we planned to file for launch, but was given further priority and upgrade as a ship blocker after a majority of our support tickets came through with PC users encountering issues with this.

Another issue we’ve have reported ties to a progression blocker on the mission Reclaimer. Interestingly, issues on this mission have dated back to the original legacy 360 version (specifically around bits of the level failing to load). Improvements here have been on our backlog for some time, but we’ve often found that there are some other gremlins that show up around this. Support recently pulled one we haven’t seen before that involves some non-regulation jetpack usage.

To read the rest of the interview with Chris, get an update on the state of the game with Farns, Q&A with Max and Dana, and a whole lot more, head over to Halo Waypoint and read the rest of the update today!

If you want to catch up on past editions of the dev update, you can find the one you want here:

Guillermo Del Toro's Halo movie might have given Master Chief a twin

A Halo movie has been in various stages of production, with some of the biggest names in Hollywood attached, for over 15 years. Back in the mid-2000s, Pan's Labyrinth and The Shape of Water director Guillermo Del Toro was looking to adapt the FPS game, and his ideas were creative, to say the least.

The revelation comes from a discussion featuring several of the developers on 2001's Halo: Combat Evolved (cheers, IGN). Marcus Lehto, Marty O'Donnell, Paul Russel, Paul Bertone, and Jaime Griesemer all take part in the conversation, all while reacting to a speedrun by Halo speedrunner GarishGoblin. The expected stories and tidbits on the development of the original game are traded, but towards the end, Russel delivers an inside scoop on Del Toro's vision for a Halo film.

According to him, the Hellboy and Crimson Peak filmmaker wanted to give Master Chief a twin, that would have defected and joined The Flood. "Master Chief had a twin brother, and the twin brother sided with The Flood," Russel explains. "And then the end of the movie was going to be brother against brother." Russel elaborates that Del Toro pitched his idea to what's presumed to be Joseph Staten, Combat Evolved's writer and cinematic director, at Staten's house. "Del Toro was pitching this to Joe at his house. He was punching Joe on the arm and going, 'And they're brothers! And they're going to fight at the end!'"

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Halo 4 PC beta is live - with crossplay and input-based matchmaking

After a long road to release, the Halo Master Chief Collection on PC is nearly complete. The beta (or flight, in Microsoft's bizarre parlance) for Halo 4 is rolling out now, and there's one final extra feature here to make the PC port complete: crossplay. Yes, with the launch of Halo 4 on the PC MCC, you'll be able to play with friends and strangers on Xbox.

The beta will roll out in waves to members of the Halo Insider programme, so if you're not in already you'll likely be able to get in soon. (You can check the Halo Waypoint site for details.) The biggest addition here, of course, is Halo 4 for the PC collection, but the update's also heading to consoles to help implement crossplay and some of the other new features. (Plus, console players are getting an FOV option. Good for them!)

This update introduces crossplay with input-based matchmaking, so controller players play with controller players and mouse-and-keyboard players stick with mouse-and-keyboard, so there's no upsetting the multiplayer balance. For this beta, crossplay is enabled across all Firefight, Forge, and multiplayer modes, though the Halo 4 campaign and Spartan Ops don't currently support it.

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Halo PC: everything we know

Is there a new Halo on PC? It had been a very quiet few years for fans of the Halo series on PC, with only a couple of major announcements and releases in the past decade to tide them over - Halo Wars 2 and the reveal of Halo Infinite and Halo Master Chief Collection for PC. Now that these Halo games have started coming out, however, things are looking up.

We're not getting the entire MCC at once, though, as they're slowly trickling out. Halo: Reach was first, Combat evolved came after, and now Halo 2 is available of Steam. If you're curious whether they've stood the test of time, we've chalked up a Halo Reach review and Halo Combat Evolved review to help you out. It's not all remakes, though, as we're getting some new Halo games, too. There's no Halo Infinite release date yet, but it is coming to PC at least.

What about the state of Halo on PC right now, though? Can you play the first Halo on computer? And how many Halo games are on PC? To help you suss out the scene we've assembled a handy FAQ for Halo PC fans looking to get their fix of Master Chief sooner rather than later.

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MCC Development Update – September 2020

Welcome back, everyone, for the September 2020 installment of the monthly MCC Development Update. We are just a few months out from wrapping up the year as well as wrapping up the final game on our journey to bring MCC to PC! This year has been super busy and if this is your first time checking out one of these updates, this blog series has a lot of backstory. I just took a look back and this is now my 19th MCC dev blog - we've shared a lot of insights and words together on this journey, friends. Well, that's enough nostalgia – onwards!

September has been action-packed and we have a number of topics to talk about. First, we'll recap our latest PC launch and the release of Halo 3: ODST (and Firefight!) into MCC. There are some pretty spiffy new upgrades in there for both PC and Xbox, so definitely take some time to drop in and check it out. Next up, we are going to talk through an expansive Design update with members of the Publishing Team about future features and content that folks will see come online around the time of Halo 4’s release and beyond. To wrap things up, we are going to take an early look at October’s planned Halo 4 flighting spec, remind you how to get in on Halo Insider flighting, and a lastly get a progress report from Farns in our State of the Game section. Let’s hit it, Marines!

HALO 3: ODST LAUNCH RECAP

Halo 3: ODST dropped feet first into PC last week and in the days since, players have fought off waves upon waves of enemies in Firefight, listened to hours of sweet, sweet jazz, and took the fight to the Covenant in New Mombasa’s hectic streets. Last week also saw the release of MCC's 3rd Season of entirely free unlockable content for players, updates to our Challenge system, new elements of customization across Halo 3, Halo 2: Anniversary, Halo 3: ODST, and a number of high profile bug fixes including Halo 3’s shot registration! There’s too much to put into a simple recap, so please feel free to head over HERE to check out the launch blog and HERE for the full patch notes of this latest game release and update. If you haven’t had a chance yet to check things out, there’s never a better time than now to get in on the action. MCC is available on Steam, the Microsoft Store, and Xbox One for purchase and is available for Game Pass members to download and play. To learn more about where and how you can drop into ODST, check out this page HERE.

To check out the rest of the blog, including a Design Discussion, info/updates on Halo 4 Flighting, and more, head over to Halo Waypoint and read the September Development Update today!

If you want to catch up on past editions of the dev update, you can find the one you want here: