Halo: The Master Chief Collection News

MCC Development Update – August 2020

Welcome back to another monthly MCC Development Update. This month’s edition brings information on topics ranging from community contests, flights, design updates, HCS interviews, and an overall look at the status of Halo: The Master Chief Collection. There’s some juicy details in this one, so before your mouth starts to water too much, grab some snacks, cozy up in your most comfortable chair and let’s get this one rolling!

[h2]FORGE THE FIGHT[/h2]

Earlier in the month some of our friends over at ForgeHub announced a contest for Halo 3 called “Forge the Fight.” The team over there is offering up some great prizes for map creators and have judges from the community and 343 Industries both past and present, including @Unyshek, @Naded, and @BlazeDillon. We are very excited to see what sort of creations the community comes up with during this contest. As a very important note, maps from this contest will also be considered for official integration into MCC multiplayer matchmaking if they are high enough quality. So, if you are into making maps, check this out and see if you have the chops to stack up with some of the best across the community! The submission date deadline is September 19th at 11:59 PM PST, so make sure to budget both your Forge pieces and your time wisely.

[h2]HALO 3: ODST FLIGHT[/h2]

With Halo: The Master Chief Collection, flighting is a part of its DNA. It’s how we work with the community to make the games we release the best they can be. Over the course of MCC, the teams working on flighting have learned a lot and our mantra is flight early and flight often. Flighting for Halo 3: ODST began on July 17th to folks in Ring 1 & 2 and over the course of development these groups have seen a total of 12 build updates delivered to them. Folks in our preliminary Rings are the tip of the spear before it makes it to those participating in Ring 3, our public flight.

Over the course of the 2-week flight we have seen well over 2,000 unique tickets submitted by the community. Below are some of the top issues as well as their status at the time of writing this:

Halo Support flight feedback that has now been fixed:

Detached turrets using lowered crosshair on PC while set to centered
Subtitles missing during cutscenes
Character models in Firefight use Romeo’s hands
AA Wraith spawning upside down in “Lost Platoon”
Players unable to use Health Packs
Suicide Grunts not appearing to have Plasma Grenades in their hands in Firefight
Phantom gun did not have a forward-facing gun/aim for players while in Firefight for clients

Halo Support flight feedback being tracked for future fixes (by launch or after):

AI getting stuck when attempting to vault over objects or jump down ledges
Phantom becomes stuck on environment in some Firefight matches
Players are unable to operate or exit hijacked Ghosts
Up/Down arrow keys always ping the waypoint, even when rebound
Scope zoom SFX plays twice

We believe flighting is critical to the overall success and satisfaction of players with MCC. However, in this latest public flight, we had lower than average participation and we are looking to find out why. We are going to be sending out a survey to some of our Halo Insider invitees so we can learn more about why people chose not to join us this time around.

If you are sitting there saying, “Well, why wasn’t I invited? I would have totally participated!”, please make sure to head over to your Halo Insider program profile and make sure all items are up-to-date. If you haven’t registered and would like to have the opportunity to be part of the possible pool, please follow these steps:

Register on aka.ms/HaloInsider
Verify the email address you've provided for communication
Opt-in to receive communications from us
Opt-in to PC flights or Xbox One flights (no preference is available at this time)
Link your Steam account
Upload/update your DxDiag

Thank you to those who have expressed interest and have registered. Your help is invaluable, and the community reaps the rewards when everyone participates!

[h3]Be sure to head over to Halo Waypoint to read the rest of the update today![/h3]

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

The Halo 3: ODST public beta is live now

Halo Insiders can now access and play the Halo 3: ODST public test flight. It's another word for 'beta,' and if you've signed up for the Halo Insider program you can now try out several multiplayer modes, single player levels, and some of the new features coming when Halo 3: ODST arrives in the Master Chief Collection.

The current flight adds Halo 3: ODST weapons to Halo 3's multiplayer, as well as updated hit registration. You'll be able to use Theater with mouse and keyboard, and try out some of the updated customisation options that are coming with the remastered version of the classic Xbox 360 FPS game. You'll also receive 50 season points when you log in for the first time, which you can use on custom nameplates and cosmetics. You'll find that in the Season 3 Overview screen.

There's also a selection of single-player and co-op levels to try out, and they're available in all difficulty levels. According to Halo Waypoint, these include the levels Mombassa Streets, Tayari Plaza, Uplift Reserve, NMPD HQ, Data Hive, and Coastal Highway. For Campaign Playlists, you'll have Flight Test, Flight Test (Heroic), Hoofin' It (Tayari Plaza, NMPD HQ, and Data Hive), and Street Smart (Mombassa Streets).

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Halo: The Master Chief Collection will get cross-play this year

Fresh off the release of Halo 3 earlier this month, Halo: The Master Chief Collection will get cross-play before the end of the year. Developer 343 Industries has revealed the feature will come to the FPS games as part of a package of other updates.

In the latest development blog, 343 Industries lists a number of features that will be coming to the space games in 2020. Among them are cross-play, input-based matchmaking, sever region selection, and mouse-and-keyboard support for Xbox. Those first three will come in a package at some point, while the fourth will be part of another roll-out.

Mod support is still coming, the post says, but there's no release window as yet. The EULA - the rules and legal agreement for community-generated content - is in its final stage of iteration, and once that's done, a date can be organised. Halo 4, and Halo 3: ODST's campaign and firefight, are coming to PC this year, too, and firefight will have updated networking.

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MCC Development Update – July 2020

Hey Friends,

Postums here to share a bountiful update this month on everything that is Halo: The Master Chief Collection (MCC). For those who have been paying attention, it has been a packed month with lots of new information coming from the studio. July felt like the month of Halo. With that in mind, we have a handful of things to talk about in today’s update!

Halo 3 launched earlier this month onto PC. With it, we had a handful of fixes across the collection, including the audio for Halo 3 and Halo: Reach. We’re going to talk with the partners that helped upgrade the audio before shifting gears to discuss how our investigation into Halo 3’s hit registration is going.

Next, we’ll look to the future and our next Season of content for MCC, this will include details about some new options inside of Halo 3: ODST’s Firefight. Then, we’ll set the table for what folks can expect when ODST flighting comes online next month. To wrap everything up we have a juicy State of the Game to confirm a lot of additional work items that are now in development! Now then, let’s get into it!

Head over to Halo Waypoint to read up on the rest now!

MCC Development Update – July 2020

If you missed any prior installments, you can check them out as well:

Halo 3 players are getting inventive with the new acrophobia skull

When I first saw a Halo 3 player fly around a map swatting Banshees with a gravity hammer on Reddit, I assumed it was the work of mods or other PC-based witchcraft. It turns out that Halo 3 has got a new skull (thanks, Eurogamer) to mark its arrival on PC 13 years after it launched on Xbox 360.

The new Halo 3 skull is called Acrophobia, and it lets you fly around the game at some pace. You can get the new Halo 3 skull by gunning down 343 - because 343 Industries, get it? - airborne enemies to complete the Acrophobia challenge. Flying enemies include banshees, drones, and sentinels, but we'd recommend targeting drones by slapping on the normal difficulty and heading to the Crow's Nest mission. Once you're there, head to the hanger, and you'll find plenty of drones to chop down.

While it's undoubtedly a bit of fun, I'm quite keen to see what Halo 3 speedrunners will do with the new Acrophobia skull. One player discovered he could use the skull to kill the Chieftain during a cutscene in an earlier level, so who knows what kind of skips are out there to be found.

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