It’s safe to say that Halo: The Master Chief Collection has had quite the troubled existence to date. Following its highly-anticipated launch, the game was hampered by numerous issues in its online modes with a broken matchmaking system seriously affecting the experience for fans of the series on Xbox One.
In a recent blog post, Halo’s franchise director, Frank O’Connor, addressed the game’s many issues, how it affected him personally, and what 343 is doing to update and improve the game.
O’Connor said, ‘From a personal perspective, the MCC launch was one of my lowest ebbs, professionally. Every angry mail I received, I took to heart. I felt like I had personally let our fans down.’ and he continued, stating that, ‘I have not spent a single day since the night the game fell down in matchmaking where I didn’t think about it.’
Earlier this week the developer 343 Industries said that it was going to ‘fix’ the game and enhance the Master Chief Collection with a series of updates for Xbox One and and the upcoming Xbox One X . O’Connor spoke about this, and he said, ‘that in terms of chicken/egg scenarios, fixing the existing ‘vanilla’ Xbox One MCC was the Chicken that laid the Xbox One X enhanced version egg.’ He reiterated this point by stating that, ‘without the ability and opportunity to reconfigure and fix this thing, we wouldn’t touch an Xbox One update.’
The opportunity of fixing the game was a result of ‘a series of changes to the Xbox architecture,’ and this helped to massively improve the consoles OS along with Microsoft’s back end networking systems. These changes enabled the developer to go back into the game in order to fix the issues that have plagued MCC since launch, and enhance it for the Xbox One X.
In his blog post, O’Connor breaks down the issues surrounding the Master Chief Collection in a way which isn’t obsessively technical, and surprisingly matter-of-fact, explaining the matchmaking issues in a way which makes it well worth a read.
