Halo: The Master Chief Collection Announcement
Today at E3, 343 Industries announced the upcoming Halo release, dubbed the Master Chief Collection.
This collection will be jam-packed full of Halo experiences for gamers. The Master Chief Collection will include the full, fully-unlocked campaign experiences from Halo: Combat Evolved Anniversary, the also newly-announced Halo 2 Anniversary, Halo 3, and Halo 4 all on one disk and in one seamless interface. The games are all said to play at full 1080p resolution with 60 frames per second.
Most of this isn’t new information. This was originally leaked after they announced that something special was to be announced at E3, just without much information. The E3 official announcement repeated a lot that was already known, but with clarification, detail, and a couple new surprises.
While the original leak of Master Chief Collection kinda made me unhappy, they actually made me pretty excited for it.
I am now trying to work out how I might be able to afford a XBOX One by November. Which is really silly since I can already play all these games right now. In fact, I have multiple copies of most of them. But I’m hyped. As BBKDragoon said, Halo is back!
Hype and excitement aside, I saw a lot of small things which could add up to another negative backlash against 343i if people don’t set their expectations accordingly. This by no means takes away from the awesomeness that was the announcement and will be the release, but I want people to watch out for and consider these things that way expectations are properly met come November and we can have a fantastic response to 343i for putting so much hard work into exactly what we’ve been asking for.
Given the carnage that followed Halo 4’s release, the last thing I want to see is another wave of negative backlash for the Master Chief Collection.
There were a couple curious issues with their wording that's going to lead to some misunderstandings, disappointments, or inconsistencies:
"Halo 2 Multiplayer EXACTLY as it shipped 10 years ago." While that's exciting it will be untrue in small ways people will want.
-There will likely be no BXR, button glitches, physics glitches, etc.
Though allegedly they have claimed BXR will still exist. We will wait and see. The funny thing about those button glitches is that they require very specific things to happen. If 343i just tried to re-create them artificially, it might not work out.
-balance will be different
-dual wielding might play a different role
So while it may look the same and be pretty close to the same, it will feel very different when you play and I know that will make people confused as to why it doesn't fit their nostalgia.
ALSO playing with actual decent netcode will feel very different.
Then the general bit of all 4 games running at 1080p60 "IN THEIR ORIGINAL ENGINES"
...except their original engines were for a completely different system architecture (or rather, 2 completely different system architectures) so while it's impressive and great that they took the time and resources to rebuild those engines for a new platform, those engines will ultimately have been rebuilt and work in various ways.
Their wording has been clarified to mean that the “physics” will be the same from the original engines, aside from a few small glitches.
Also, none of the games actually supported 1080p60 before, so that - as well as the netcode bit I mentioned with Halo 2 - will ultimately lead to the games' multiplayer experiences feeling radically different than we remember and we expect. While I do not find this a core problem overall, I forsee a LOT of hate headed their way because of it, people react very negatively when their nostalgia hype does not feel like it did.
Also, the fact that the games bounce between hitscan detection and projectile mapping will create a weird sense of feeling different whenever you're switching games, that may affect people as well.
It will also be a little weird and awkward when (judging by the screenshots) Halo 2 looks the best of any of the 4 Halo games due to it getting the latest graphics revamp. It would be nice if they did some minimal cleaning up/hd-ifying for Halo 3 and 4 so we don't have the second game in the series being a "Next-Gen" badass looking experience and 1, 2, and 4 looking a little more poop. Just my opinion.
The campaigns on the whole will be amazing to have together, and the custom playlists will be awesome.
The dedicated servers will be perfect for Halo, and I'd love to see if we can get paid servers for it as well.
Just my thoughts. Not trying to hate or be negative, I just want people to tune their expectations appropriately as to prevent a huge wave of negativity come November 11. Let me know what you think.