Go ahead, sign in Halo: The Master Chief Collection Today. Thanks to a much-needed patch, you just might be able to relive this moment in multiplayer!
Last month, our review of Halo: The Master Chief Collection explored many of the disparate parts of the anthology, from his Halo 2 remaster to the accumulation of the four games’ split-screen multiplayer modes, but we let a significant portion of the game slide. To quote: “We’re pretty sure Microsoft cut its Xbox Live features to make sure all four games” [online multiplayer] will work fine on launch day and beyond.”
Yes, about that…
Our review went live before matchmaking servers went live to the general public, and while we signed up on launch day to confirm that matchmaking worked on a basic level, we were apparently the exception. Users eagerly stormed sites like Reddit and NeoGAF, along with Halo’s official forums, to complain about their general inability to connect to public matchmaking lists or friends’ private games, even after developers 343 Industries proclaimed that the anthology’s matchmaking would are powered by dedicated servers.
It turned out to be so bad that Bonnie Ross, head of 343 Industries, issued an apology to fans just before Thanksgiving after the game’s first two major patches failed to fix a laundry list of issues. “On the matchmaking front, we encountered unexpected issues that were not evident in our internal testing environment and resulted in a frustrating experience, including long matchmaking times and low session success rates,” Ross wrote.
Random teams? Real?
However, her letter didn’t elaborate on the various bugs we’ve seen while investigating the game’s woes, including the following: explosions of glitchy UI text; team matchmaking that would put a single opponent on one team and up to seven enemies on the other; lose all members of your party the moment someone makes a change to matchmaking preferences; constant freezes and lockouts; team colors randomly change between matches (or are assigned to players even during non-team, “free-for-all” battles); custom “decals” and color choices not found in games; the inability to change game types when building a map in some of the Forge modes, effectively muting the entire purpose of the mode; and so forth. This list doesn’t even take into account the nitpicking that is harder to prove than these commonly known problems.
After that November 24 letter, Ross and her team took a full week to upload another patch that claimed to fix these primary issues. (When players complained about a lack of response from the design team, 343 Industries producer Frank O’Connell replied that one of the reasons for his silence, in addition to his head bowed in patchwork, was due to “a few dozen credible death threats.” )
Wednesday night’s most recent patch may not have fixed everything, but we’re happy to report that basic-level login H:TMCC and diving into public matchmaking options finally works as expected. But 343’s choice to launch a Halo game with no confirmed, working multiplayer capabilities reveals a developer with its priorities in the wrong place. Fans certainly enjoyed the chance to relive it all over again master chief campaign saga, but he became a household name because of Xbox Live combat, not because of the pistol-whipping of a bunch of easygoing Grunts.
We’ll be keeping an eye on the game’s patches for the rest of December to see if 343 fixes the rest of its critical patch-worthy issues in time for a slew of Xbox One deliveries on Christmas Day. The three-week period between launch and this week’s critical fix is surprising, especially since we haven’t seen such a tampering with a Microsoft Game Studios product since then Gears of War 2 launched in 2008 with similar lengthy hiccups when connecting to both public and private games.