Halo: The Master Chief Collection

This review, while it is good, mostly only covers the unfortunate launch of the game.

I like how they compiled all the games of the franchise into one compilation. The Master Chief Collection has been also recently released on PC after years of request, making it possible for games such as Halo 3 and Halo: Reach to be playable for the first time, and gave a way to play Halo 2 without having to deal with the "Vista" version which had problems due to Games with Windows Live. In addition, Halo 2 has been updated with modern graphics, as well as the ability to switch between classic and modern graphics, something that worked before in Combat Evolved Anniversary Edition.

The only compensation for the botched launch given was the campaign for Halo 3: ODST, and even then it was only given to players who brought the game before Christmas of 2014. However this implied that the game was fixed on Christmas, when it was still broken at the time. Halo Reach and Halo 3: ODST were given away for free (while originally locked behind a paywall) to owners of the collection via update on 3rd of December 2019, which is great for ODST's case as it's now no longer exclusive to those who bought the game before Christmas 2014.

Unfortunately, it launched with major game breaking bugs, so as a result, buyers, who thought that the game was supposed to be the definite version of the Halo games, were disappointed because the game was filled with bugs and were unable to play the multiplayer part of the game properly.

I will say this: If a game is clearly not ready for release, you should, you know... DELAY THE GAME AND FIX IT!

If you don't care about multiplayer and just want to play the original Halo campaigns, this collection will let you do just that.

The incident was a major example of the anti-consumer practice of rushing games, releasing them broken with major bugs and glitches, and fixing them later after the release.

The main issue was that the multiplayer matchmaking had severe game crippling bugs where it was extremely difficult to join a match, and when you did manage to join a match the match was filled with latency, lag, and connection issues. Seeing as the Halo series was renowned for its multiplayer mode this was a serious disappointment for the players who brought the game. The online multiplayer, the feature that Halo basically put on the map and is known for above everything, was completely broken. Of course this would not go well with players.

Since Halo: Combat Evolved and Halo 2 in the compilation were based off of the PC version of the games, not the original Xbox version, the changes (such as game mechanics and weapon and vehicle spawning locations) and bugs that were introduced in those versions were also in this game. They advertised those games as being ported from the original Xbox version of the games, not the PC version, so this could be considered false advertising.

Players were unable to properly form an in game party. After completing a game match most players lost connection to the party and had to reboot the entire game just to be able to get back into the party.

Shot hit detection was messed up, and since this is a first person shooter game it is a serious problem.

Teams in matches were not balanced properly, with some matches being set up for example as 3v4 matches, which makes it so that the team with less players would lose the match because the original games were not designed for unbalanced teams of player amount.

There is no ranking system to match players up with similar skill, and as there is a massive skill gap in the original Halo trilogy this means that the team with the less skilled players would lose the match.

An official Halo tournament was cancelled due to the broken nature of the game and they were unable to start the matches in the game.

When 343 Industries and Microsoft attempted to patch the game at first, not enough improvements were made to fix the issues with the matchmaking. This caused players to stop playing the game believing that the game would never actually be fixed (in other words it is like the "Boy who Cried Wolf" story except with Microsoft being the boy and the players being the villagers that the boy told about the wolf).

Eventually enough players stopped playing that matches in playlists were not being filled with the correct amount of players so 343 Industries had to change the amount of players that can be in the match. This broke the spawning of players in free for all matches who were now being spawned right next to another player and being killed immediately because the maps were not designed for the increased amount of players. This further drove away the players as the matches were no longer fun, which eventually ended up with very few people actually playing the game.

It took 343 Industries over one hundred days to fix the issues with the matchmaking and multiplayer. At the time it was first fully fixed the update notices that Microsoft sent was diluted and did not get players back into playing the game because they were burnt so many times by the updates not getting the game into a state fit for a game launch, and they failed to give an incentive for playing the game again.

Microsoft didn't attempt to fix the loss of trust and brand damage caused by the horrible launch condition of the game at first, so people were burned out of the series thinking that Halo 5: Guardians would also launch horribly broken like this game. While they were fixing the issues with the game Microsoft still advertised Halo 5: Guardians and built up hype for that game even though Halo: The Master Chief Collection was still broken. This could be seen as Microsoft not caring about making quality games and just wants to release games to make money. And, yes, Halo 5 was also broken at launch despite their promise, which shows how much they can handle the series now. Microsoft basically said that they promise Halo 5 won't be broken at launch after this incident, infuriating people because GAMES ARE SUPPOSED TO WORK AT LAUNCH IN THE FIRST PLACE!

Eventually, in August of 2018, 343 released an update that gave the game a massive overhaul. Nearly all the above issues were fixed, they added new features such as LAN support and the ability to choose which games to install, and the game's main menu got a completely new look. This somewhat recovered the player-base of the game. While this did come very late, it a least shows that, unlike other developers, 343 does listen to what gamers are telling them.

It's a great compilation, but only the launch was a complete mess.