While Xbox One fans may be hungry for more news on Halo 6, there are a newer projects being worked on that might be of interest.
It has been confirmed by Microsoft that they will be updating Halo: The Master Chief Collection for it launch on the Xbox One X.
A new patch is being launched that will boost the title, which originally launched with some major multiplayer issues.
This was confirmed during a recent Halo Waypoint, in which 343 revealed they wanted to: “bring [Halo: MCC] forward and modernize many of the game’s systems to take advantage of Xbox platform advancements since its original launch.”
Halo Wars 2 will see some “visual upgrades” as part of its patch, while the MCC will also get a new system in which players can test out new builds of the game moving forward.
It seems Microsoft have a little bit of unfinished business to wrap up with the Master Chief Collection, following its rocky initial launch on the Xbox One in 2014.
And in a new update from the development team, more information has been provided on how they hope to give MCC a new lease of life.
According to franchise development director Frank O’Connor, new improvements can be made to the game following some major platform upgrades.
It should also be noted that these improvement will also be available on the base Xbox One console.
“On Wednesday of this week, we announced that we’re both fixing MCC and working on enhancements for the Scorpio (Xbox One X) version of the game, but I should be clear here, 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 explained on a recent blog post.
“Without the ability and opportunity to reconfigure and fix this thing, we wouldn’t touch an Xbox One update. But a series of changes to the Xbox architecture, some of them related to Xbox One X – and others just a series of ongoing improvements to the OS and back end networking systems, have cracked open an opportunity we’ve wanted to seize for many, many months now.
“So to be super clear, these fixes will apply to both regular Xbox One version and the Xbox One X enhancements.
“We’re also getting a lot of help from the (wholly separate) Halo 5 team, who created a much more robust system for the launch of that game and continue to make improvements to their networking model.”
O’Connor also delved more into how Microsoft hopes to improve the Master Chief Collection, adding: ”It may sound simplistic, but MCC was essentially six pretty different game engines strapped together and interlinked with highly complex and highly delicate new systems.
“With Xbox One X on the horizon, it was obvious that we could simultaneously update the game to take advantage of the new hardware for folks that have it and use that as an opportunity to finally rearchitect and update some of the foundational issues and networking/matchmaking methods.
“And to be clear, these solutions were simply not possible until quite recently. The platform team has made numerous improvements over the last year or so, and we’ve internally done a bunch of research, and so our timing has been reliant on a number of systems and solutions converging rather than one single element.
“But these weren’t easy fixes we were simply sitting on. That’s honestly not a thing, even. I also understand that silence can be frustrating.
“You have complaints or questions, and we try to answer them as best we can, but sometimes bad information is worse.”