I got the new Halo Master Chief Collection as a gift for myself and my cousins as we hung out together for Christmas (Xbox One). I was shocked and stunned to see just how absolutely broken the multiplayer experience is after not only downloading the game, but a 20 gig “patch.”
First issue; pressing the “start” button from the main menu, the game will hang for 2-3 minutes; seeming to freeze as the music suddenly stops playing (at one point in time I did see something pop up about “syncing,” but that quickly went away and all I could see was the starting background graphic). Impatient at the start, I actually did a hard reset of my Xbox, thinking it was the systems fault. But later found out this is “normal” when the system is online (I later tested to not find this to be an issue if the Xbox One is set to “offline”).
Second Issue; Fine, so once I understood that issue, we went on to try to play custom matches locally (system still online). Leaving my Xbox online, I had a cousin signed in as a guest of my gold account and another cousin under another account on my system. We played a few matches, but half the time I had to quit out of the game from the Xbox dashboard due to the game freezing after a match was over.
Third Issue; Okay, even though it was fun to play the old maps, we thought we would give Spartan Ops a try. We wanted to play something that was co-op, and seeing you can’t do that with three people locally in campaign, we’d try Spartan Ops. It never loaded. We tried the first level of the first campaign. The counter would count down, a loading screen would pop up for a few seconds, and then it would fade away. Fading from black would be the beginning start screen of the game (the one with the planet and broken debris revolving around it). The debris would animate around it, so it didn’t appear anything was frozen, but it would just stay on that screen indefinitely. Tried numerous times to get it to work. Taking the system offline, online, nothing appeared to work.
This is the first time I have ever experienced something this broken as a finished product. I’m floored, confused, and shocked. I did my time as QA, so I tried to put the Xbox through its paces as a benefit of doubt as much as I could. With family around and wanting to focus on having fun with them though, I just put my console to offline mode and played custom maps as much as we could (as that seemed to be the least problematic). So I must confess I didn’t test anything past the amount of players we had logged in.
Later we did try online multiplayer with our 3 person group. It worked from time to time, but we mainly focused on local multiplayer. That’s what I found to the biggest surprise when it comes to functionality. I thank you for taking the time to read this and look forward to reading any and all responses.