Over the last year, a lot of emphasis has been placed on Halo: Infinite, and understandably so. It’s the new title, the latest and g … latest installment in the franchise. As a PC player, I don’t care; it’s not for me. I’d rather just play the Master Chief Collection. Apparently I am not alone.
Given that there are almost as many players for the MCC as there are for Infinite on Steam, I think it would be most prudent for Halo MCC to get some TLC from 343. Here’s what I had in mind.
The collection requires a proper AFK/AFC timer. For those not in the know, that means a timer for players that are away from their keyboard or controller, respectively. It may take time and resources to make but it’s an important feature. Right now, you get punished for leaving a match but not for staying and idling the whole time. This has to change. An AFK timer set to about 60 seconds should be sufficient in warding off problematic players who ruin the match for their teammates.
The match-leaving penalty should allow 1 penalty-free exit per hour. As is, the penalty is obnoxious. Many times I’ve personally had the game crash on me and lock me out from matchmaking upon a restart because of this controversial feature. It should be more forgiving since the game has no means of knowing what happened: perhaps a player did rage-quit; perhaps the console/computer was unplugged; perhaps there was a power surge; perhaps the internet went down for a moment; or perhaps the game just crashed mid-match. Regardless of the reason, 1 free quit per hour (based on when the player started playing) seems like a reasonable compromise to stop frequent quitters and give innocent players a break.
All rank ups past the first 100 should give you Season Points, or Spartan points as they may be called. This would include “back-pay” for all the ranks obtained after 100 points. Having the points end at 100 is arbitrary given how many things you can buy. The challenge system is already set up perfectly for this change and it would come as a fair compromise for players if 343 Industries does indeed choose to start adding microtransactions to the MCC.
Add the Unified medal display to Reach. Many objective medals for challenges, such as in Zone Control modes, don’t exist in Reach natively, making Reach entirely unviable for playing many objective modes for challenges. They didn’t exist in Halo 3 or earlier, but because of the unified medal system, they do now, and Reach should be added to that list.
As for individual titles, there are some bugs that could use some addressing that should be very quick fixes.
Combat Evolved’s Cutscenes are very difficult to skip and can’t switch between original and anniversary graphics on the fly like Halo 2’s.
Halo 2 Annivesary’s Cutscenes don’t take up the full screen on 21:9 monitors despite using a wider cinematic aspect ratio.
Fix the spawn timer for the Blue Wraith on the Reach Heavy’s Map “Asphalt”. It takes literally 10 seconds in Forge. The Wraith improperly and unfairly respawns every 30 seconds instead of the default time. This has been bothering me for almost a year now.
My last suggestion would be the largest ask of all, but I’m going to ask it anyway: add Halo 5 to the Master Chief Collection for Xbox and PC.
As a PC-only player of over a decade, I’d really like to try the game. I hear the multiplayer is a great deal of fun and the advanced movement mechanics seem perfect for PC players who are used to faster, more kinetic games.
The game’s population cannot sustain. The game should be considered a legacy title and added to the MCC so that it will always have players online and will be appreciated by a larger audience that may not consider trying it, namely players on PC. I don’t know many players who’d want to launch it rather than the MCC if they’re in a Halo mood that doesn’t involve Infinite.
Anyway, that’s all I got to say about that. As a Halo fan, I really want to see the franchise live on and find new players given how much life the MCC still has.
All that sounds good to me. My final ask would be a more robust fileshare system. A hub area to browse and download fileshare maps, modes, videos, screenshots, etc. This would be constantly updated and exposed for years to come by the community without the need for 343 to add content.
Because honestly, I dont ever touch fileshare stuff the way it is, but would like to play other peoples maps. Finding an Octagon map and gametype seemed like an unnecessary process when I went looking for it.
As demonstrated in the video, CE doesn’t accept inputs from my keyboard or controller when it comes to graphics switching or skipping the cutscene. To skip cutscenes, I’ve only some found success spamming the crap out of Space and Enter keys. Otherwise, holding does nothing Space or Y on controller 99% of the time. Works in every other game with a single tap.
My basic Microsoft Keyboard and Mouse work fine for these functions, as does my basic Xbox One controller. I don’t think I’ve seen anyone else on here mention having issues. Might be best to submit a ticket for your issue
Can they please fix the API before they do that? Assists are impossible to track now, since for example Halo 3 has different methods for tracking assists. Now all game stats for Assists via API are 0.
Strongly agree with almost everything you’ve said and regarding the unified medal system, it needs to be properly utilized in every title. For example, you should be able to get Assist Spree in H3. Any and all applicable medals should be attainable in all titles.
The one thing I don’t agree with is H5 being added to MCC and I would be happy if H4 was surgically removed from MCC. But that’s my personal feelings, looking at things without bias, it’d be a good idea to add H5 to MCC after absolutely everything that needs doing is done.
Its as it sounds - your assists in H3 dont line up w/ the Assist medals you get. So any API (HaloDotAPI for example) reports all games as 0 assists no matter what.
You just need Discord my friend. There are a few good servers that have community hosted content including the holy grail of content for each game known as the Halo [insert number] Mega Map Pack.
Even if you have a potato PC that cannot handle MCC, you can still use the menus and then add gamemodes to your shared files etc…
Does it not seem a little tedious that in order to download a specific file, you need to go to google (or discord, sure), find a player who has a variant saved in their fileshare, go back into the game, search up their gamertag and browse through that specific fileshare to download what you want?
I get that there’s multiple ways to find what you need, its just not functionally elegant. Wouldn’t it be easier to just search “octagon” and instantly find/download what I want?
Im sure new players who try the game out are more likely to discover the joys of custom maps/modes/etc if it were in-game rather than being told on a forum that there’s some discord you can join to find stuff?
Halo 5 cannot be added because MCC is at a technical limit. It just can’t handle anymore engines without breaking apart pretty much everywhere.
It would also be pointless for an Xbox player. We’d be playing for the exact same game twice.
If you want Halo 5, your best hope is a standalone release on Steam. 343 said a while ago they currently have no plans to port the rest of H5, but they didn’t write off the possibility. Still, what matters to them is the profits. If they expect it’ll do well, they could do it. But with the current state of the franchise, I don’t see it happening for a few years.
With that out of the way, there is an actual Halo 5 PC port, free for everyone to play. It’s called Halo 5: Forge. It has Forge and Custom Games, but you can’t really customize yourself there or open REQ packs. It also has a Customs browser, but I imagine it doesn’t have many people playing.
I’ve heard this excuse before about technicals but can’t find and haven’t seen a source for this. I also remember reading that someone pointed out this excuse was in regards to the Xbox One and probably wouldn’t apply to Series X/S or PC.
I’m not going to beat a dead horse about how a stand-alone 5 release won’t work. I will still fight for 5 on the MCC.
Lastly, you and I both know Halo 5 Forge isn’t the full experience. Most Halo players don’t know about it, it’s not the proper multiplayer experience and it’s missing all the benefits that 343i added to the MCC like ultrawide support, unlocked frame rate, etc.
I’m fine with peoples preference for wanting H5 in the MCC to make it a “more complete” package, but there is 0 reason why a stand alone PC H5 wouldn’t work.
Ignoring the original Xbox One’s memory limitations there are so many aspects about Halo 5 that you would have to change in order to fit it into the collection. The REQ system, Warzone, and customization to name a few. On Series X you still have two different SKUs of the same game which doesn’t make any sense.
Just port it as is. Charge $30 full price and dip around $10 during a sale. The stability of the MCC is preserved and Halo 5’s story could finally be enjoyed (or detested) on PC. Throw in cross play and call it a day.
The argument is thrown fairly often, but it’s not exactly innacurate or something out of the ordinary. Engine limitations can sometimes stop even developers. In this case, MCC is handling up to 11 engines, all running in some capacity, especially now with live armor customization which forces the game to load up 7 different engines just so you can customize your avatar. Higher end hardware also doesn’t dictate the limit of an engine. You can see this with SPV3. It took the team over 12 years to get to this point, and it would’ve been impossible without outside tools. If they relied on the engine alone, we probably wouldn’t have had Visor mode, live Flood infection, loadout selection, and more.
Of course, AAA developers will always be more capable of doing more than a couple of modders, but the point stands, especially on an aging engine such as BLAM!.
I don’t even blame you. It wasn’t really advertised, it was a random announcement. It just happened and that’s all it had to it. It was meant to be more of a companion to the Forgers.
Either way, it’s also the only way you’ll play Halo 5 on pC currently. So it’s either “take it or leave it”.