The Halo Master Chief Collection Launch: The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly

Yesterday saw the awaited release of the Halo Master Chief Collection. Experiences with downloading and playing the game varied widely. Below is my personal experience along with notes from friends experience as well.

Forewarning, this article is a little long in the writing and I do not include a TL;DR.

So let’s start with the GOOD:
I got mine from my local Gamestop. I’m well known there as I’ve been going there for nearly 15 years. I had the pleasure of setting up a table to display Halo stuff as well as hand out free Halo Mega Bloks mini figures. I got to meet other fans, some casual, some avid. Several people took pictures of the 3ft Halo 2 Master Chief statue I have and brought along to display.

So the midnight release was nice. Not a huge turnout, but still a nice experience.

After an excessive amount of time to download (read below in the ‘BAD’ section… I was able to get into Halo 2 Anniversary’s Forge. I have to say, that is absolutely a highlight for me. Some of the pieces are brand new. Lots of ground and foliage pieces, Mirrored objects, three blank forge maps, Golden Warthog, Heretic Banshee and more. I’ll be spending a good amount of time it there.

The BAD:
I got home right around 12:30 and immediately put the disc in to start the download. It was going VERY slow. After about 30 minutes it was stuck at 2% and didn’t move. I took to twitter to find out what might be going on and get any tips on what to do. I found that there were many others having download issues as well from their disc copies of the game.

I got the advice to uninstall, reboot the XBOX One and try again. So I did that. The game started to install. In the meantime, I figured I’d watch Halo Nightfall. Except…the Halo Channel was either NOT loading Nightfall or was down altogether. I had put in my code for Nightfall from the game and it was accepted, so I know the code wasn’t the issue. After about an hour, I was finally able to watch the episode. While the episode was good, there were issues with it.

When you watch Nightfall via the Halo Channel, you will be promoted to watch what they call “second stories”. These are side stories that tell of other people’s points of view within the episode. In episode 1, there were three of these. Okay, cool. However, when I went to view those, not only could I not rewind or fast forward, the language was Italian. Okay, WTH? I never changed my settings so everything should be in English. The episode itself was entirely in English, just not the ‘second stories’. To be sure, I went back through and set everything manually to English. This included the spoken voice, closed captioning and subtitles. Everything was set to English and I tried again. The second stories STILL were in Italian. What gives? This was very frustrating…

The UGLY:
After that bit of a let down, I checked on my download progress. It said 24%. Okay, so I thought I was getting somewhere. The game I could start playing, so I went into it. At that time the only thing that had loaded was Halo 4. So I could only play Halo 4’s campaign. Now, I have to say, that was disappointing as well. I didn’t buy the HMCC for Halo 4. I wanted to get into Halo 2 Anniversary’s campaign as well as H2A’s Forge. I did play the first mission of Halo 4 just to pass time then checked the download again. STILL at 24%. Grr…. this was getting frustrating. I have an excellent connection at home. My wife works from home so we pay for much better than average connection due to her work needs.

So what does this mean? Yep, I had ti uninstall it again… The third time seemed to be working, though it was downloading VERY slowly. In fact all said, it took just over 12 hours for that third time for the disc to install completely.

The order in which my disc downloaded was: Halo 4, Halo CE, Halo 2, Halo 3. I asked other friends about their downloads and they all confirmed the same order of download. You’d think that with the big thing about this collection being Halo 2 Anniversary that it would have been the first thing to download… Rolls eyes.

Well, I did finally get started into the game. I went with Halo CE campaign first. However, after playing three missions, I noticed I wasn’t getting any achievements for completing levels. Anyone else have that happen to them? My friend and fellow gamer, Rythmic Warrior got on XBOX and joined me for some Campaign. We at first went into the Campaign playlists and started into playing all 4 campaigns. Same thing. I wasn’t getting achievements to unlock. And no, I wasn’t using any pre-order skulls. In fact we didn’t have ANY skulls turned on. We were playing on Normal (Rythmic’s choice, not mine as I wanted to play on at least heroic).

With regards to Multiplayer, there are thousands of players who can’t even play. I’ve got friends form various places all over the globe that have had to wait HOURS just to get into one game. That’s unacceptable. With dedicated servers there is just no excuse for this. Whether that’s a 343 or XBOX fault doesn’t really matter. The fact is, it just should not have happened. Certainly boot with Microsoft’s marquee title.

OTHER issues.
Now beyond this all, there were things about the game that didn’t quite pan out as 343 had said they would. First, the games are NOT completely given to us as they were when they first released. For instance, you can’t have different sets of armor on one Spartan. In Halo 3,I wanted to have a CQB Helmet, Recon chest and EOD shoulders. You can NOT customize your armor. Same with halo 4 too. Not to mention you can’t change your visor color… If these are possible, I haven’t found those options.

I’ve heard of others having issues with setting custom game options that aren’t working like they did in the original release of the individual games.

Folks, I was hyped for this game. But wow, it was an epic fail of a launch. This is something 343 did NOT need to have happen. With Destiny getting much criticism, this would have been a GREAT opportunity for Halo to rise above and shine. Instead if kind of fell flat on it’s face for the launch.

I’ve already had some friends say they’ll be going back to Destiny until the fixes have happened for the HMCC. That’s not a good thing at all.

For myself, I’ll be happy to play the campaigns, so long as I get the achievements I should be getting. As well, I’ll spend a lot of time in H2A’s Forge.

One thing that I hope is ready to go flawlessly is the Halo 5 Guardians BETA. If there is a fail there, it’s really going to set 343 back, a LOT.

Many fans were hoping for an ultimate Halo experience at launch. Instead we got long download times, partially working games, horrid matchmaking wait times, and more.

We’ve already given 343 the benefit of the doubt with Halo 4. They just shouldn’t get a pass here as well. I don’t want to bash on them, so that’s why I’m trying to stick to the facts or my personal experience in a factual manner. It’s hard to do that though without some personal opinion though.

The HMCC needed to be the absolute best launch to usher in Halo to the XBOX One.

One thing I would say directly to 343 is, please do NOT tell us one thing then deliver another. The games are NOT exactly as they shipped when first released. That in and of itself is enough to make me and plenty of others wary considering the gaffes they made with Halo 4.

At this point, 343 has to be held accountable. They just can’t be asked to do better. They must be the BEST. There is no other dev Microsoft has in line to run Halo. If the BETA fails, well…Competitive Halo may just fail well before it even had a reasonable chance of coming back.

Believe me, I didn’t want to write this kind of article. It’s not something any of us wanted from this launch. I’d REALLY like to know what your experiences were, be they good, bad or ugly. Either reply below or e-mail me. This is something I’ll be talking about on Sunday when we record a new Spirit of Fire podcast.

-Sal

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About Sal

I’ve got tons of experience with Halo gaming and collecting. I feel I have something to offer to the greater Halo fan community. Posts along the way will be about tips and tricks in the games as well as collecting and many more Halo related things. I’ll also repost interesting articles from the official site, Halowaypoint.com, or from fellow Halo fan sites. As I continue this blog, I hope to help gamers who want advice on the games, as well as any collectors with regards to where to find collectibles as well as deals, coupons and so on. You can also follow me on Twitter at: http://twitter.com/#!/HaloFanForLife or Facebook at: http://www.facebook.com/halofanforlife11. Welcome to my blog and I hope you’ll come back again and again. -Sal

9 thoughts on “The Halo Master Chief Collection Launch: The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly

  1. As someone who wasted a lot of time on MMOs a long time ago, awful launches are something I’m very used to – I kind of just expect it. So when something like this happens it literally means nothing to me. The game is still what it is, and in a week’s time most of this will be ironed out and we’ll all be too busy fragging or forging things to remember or care. I prefer the campaigns anyways though, so I was probably playing what I wanted to much sooner than most people.

    As for Nightfall, I loved it! I have no idea why it’s getting the almost vitriolic bad reviews it has. There were a few corny lines, a pinch of the exposition for non-Halo fans felt unnatural, and the elite’s CGI looked better in darker environments than the brighter ones, but those are all minor quibbles compared to the overall awesomeness of it. I can’t wait for the next one! I didn’t try the side story thing though – I’ll have to and hope mine’s not in Italian.

    • Thankfully, the installation woes are behind me. Some of the achievements I didn’t initially get awarded to me have been given, but not all. I watched Nightfall Ep1 again, this time everything was correct. Closed captioning was in English and in big letters. ALL speech, including the side stories were in English. BTW, I liked Nightfall. I just wish I could access it somewhere other than my XBOX One. I really REALLY wanted to make comic books form each episode as I did for Forward Unto Dawn and Spartan Ops.

  2. Well thats just depressing. I haven’t seen anything beyond halo 2s (awesome!) campaign, so I wouldn’t have known about this. I really hope things get better………..

    • They have begun to get better. My article was really about the launch itself and a few bugs. I think the overall collection is fantastic. I’ve spent most of my time in it split between Halo 2 Forge, Halo 2 Anniversary campaign and Halo 3 Campaign.

  3. I had a great experience, I got the game physically, and it took roughly an hour to download it completely. I was able to play everything besides multiplier due to it being down. So I just created some forge maps.

  4. Wow. I don’t have the game (or a Xbox One yet) but I’m surprised about all the issues I keep hearing about. You would think that this game would be running smoothly considering these are “old” games and this is “next-gen”. Very disappointing. 343 had a chance to make good with all it’s fans but it doesn’t look like they took full advantage of that opportunity.

    • I just hope they get things fix very quickly. It won’t reverse the effect of the bad launch, but it won’t exacerbate the problem any more if the issues are fixed.

  5. Being on vacation this week I have done my best to keep up with all of the news on the release of the MMC. I must say that the first word that comes to mind is disheartening. I know that 343 is working hard to fix the issues, and that some might be related to an XBox Live issue. However this is not what 343 or any Halo fan wanted to have happen.

    It is my hope that by Saturday things are working normally and we can put this behind us. Now if only Xbox would fix the party chat system…

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