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.<\/p>\n
Forewarning, this article is a little long in the writing and I do not include a TL;DR.<\/p>\n
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So let’s start with the GOOD<\/strong><\/span>: So the midnight release was nice. Not a huge turnout, but still a nice experience.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n The BAD<\/strong><\/span>: 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.<\/p>\n 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…<\/p>\n The UGLY<\/strong><\/span>: 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.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n 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).<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n OTHER<\/strong> <\/span>issues. 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.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n The HMCC needed to be the absolute best launch to usher in Halo to the XBOX One.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n -Sal<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" 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 … Continue reading
\nI 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.<\/p>\n
\nI 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.<\/p>\n
\nAfter 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\u00a0much better than average connection due to her work needs.<\/p>\n
\nNow 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.<\/p>\n