The highly anticipated Halo: The Master Chief Collection came out for the Xbox One back in November 2014 but that hasn’t stopped 343 Industries from continuing work on the game. In a recent blog post, the company outlined some upcoming feature updates as part of their new MCC Development Update series started back in January of this year.
As with any updates, gamers generally hope that bugs are being addressed and that is indeed the case with what 343 Industries is calling “Milestone 5.” Besides tackling the “worst bugs” from the retail version of MCC and new ones introduced during the update programming process, texture streaming, intelligent delivery, UI and UX updates, and chances to the MCC matchmaking playlists are also being targeted for the next update.
“P1 & P2 continued bug fixing” is a broad way of saying “fixing all the worst bugs that negatively impact our ability to deliver the flighting build or complete a milestone.” Some of these bugs are carryovers from the retail version of MCC while others are new and were introduced during the process of this update work.
Texture streaming is something the engineering folks have been working on and I’m told some of the fruits of their labor are already noticeable in-game via considerably quicker load times. Greg says that MP map load times across the board are significantly quicker (approx. 35-40% of what they were previously).
Intelligent Delivery (the feature that will enable players to eventually have the option of only installing one or more specific titles within MCC or even changing which language they want to install) has been underway for a while now. This feature gets really complicated really quickly but is something the team continues to make good progress against. For what it’s worth, even though our flighting build will only have Halo 2 Anniversary in it, the other content is being manually stripped out for now – this is not technically “Intelligent Delivery” at work. Not yet.
We’ll talk more about the some of the UI and UX updates further below (including some show-and-tell!) but suffice it to say that the fruits of this work have slowly been making their way into our internal builds. Some of this, like the updated title screen and main menu, will be included in the first flight. Others, like HDR settings and LAN Support options, are not within the scope of the initial flight.
The first retail update is being targeted with a summer patch, however, that may change as the company’s goal is “quality first and foremost” and will be giving the team as much time as they need to deliver a quality update. As such, 343 Industries is focusing on the following for the first update:
- Intelligent Install
- Xbox One X Visual Enhancements
- HDR/SDR Calibration Settings
- Networking and Matchmaking Improvements (Continuous Matchmaking, Network/Multiplayer API updates)
- P1 & P2 Bug Fixes
- LAN Support
- UI & UX Updates (Main Menu, Title Screen Video, Button States/Highlight States)
Other new features like the Custom Game Browser will not be included but the company has plans for a “steady stream of rolling updates well after the retail patch.” 343 Industries is also looking for more to join the MCC Insider Program to help guide further development.
What do you think about the upcoming improvements and fixes to Halo: The Master Chief Collection? Let us know in the comments below or on Google+, Twitter, or Facebook.
[button link=”https://www.halowaypoint.com/en-us/news/mcc-development-update-3″ icon=”fa-external-link” side=”left” target=”blank” color=”285b5e” textcolor=”ffffff”]Source: Halo Waypoint[/button]
