Halo fans play Master Chief Collection at HaloFest in November 2014. Courtesy Microsoft
For Adam McGuire, the hype surrounding Halo: The Master Chief Collection couldn’t have been higher. McGuire, a 33-year-old project engineer from Grand Haven, Michigan, saw it as a way to revisit his favorite game series, and rekindle a romance that started more than a decade before with Halo: Combat Evolved.
McGuire is a hardcore devotee of the franchise. As a student at Michigan State University, he sold an old guitar and bought an Xbox and a copy of Halo 2 to stay competitive with his friends. They played Halo 3 for years, devouring the map packs and using the game to stay in touch after graduation. Halo: Reach, Halo 3: ODST, Halo 4: He played them all.
And so he was beyond stoked to hear about The Master Chief Collection. It was to be a rabid fan’s dream come true, a one-and-done single-disc “box set” including high-definition remasters of Halo and Halo 2 and improved versions of Halo 3 and Halo 4. Best of all, the beloved online multiplayer of all four games would be served up in a mix-and-match sashimi platter of shotguns, snipers, energy swords, and battle rifles. Everything looked great, and the early word was Microsoft had done it right.
It was gonna be amazing. Except it wasn’t.
Microsoft’s launch of Halo: The Master Chief Collection was a disaster. The games were buggy. You couldn’t contact friends. Joining a party was a colossal pain in the ass. Matchmaking within a party was a nightmare. Even the most ardent fans of the game, the ones only too happy to shell out 60 bucks to buy a collection of games they already own, were left wondering: “WTF?”
“The launch of Master Chief Collection was really bad, and it still continues to have problems,” McGuire said. “And this is coming from someone with a Master Chief tattoo, so for me to say it’s disappointing is a big deal.”
Bugs, Bugs Everywhere
The Master Chief Collection is just one of the many online games in recent memory that stumbled out of the gate. Last year’s launches of SimCity and Battlefield 4 were seriously problematic, and this year’s releases of Assassin’s Creed Unity and Driveclub were also marred by serious problems. But The Master Chief Collection was particularly egregious, because it was Microsoft’s marquee series—and the problems were so pervasive.
Matchmaking rarely, if ever, worked. If you did manage to get a match going, bugs and issues abounded, especially with post-game stat-tracking. (One was the notorious “1th place” victory awarded to everyone at the end of certain matches.)
The Halo and Halo 2 parts of the collection seemed to be ported from the games’ PC releases, not the original Xbox versions, and they brought with them bugs that had only popped up on those PC ports. Even worse, the game’s pre-release marketing promised tons of dedicated servers, for stable games and to prevent matchmaking abuse or cheating. But those servers seemed nearly nonexistent. With matches running on peer-to-peer networks, they were again vulnerable to the cheaters.
“Part of the enjoyment of Halo is that, unlike Call of Duty, you have a skill-based rank that you achieved by good gameplay, skill, and teamwork,” McGuire said. “On a peer-to-peer system, the game isn’t protected against [cheating]. Without that competitive aspect, you start asking yourself ‘Why am I playing this? What am I going for?'”
courtesy Adam McGuire
Over the last month, the Halo community has found ways to make The Master Chief Collection playable. Tricks they devised included disconnecting from party chat, restarting or fully reinstalling the game, and not even bothering to play when Microsoft is having server issues. Users on forums like Reddit, NeoGAF, and Halo Waypoint compiled epic lists of bugs and issues, pleading with game developer 343 Industries to fix them.
“Most of the problems that The Master Chief Collection has are directly related to Xbox Live,” Microsoft’s online gaming service, McGuire said. “I threw a LAN party and it was a huge success. The issues arise with all the different individual applications—the dashboard, the party chat system, the friends system—that work together to give you the Xbox Live experience. When you throw The Master Chief Collection into that, and if one of those applications is having problems, it throws a huge wrench into the system.”
Developer 343 pushed out a patch soon after it launched the game. But as fixes came in, so did new problems. The horribly long waiting times were mostly taken care of… but now the game would mix up the players on your teams and start the matches with uneven numbers on both sides. Subsequent patches fixed things here and there, but overall the experience remained imperfect. Playing by yourself seemed to be a decent solution—but Halo is a game founded on its community, on shooting aliens and each other with your friends.
“We pay our $15 every month for people to make this work,” McGuire said. “[Xbox Live] is not a free service. The fact that it doesn’t work a lot of the time—that’s a big issue.”
By November 24, 343 finally apologized to players. “I personally apologize for this on behalf of us all at 343 Industries,” wrote 343 studio head Bonnie Ross. “Our team is committed to working around the clock until these issues are resolved.”
(Microsoft declined WIRED’s request to speak with a representative of 343 for this story.)
On December 19, with many problems still outstanding, 343 detailed a make-good gift that it would offer to Master Chief Collection owners: A free month of Xbox Live Gold, an exclusive in-game nameplate and avatar, and an upgraded version of the spinoff game Halo 3: ODST.
Many players seem genuinely excited about what they’re getting for their troubles. But it’s important to remember that for many, Halo: The Master Chief Collection cost much more than $60. This November, probably thanks to the release of a Halo game, Microsoft finally sold more Xbox Ones in a single month than rival Sony sold PlayStation 4 consoles.
That’s a big deal, and it’s probably thanks largely to Halo fans finally shelling out the $400 to upgrade their console. But that means Microsoft owes them a $400 apology.
Halo: The Master Chief Collection‘s release date was etched in stone—well, etched in metal, anyway. Courtesy Microsoft
Today, well over a month after its launch, Halo: The Master Chief Collection seems to be finally, mostly, playable.
The latest patch, released earlier this week, was touted as the great and mighty fix to multiplayer’s woes. But it seems the bulk of the patch takes the form of the previously-promised “Spartan Ops” mini-campaign from Halo 4—and only marginal improvements to the major problems.
The biggest multiplayer fix takes care of cheaters who were gaming the system, but, again, it seems to have created as many problems as it solved.
Reddit users are still reporting long queue times, and there seems to be a major disconnect between what 343 is saying and what players are experiencing.
“They claim to have fixed it to where the game won’t start without even teams,” McGuire said after the latest patch went live on December 22. “Yet this appears to have dramatically raised the amount of uneven teams. Lobbies of 8 players are being split into 5 on 3, 6 on 2, etc. Back to the drawing board, 343.”
Even the Spartan Ops campaign mode feels rushed and incomplete. It lacks achievements, leaderboards, and post-game lobbies. It’s the only mode in the collection that doesn’t award medals. Cutscenes don’t auto-play, and it doesn’t automatically progress to the next mission.
They just see it as a broken game, and they’ll go play something else.
Granted, these features weren’t a part of the original Halo 4 version of Spartan Ops, but without updating the game to fall in line with the rest of The Master Chief Collection, the mini-campaign feels hastily tacked-on, as opposed to part of a cohesive whole.
At this point, even guys like McGuire say they’re getting tired of waiting for Microsoft to fix everything for good.
“When this first came out and it had some problems, I said ‘Alright guys, slow the hate train. There’s some problems but they’ll fix them. No big deal.'” McGuire said. “I kept saying that week after week, patch after patch that failed to connect. And I’ve come to a point where I can’t defend it any more. Don’t get me wrong, I know there’s no magic wand to wave over the game. I know it takes hundreds of man-hours of coding and fixing and testing. But there’s no excuse. You had years to do this. You had plenty of time, and the fact that you released it in this state is unbelievable.”
The trouble for 343 and Microsoft is that, even once The Master Chief Collection is eventually fixed, the damage is done. This was Microsoft’s first real chance at a decisive victory in the console war. It was a perfect opportunity to sell a ton of Xbox Ones and draw new fans to its flagship franchise. And Microsoft screwed it up.
“Am I going to give up on the series? No, I love it to death,” McGuire said. “But there’s a lot of people out there who aren’t going to have this experience because they don’t have the love for the game, and the memories, to stick with it. They just see it as a broken game, and they’ll go play something else. A lot of people aren’t willing to suffer through it. They’ll just pick something else up. Back to Call of Duty.”
No comments:
Post a Comment