On the disastrous launch of The Master Chief Collection

The warning signs were there for the failure of The Master Chief Collection’s launch. Matchmaking and online play were promised to be activated a full week before the review embargo lifted, a date that was pushed back to two days before embargo, then finally arriving about 24 hours beforehand. Custom game sessions were hastily organised to give us a chance to experience online play, and those went well, Halo played like Halo. The benefit of the doubt was given to 343 and Microsoft by myself and many others. Surely the most important, the most beloved part of the Halo series wouldn’t be released in anything but full working order? There was no way Microsoft would go in half-baked on their flagship first party release of the spring, not on the heels of the successful launches of Destiny and Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare, both games with bigger multiplayer install bases than The Master Chief Collection could hope to achieve. Yet here we are, with a barely functioning matchmaking service that underwhelms and disappoints on the rare occasions it does work. How could this happen?

The Master Chief Collection was a massive project, high on ambition. Four developers worked on the compilation, remastering all four Halo games and giving the anniversary edition treatment to Halo 2, including six remade multiplayer maps in a new engine. In single player things hold together well. Sure there are some strange inconsistencies, like why medal scoring only applies to the anniversary edition games, and some jankiness like cut-scenes abruptly ending to bring up the post level score sheet. In my time with all four games I never saw anything worse than that, no hard crashes or game breaking bugs. I had my reservations about the online system but was confident it would ship in at least a playable format, perhaps showing some strain under the day one load but nothing terminal.

Instead the online functionality is a complete mess. The issues here aren’t servers buckling under a crippling load, this is matchmaking code that flat out doesn’t work. It feels like it is being built around us as we play, with basic features from as long ago as Halo 2 missing such as pre loading levels, player counts within individual playlists and an easy way to switch teams in custom games. There are spelling and grammar issues in descriptive text (I finished 1th in my first online game according to the post match scoreboard), long load times both pre and post match, pre-load load times between when a level is voted on and it actually loading and hard crashes both in game and in post match reports. I have yet to play a full game in terms of players in any playlist, the best I have managed is 4v3, unless you count a full 4v4 team slayer on Damnnation that only saw three players make it into the actual game, which then hard crashed when I tried to exit.

All of this is dependent on actually getting in to a game at all, matchmakings apparent Achilles heel. Stories abound of hours spent searching for matches, personally I have probably spent about 6 hours total with matchmaking open, attempting to find games while I do something better with my time, like play Monument Valley or Wave Wave. I would be lucky to have played a dozen games total, many of those unsatisfying 3v2 showdowns that are lucky to finish any way other than a full team quit. Within these matches problems abound. Lag is terrible, with no connection quality indicator on the scoreboard. Regularly you will find yourself spawning in the sights of an enemy, particularly in Halo: CE, and the game modes presented for voting so far have been mostly battle rifle starts on maps that might play well in MLG style competitive environments but degenerate into single weapon clusterf*cks when played with randomly selected teams. Leave the BR starts to the large levels that need them, or to the playlists designed around them.

All of the online infrastructure is clearly rushed. Net code isn’t optimised, game balance isn’t tested and the playlists don’t bloody work. Matchmaking fails abysmally at the one thing it is designed to do, and for a compilation of one of the most popular multiplayer console shooters to get that so wrong, to show such little regard to their customers as to rush this out the door in an unfinished state, it is insulting. It may have been a huge technical challenge to get this done but Microsoft and 343 have had a lot of time to get this right. They had to know how important multiplayer and matchmaking is to the game, they had to know how important this game is to the Xbox One turning the tables on the PS4. To release The Master Chief Collection with matchmaking broken beyond even the most pessimistic predictions immediately wipes from the board all of the goodwill Microsoft has earned in the last nine months. For a company that was already facing an uphill battle against Sony this generation it could end up being a mortal blow.

I can’t see this being a quick fix, the problems with this matchmaking system run so much deeper than just getting the damn thing to work. Even if you can find games they aren’t the optimal Halo experience, and ranking support looks even further away. I really hope 343 and Microsoft can turn this around, Halo has meant a lot to me over the years, Halo 2 multiplayer may be my most played game and both it and Combat Evolved account for a significant number of my favourite gaming memories. I like what Microsoft is doing with the Xbox One, I believe in the system, but if they can’t get this launch right how can I, and others, have faith in them? Burn the midnight oil and fix this Microsoft, as fast as you can. Before it is too late.