Why Halo: The Master Chief Collection Had Such A Disastrous Launch

While waiting for Halo Infinite to finally come out, plenty of gamers have been revisiting Master Chief's previous adventures through Halo: The Master Chief Collection. Unfortunately, upon its release in 2014 for the Xbox One, this collection — purportedly containing the definitive versions of all the previous Halo games — had a disastrous launch that had many fans crying foul.

The collection contains the complete Halo storyline, including remastered versions of the older games. Halo: Combat Evolved, Halo 2, Halo 3, Halo 4, Halo: Nightfall, and access to the Halo 5: Guardians beta included at launch. Later, Halo Reach and Halo 3: ODST were added.

Fortunately, Microsoft was able to fix most of the game's issues in plenty of time for The Master Chief Collection's 2019 staggered release on PC, which made fans so ecstatic they sent huge amounts of pizza to developer 343 Industries. Today, the game is a solid, upgraded introduction to the franchise for new fans and a nice throwback for the older ones who want to experience a bit of remastered nostalgia. 

However, that wasn't always the case. Read on to find out about the issues that made Halo: The Master Chief Collection practically unplayable at launch.

When Halo: The Master Chief Collection was released in 2014, it had numerous problems. Multiplayer was especially frustrating for many players. An epic bugs list from the era that was collected on Reddit shows that you couldn't contact friends, joining parties was difficult, and matchmaking, as Wired put it, was "a nightmare." Dedicated servers seemed non-existent, as well. 

Among the many problems were the fact that end-of-game stats sometimes didn't display in the correct way, the game chat cut in and out, quitting a match required five seconds (during which you could still die), and the music volume was wildly inconsistent. In fact, almost every aspect of the collection seemed affected in one way or another. A large amount of the bugs were game-breaking, causing players to throw up their hands in frustration and wait for updates that would make the games playable again. 

Basically, this game's launch was so poorly handled that it required multiple apologies from Microsoft and 343 Industries. It also took the developer a long time to put the fixes in place: the set was launched in November 2014, and the problems weren't (mostly) patched up until August 2015. Luckily, a great number of fixes arrived in a huge update.