So I did the thing I always tell myself I won't do anymore, which is pre-order a game and then take a chunk of a weekday to actually play it at launch. Halo: The Master Chief Collection came out this past Tuesday, November 11th, and I had it downloading before I'd even finished my coffee.
For sixty bucks you get Halo: Combat Evolved Anniversary, Halo 2 Anniversary (with all new cutscenes done by Blur, which honestly look incredible), Halo 3, and Halo 4, all running at 60fps on Xbox One, plus something like 100 multiplayer maps across the whole collection. On paper this is the best deal in gaming this year. I don't say that lightly — I've been playing Halo since I was in middle school borrowing my cousin's original Xbox, and the idea of having every era of it in one place, with matchmaking spanning all four games, is exactly the kind of thing I've wanted for a decade.
The single-player campaigns work fine. Halo 2 Anniversary in particular is worth the price of admission on its own, the updated version of the Arbiter reveal cutscene gave me actual chills.
The multiplayer, though. Oh man.
I sat down Tuesday night with a buddy of mine, both of us on party chat, trying to just get one game of Halo 2 Anniversary Slayer going. Took us almost twenty five minutes. The matchmaking would say it found a match, start counting down, then just dump us back to the lobby with no explanation. At one point it split our party into two separate games without telling us. Another time it queued me into what was supposedly a Halo 3 playlist and loaded Halo 4 assets instead. I'm not making that up, I watched it happen on my own TV around 9:40pm.
343 Industries has been pretty upfront about it on the Halo Waypoint forums and on Twitter, which I appreciate, they're not pretending it's fine. They've said a title update is coming to address matchmaking reliability and some of the playlist issues, and honestly given how ambitious this thing is under the hood (four games, four different original engines, all being routed through one unified matchmaking service) I get why it's a mess right now. Doesn't make it less frustrating to sit in a lobby doing nothing on a Tuesday night though.
Here's my actual opinion, not a hedge: this should not have shipped like this. I understand technical ambition is hard. I understand a collection like this had never been attempted at this scale before. But matchmaking is not a bonus feature you can patch in later, it's the entire reason half the people buying this game bought it. If Combat Evolved and Halo 3 had shipped as standalone remasters with working matchmaking on day one and Halo 2 Anniversary came six months later once it was actually ready, I think basically everyone would've been fine with that. Instead we got everything at once and none of it quite works together yet.
Small tangent that has nothing to do with Halo: my Xbox One dashboard still takes an embarrassingly long time to boot up compared to how snappy the 360's was near the end of its life, and every UI update seems to add another tile I have to scroll past to get to my games. Not really related, just something that's been bugging me for months and this seemed like as good a place as any to mention it.
Anyway. I'm not returning the game or anything dramatic like that — the campaigns alone were worth it to me, and I trust 343 will get the multiplayer sorted out over the next few weeks, they've fixed worse in past Halo titles. But if you're thinking about picking this up this weekend expecting to jump straight into a smooth Team Slayer match with friends, maybe hold off a bit and let the first patch land first. I'll probably post an update once that title update actually goes live and see if it's any better.