‘Halo: The Master Chief Collection’ Gets Free Month of Xbox Live Gold
Over 3 months have passed since Halo: The Master Chief Collection released to Xbox One owners. Today, the game is still fundamentally broken. As a way of compensating owners, Microsoft is giving out a free month of Xbox Live Gold to owners of Halo: The Master Chief Collection as another way of saying, “We’re sorry.”
The announcement was picked up by GameSpot as they spotted a message on Xbox Live that stated the following.
“As a token of our appreciation for your continued support of Halo: The Master Chief Collection, we have applied a free one-month extension to your Xbox Live Gold membership. No further action is required. Game on!”
In addition, Halo 3: ODST and Halo 2: Anniversary multiplayer map “Relic” will be given to players free of charge.
Halo franchise guardians 343 Industries first established themselves as a competent caretaker of the series with their first Halo title, in Halo 4. Combined with the supervision of Halo: Combat Evolved Anniversary edition, which was developed by Saber Interactive and Certain Affinity, 343’s position was solidified.
With Halo 5 not due until 2015, gamers were expecting only a remastering of Halo 2. When the announcement of the Halo: Master Chief Collection was announced at E3 in 2014, gamers were ecstatic. Halo 1 – 4 in 1080p at 60fps, the original Halo 2 multiplayer which made the Xbox into a real contender in the video game console market, plus a plethora of other goodies, were almost too good to be true. When the collection launched on November 11, 2014, it turned out to be exactly that.
What followed upon launch of the collection was an unmitigated disaster for 343 Industries, which has permanently damaged their reputation. While the single player sections of the game worked as advertised, the multiplayer was fundamentally broken. Matchmaking was barely working, with extremely long wait times — which often was accompanied by uneven teams, random party separations, and a host of other issues. Gamers have learned to deal with bugs on launch, but in the this case they never went away. To this day, only one ranked playlist exists in Halo 2 Anniversary. Other maps were promised to become ranked, but this has not come to pass.
One of the biggest questionable decisions by 343 was to release a major content update the night of the first Halo Championship Series, which the Inquisitr covered in January. When an update is released, the online multiplayer portion of the game is normally rendered unplayable until the update is applied. This rendered the game unplayable for many, with several teams being disqualified because they could not download the update in time for their slot.
TeamBeyond, a leading Halo fan site, made a 100 day timeline of the events preceding the Halo: The MasterChief Collection‘s launch to present day, which is worth reading for a complete breakdown of the problems plaguing the game.
This current generation of consoles has yet to deliver on the potential of the new hardware. Games like Halo: The Master Chief Collection, Assassin’s Creed: Unity, and others reflect a willingness of publishers and developers both to release games before they are ready, which in turn may cost both parties more in the long run.
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